c2p-cmd/Good-Quotes-Authors huggingface dataset:
We knew our days were numbered. We had fouled up our lives and we were getting ready for a shake-up.
— Raymond Carver, Where I'm Calling From: New and Selected Stories
He who rejects change is the architect of decay. The only human institution which rejects progress is the cemetery.
— Harold Wilson
We are all glorified motion sensors.Some things only become visible to us when they undergo change.We take for granted all the constant, fixed things, and eventually stop paying any attention to them. At the same time we observe and obsess over small, fast-moving, ephemeral things of little value.The trick to rediscovering constants is to stop and focus on the greater panorama around us. While everything else flits abut, the important things remain in place.Their stillness appears as reverse motion to our perspective, as relativity resets our motion sensors. It reboots us, allowing us once again to perceive.And now that we do see, suddenly we realize that those still things are not so motionless after all. They are simply gliding with slow individualistic grace against the backdrop of the immense universe.And it takes a more sensitive motion instrument to track this.
— Vera Nazarian, The Perpetual Calendar of Inspiration
Be different. Be original. Nobody will remember a specific flower in a garden filled with thousands of the same yellow flower, but they will remember the one that managed to change its color to purple.
— Suzy Kassem, Rise Up and Salute the Sun: The Writings of Suzy Kassem
In a time of drastic change it is the learners who inherit the future. The learned usually find themselves equipped to live in a world that no longer exists.
— Eric Hoffer, Reflections on the Human Condition
All night I dreamt of bonfires and burn piles and ghosts of men, and spirits behind those birds of flame. I cannot tell anymore when a door opens or closes, I can only hear the frame saying, Walk through.
— Ada Limon
We have to abandon the conceit that isolated personal actions are going to solve this crisis. Our policies have to shift.
— Al Gore
Small things start us in new ways of thinking
— V.S. Naipaul, A Bend in the River
Because sometimes Lucky wanted to change everything, all the bad things that had happened, and sometimes she wanted everything to stay the same forever.
— Susan Patron, The Higher Power of Lucky
Pain moves us forward, changing us into something else, something we need to be.
— Michelle Moran, Rebel Queen
To have been always what I am - and so changed from what I was.
— Samuel Beckett, Happy Days
A person could stop a specific thing, but they couldn’t stop change in general. Rivers can’t run backward. Yet, he felt there must be an alternative, neither willfulness nor resignation. He couldn’t put words to it. All he knew was, neither of them had changed their minds and neither of them could find anything more to say.
— David Wroblewski, The Story of Edgar Sawtelle
Nothing stays the same and nothing changes. What is old today will be new tomorrow. What is new today will be forgotten tomorrow.
— Harley King
Lives are made of strings of moments, and every once in a while, one of those moments is pivotal and defining. It changes everything, alters you so completely that when you look back, there’s a clear before and after
— Elizabeth Norris, Unraveling
People who complain about something that they cannot do anything about are as irritating as those who complain about something that they can do something about.
— Mokokoma Mokhonoana, N for Nigger: Aphorisms for Grown Children and Childish Grown-ups
Nothing can be compared to the new life that the discovery of another country provides for a thoughtful person. Although I am still the same I believe to have changed to the bones.
— Johann Wolfgang von Goethe, Italian Journey
Most of our assumptions have outlived their uselessness.
— Marshall McLuhan
The Doctor is all of us, he lives and dies as all of us, and we need him to – because no matter the anvil-imagery of the Doctor as Christ, this is actually a far older and far simpler story than that. Everything changes. We all regenerate. I am not the same woman who first saw Rose ascend. Years go by and I become someone new, with the same memories but a new face, a new self.
— Catherine Valenti
We rest; a dream has power to poison sleep.We rise; one wand'ring thought pollutes the day.We feel, conceive, or reason; laugh or weep,Embrace fond woe, or cast our cares away;It is the same: for, be it joy or sorrow,The path of its departure still is free.Man's yesterday may ne'er be like his morrow;Nought may endure but Mutability!
— Percy Bysshe Shelley, The Complete Poems
Cultural survival is not about preservation, sequestering indigenous peoples in enclaves like some sort of zoological specimens. Change itself does note destroy a culture. All societies are constantly evolving. Indeed a culture survives when it has enough confidence in its past and enough say in its future to maintain its spirit and essence through all the changes it will inevitably undergo. 
