Quotes about Change

They say I'm old-fashioned, and live in the past, but sometimes I think progress progresses too fast!

You can't change the fruit without changing the root.

Plans are worthless, but planning is everything.

It was easy enough to despise the world, but decidedly difficult to find any other habitable region.

There is someone I must say goodbye to. Oh, not you - we are sure to see each other again - but the Lily Bart you knew. I have kept her with me all this time, but now we are going to part, and I have brought her back to you - I am going to leave her here. When I go out presently she will not go with me. I shall like to think that she has stayed with you.

The greatest mistake is to think that we ever know why we do things...I suppose the nearest we can ever come to it is by getting what old people call 'experience.' But by the time we've got that we're no longer the persons who did the things we no longer understand. The trouble is, I suppose, that we change every moment; and the things we did stay.

It was thus, Archer reflected, that New York managed its transitions; conspiring to ignore them till they were well over, and then, in all good faith, imagining that they had taken place in a preceding age.

If you're as detached as that, why does the obsolete institution of marriage survive with you? Oh, it still has its uses. One couldn't be divorced without it.

What was left of the little world he had grown up in, and whose standards had bent and bound him?

Age seemed to have come down on him as winter comes on the hills after a storm.

And as he had seen her that day, so she had remained; never quite the same height, yet never below it: generous, faithful, unwearied; but so lacking in imagination, so incapable of growth, that the world of her youth had fallen into pieces and rebuilt itself without her ever being conscious of the change.

A frivolous society can acquire significance through what its frivolity destroys.