Quotes about Change

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.

seemed like that moment of pause and arrest when the warm fluidity of youth is chilled into its final shape. He

It's all stupid and narrow and unjust—but one can't make over society.

Archer looked down with wonder at the familiar spectacle. It surprised him that life should be going on in the old way when his own reactions to it had so completely changed.

But is has happened, you know. Bear that in mind. Nothing you can do will change it. Time and again, I've found that a good thing to remember.

He had no desire to marry at all—that had been the whole truth of it till he met Undine Spragg. And now—

Ah, don't let us undo what you've done!' she cried. 'I can't go back now to that other way of thinking. I can't love you unless I give you up.