— Wade Davis, The Wayfinders: Why Ancient Wisdom Matters in the Modern World
How he could be a good user of LSD," I asked, "And know about the spiritual dimension - all that sort of thing - and still be a crook? I don't understand.""Then it's time you did. Psychedelic drugs don't change you - they don't change you character - unless you want to be changed. They enable change; they can't impose it...
— Alexander Shulgin, Pihkal: A Chemical Love Story
Fight for change? Thirst for difference?Start talking what men avoid talking about.
— Toba Beta, Master of Stupidity
Are you Stupid?""Huh?""Hotoba-san, Even if you are far away the sky i always connected. Friends are friend no matter where you are. Change isn't so bad...I was scared of change too. We're both scared. Lets be friend...okay?
— Peach-Pit, Shugo Chara!, Vol. 2: Friends in Need
As we know from the study of history, no new system can impose itself upon a previous one without incorporating many of the elements to be found in the latter...
— Margaret Atwood, The Handmaid's Tale
Everything in life that we really accept undergoes a change. So suffering must become Love. That is the mystery.
— Katherine Mansfield
You know, small children take it as a matter of course that things will change every day and grown-ups understand that things change sooner or later and their job is to keep them from changing as long as possible. It’s only kids in high school who are convinced they’re never going to change. There’s always going to be a pep rally and there’s always going to be a spectator bus, somewhere out there in their future.
— Stephen King
She emptied herself of Fabio and of herself, of all the useless efforts she had made to get where she was and find nothing there. With detached curiosity she observed the rebirth of her weaknesses, her obsessions. This time she would let them decide, since she hadn't been able to do anything anyway. Against certain parts of yourself you remain powerless, she said to herself, as she regressed pleasurably to the time when she was a girl.
— Paolo Giordano, The Solitude of Prime Numbers
I am in a spot where I can neither be what I always am nor turn into what I could be.
— Claire Keegan
That's a pretty story,' said Afanasievna as she let go of Ansky's genitals. 'A pity I'm too old and have seen to much to believe it.'It has nothing to do with belief,' said Ansky, 'it has to do with understanding, and then changing.
— Roberto Bolaño, 2666
We must remember that one determined person can make a significant difference, and that a small group of determined people can change the course of history.
— Sonia Johnson
...no one likes change unless it is from sommething bad to something good...
— Ron Currie Jr., Everything Matters!
The boundaries of this world are forever shifting – from day to night, joy to sorrow, love to hate, and from life itself to death; and who can say at what moment we may suddenly cross over the border, from one state of existence to another, like heat applied to some flammable substance? I have been given my own ever-changing margins, across which I move, continually and hungrily, like a migrating animal. Now civilized, now untamed; now responsive to decency and human concern, now viciously attuned to the darkest of desires.
— Michael Cox, The Meaning of Night
Didn't they realize that the only way to change things was to act?
— Tamora Pierce, The Woman Who Rides Like a Man
How dare you settle for less when the world has made it so easy for you to be remarkable?
— Seth Godin, Small Is the New Big: and 183 Other Riffs, Rants, and Remarkable Business Ideas
The example could encourage others who only fear to start.
— José Rizal, Noli Me Tángere
Love is an expression of power. We can use it to transform our world.
— Ericka Huggins
Something did happen to me somewhere that robbed me of confidence and courage and left me with a fear of discovery and change and a positive dread of everything unknown that may occur.
— Joseph Heller, Something Happened
How much change can a person absorb before everything loses meaning Living for its own sake isn't life. People need meaning as much as they need air.
— Daniel H. Wilson, Robopocalypse
...my body has becomeanother countryand I feel like an unemployedillegal alienhow will I survivewhere I do not belongI belong with you
— Patrick Califia-Rice
Tibby, who was not fond of change, had once told Bridget that the present, no matter what it brought, couldn't change the past. The past was set and sealed.
— Ann Brashares, Sisterhood Everlasting
The trick is remembering that change is as easy as you make it. The trick is remembering that you are the boss of you.
— A.S. King, Please Ignore Vera Dietz
Change is the end of something you know and the beginning of something else that you don't know. Something new that holds opportunities.
— Kholoud Yasser
For fate may hang on any moment and at any moment be changed.
— Jeanette Winterson, Sexing the Cherry
As long as karma exists, the world changes. There will always be karma to be taken care of
— Nina Hagen
Your self-talk is the channel of behavior change
— Gino Norris
Every revolution was first a thought in one man's mind, and when the same thought occurs to another man, it is the key to that era.
— Ralph Waldo Emerson, The Essays of Ralph Waldo Emerson
Men's lives are not progressions, as conventionally rendered in history paintings, nor are they a series of facts that may be enumerated & in their proper order understood. Rather they are a series of transformations, some immediate & shocking, some so slow as to be imperceptible, yet so complete & horrifying that at the end of his life a man may search his memory in vain for a moment of correspondence between his self in his dotage & him in his youth.
— Richard Flanagan, Gould's Book of Fish: A Novel in Twelve Fish
If you don't like change, you're going to like irrelevance even less.
— David F. Jakielo
Yes, the wind came up--" Mrs. Sharpe began. She paused."And changed us all," Petra said softly.
— Blue Balliett, The Calder Game
For a moment we're both silent, staring. I wonder if either of us really sees the other clearly anymore or if we stuck looking at the frozen images of who we used to be.
— Emily Henry, The Love That Split the World
Change--savor the cool, fresh flavor of it.
— Nora Roberts, Genuine Lies
After all, Paul Robeson said, ‘Artists are the radical voice of civilization.’ Each and every one of you in this room, with your gifts and your power and your skills, could perhaps change the way in which our global humanity mistrusts itself. Perhaps we as artists and as visionaries, for what’s better in the human heart and the human soul, could influence citizens everywhere in the world to see the better side of who and what we are as a species.
— Harry Belafonte
It was then, there in the darkness, with only those little pin-points of light to see by, light from a world away where other people with their own problems and their own secrets lived their own lives, that everything in our world changed for good.
— Dana Reinhardt, Harmless
I don't know how to change and I'm not sure I want to.
— Jordan Dane, In the Arms of Stone Angels
At this very moment enormous numbers of intelligent men and women of goodwill are trying to build a better world. But problems are born faster than they can be solved.
— B.F. Skinner, Walden Two
If a policy is wrongheaded feckless and corrupt I take it personally and consider it a moral obligation to sound off and not shut up until it's fixed.
— David H. Hackworth
Those who can not adjust to change will be swept aside by it. Those who recognize change and react accordingly will benefit.
— Jim Rogers, A Gift to My Children: A Father's Lessons for Life and Investing
Maybe not. But maybe that's how the world changes, Isaiah. One father, one child, at a time.
— Barbara Samuel, The Sleeping Night
My life will be what I make it," he told her. "That is true for all of us all the time. We cannot know what the future will bring or how the events of the future will make us feel. We cannot even plan and feel any certainty that our most carefully contrived plans will be put into effect. Could I have predicted what happened to me in the Peninsula? Could you have predicted what happened to you in Cornwall? But those things happened to us nevertheless. And they changed our plans and our dreams so radically that we both might have been excused for giving up, for never planning or dreaming again, for never living again. That too is a choice we all have to make.
— Mary Balogh, Simply Love
You jeopardize all if move slowly on a fast lane.
— Toba Beta, My Ancestor Was an Ancient Astronaut
We shall change all that...because it is possible to change the world, if one is determined enough, and if one sees with sufficient clarity just what has to be changed.
— Alexander McCall Smith, The Kalahari Typing School for Men
I've put out a lot of little roots these two years," Anne told the moon, "and when I'm pulled up they're going to hurt a great deal. But it's best to go, I think, and, as Marilla says, there's no good reason why I shouldn't. I must get out all my ambitions and dust them.
— L.M. Montgomery, Anne of Avonlea
The only permanent thing in this world is change.
— Totò
Things are embarrassing, best to avoid them. But since your death I prefer a naturalist style of conversation. Let's strip it down to what matters. Let's have emotions and beliefs on show without the modest covering of small talk.
— Rosamund Lupton, Sister
The old resists the new one.'Change hurts' is the reason.
— Toba Beta, Betelgeuse Incident: Insiden Bait Al-Jauza
If you really want to be different, you'd better keep quiet and be a good person on the inside.
— Michael Bassey Johnson, Master of Maxims
Olivia had changed so much since then. She had changed in ways she would never have been able to anticipate. She had become the kind of person who was barely able to get out of bed in the morning without buckling beneath the tidal pull of the planets.
— Kevin Brockmeier, The View from the Seventh Layer
Things yet unknown will change the way you think.
— Toba Beta, Master of Stupidity
We can't be afraid to change. You may fell secure in the pond that you are in, but if you never venture out of it, you will never know there is a such a thing as an ocean, a sea. Holding onto something that is good for you now, maybe the very reason you don't have something better.
— C. JoyBell C.
Resisting change does not change the truth that change is constantly happening.
— Jon Scott
You just need to be a flea against injustice. Enough committed fleas biting strategically can make even the biggest dog uncomfortable and transform even the biggest nation.
— Marian Wright Edelman
Any real change implies the breakup of the world as one has always known it, the loss of all that gave one an identity, the end of safety. And at such a moment, unable to see and not daring to imagine what the future will now bring forth, one clings to what one knew, or dreamed that one possessed. Yet, it is only when a man is able, without bitterness or self-pity, to surrender a dream he has long possessed that he is set free - he has set himself free - for higher dreams, for greater privileges.
— James     Baldwin, Nobody Knows My Name
Flexibility requires an open mind and a welcoming of new alternatives.
— Deborah Day
What you're missing is that the path itself changes you.
— Julien Smith, The Flinch
Civilizations grow by agreements and accomodations and accretions, not by repudiations. The rebels and the revolutionaries are only eddies, they keep the stream from getting stagnant but they get swept down and absorbed, they're a side issue. Quiet desperation is another name for the human condition. If revolutionaries would learn that they can't remodel society by day after tomorrow -- haven't the wisdom to and shouldn't be permitted to -- I'd have more respect for them ... Civilizations grow and change and decline -- they aren't remade.
— Wallace Stegner, Angle of Repose
I had discovered something; there was a pleasure in becoming something new. You could will yourself into a fresh shape. Now all I had to do was figure out how to do it out there, in my life.
— Claire Dederer, Poser: My Life in Twenty-three Yoga Poses
We do not escape our boundaries or our innermost being. We do not change. It is true we may be transformed, but we always walk within our boundaries, within the marked-off circle.
— Ernst Jünger, The Glass Bees
The great secret about goals and visions is not the future they describe but the change in the present they engender.
— David    Allen
If all the Christians- I mean all of 'em- got outta the pews on Sundays and into the streets, we'd shut the city down.We'd shut down hunger.We'd shut down loneliness.We'd shut down the notion that there is any such of a thing as a person that don't deserve a kind word and a second chance.
— Ron Hall
… the river sliding along its banks, darker now than the sky descending a last time to scatter its diamonds into these black waters that contain the day that passed, the night to come. — Excerpt from the poem “The Mercy
— Philip Levine
Changes come all the time. Just as soon as things get really nice they change,' she said with a sigh.
— L.M. Montgomery, Anne's House of Dreams
Maybe if we focused on being light & less on the dark, we might actually see things change.
— Michael M. Rose
Art isn't only a painting; it's anything that changes someone for the better, any nonanonymous interaction that leads to a human (not simply a commercial) conclusion.
— Seth Godin, Linchpin: Are You Indispensable?
So thoroughly and sincerely are we compelled to live, reverencing our life, and denying the possibility of change. This is the only way, we say; but there are as many ways as there can be drawn radii from one centre.
— Henry David Thoreau, Walden
Which came first: the change-ready company or the change-ready employee?
— Lorii Myers, Targeting Success, Develop the Right Business Attitude to be Successful in the Workplace
People learn when they are ready to learn. Are you ready?
— Lorii Myers, Targeting Success, Develop the Right Business Attitude to be Successful in the Workplace
To desire to change one’s past means there is a desire to change oneself. To desire to change oneself, one must learn to change.
— Lorii Myers, Targeting Success, Develop the Right Business Attitude to be Successful in the Workplace
One age ends, and another begins. It is the way of things. But, it doesn't happen all at once.
— Derek Donais, MetalMagic: Talisman
Ready how? Who's ever ready for anything important?
— Julia Glass, The Widower's Tale
Not much in the world ends up being the same as it started out, unless of course it had a very short life cycle.
— Lorii Myers, Targeting Success, Develop the Right Business Attitude to be Successful in the Workplace
Why did someone fall in love with you because you were one thing, and then want you to be something else?
— Tatjana Soli, The Lotus Eaters
...I didn't run away to come home the same. -Claudia
— E.L. Konigsburg, From the Mixed-Up Files of Mrs. Basil E. Frankweiler
The world has changed from quality to quantity, and so have we.
— Santosh Kalwar
I believe that mycelium is the neurological network of nature. Interlacing mosaics of mycelium infuse habitats with information-sharing membranes. These membranes are aware, react to change, and collectively have the long-term health of the host environment in mind. The mycelium stays in constant molecular communication with its environment, devising diverse enzymatic and chemical responses to complex challenges.
— Paul Stamets, Mycelium Running: How Mushrooms Can Help Save the World
...give yourself permission to change your world and others around you, in a positive way, with love and respect.
— Tasha Hoggatt
Twenty years is, after all, a long time. We are not the same people we were. Old friends, lovers, even family members: they are strangers who happen to wear a familiar face. We have no right to claim to know anyone after such a distance.
— Graham Joyce, Some Kind of Fairy Tale
I had a long talk with Bruce Springsteen on a rooftop during the Vote for Change tour (in 2004). And it boiled down to this: That guy you used to be, he’s still in the car. He’ll always be in the car. Just don’t let him drive. He might be shouting out directions. But whatever you do, don’t let him get behind the wheel.
— Eddie Vedder
Knowledge empowers people with our most powerful tool: the ability to think and decide. There is no power for change greater than a child discovering what he or she cares about. (Speech about Global Warming read on the National Mall for the 40th anniversary of Earth Day, 2010)
— Seymour Simon
Our national emblem has four lions but unfortunately we have highlighted more lambs and wolfs than real lions of our country.
— Sharad Vivek Sagar
Sometimes it's possible, just barely possible, to imagine a version of this world different from the existing one, a world in which there is true justice, heroic honesty, a clear perception possessed by each individual about how to treat all the others. Sometimes I swear I could see it, glittering in the pavement, glowing between the words in a stranger's sentence, a green, impossible vision--the world as it was meant to be, like a mist around the world as it is.
— Ben H. Winters, Underground Airlines
The conservatives are fools: They whine about the decay of traditional values, yet they enthusiastically support technological progress and economic growth. Apparently it never occurs to them that you can't make rapid, drastic changes in the technology and the economy of a society without causing rapid changes in all other aspects of the society as well, and that such rapid changes inevitably break down traditional values.
— Theodore J. Kaczynski, Industrial Society and Its Future: The Unabomber Manifesto
Perhaps the various burnings of the Alexandria Library were necessary, like those Australian Forest Fires without which the new seeds cannot burst their shells and make a young, healthy forest.
— William Golding, A Moving Target
An airport is a potent place, a point of reunions and departures. For the traveler, it's a crossroads at the moment of decision, a flashpoint that separates intention from retreat.
— Ginger Bensman, To Swim Beneath the Earth
The same process that makes AA so effective—the power of a group to teach individuals how to believe—happens whenever people come together to help one another change. Belief is easier when it occurs within a community.
— Charles Duhigg
Behavior precedes belief - that is, most people must engage in a behavior before they accept that it is beneficial; then they see the results, and then they believe that it is the right thing to do....implementation precedes buy-in; it does not follow it.
— Douglas B. Reeves, Leading Change in Your School: How to Conquer Myths, Build Commitment, and Get Results
Personalities change when you least expect them
— G.M.
The power of a bold idea uttered publicly in defiance of dominant opinion cannot be easily measured. Those special people who speak out in such a way as to shake up not only the self-assurance of their enemies, but the complacency of their friends, are precious catalysts for change.
— Howard Zinn, You Can't Be Neutral on a Moving Train: A Personal History of Our Times
At any given moment in our lives, there are certain things that could have happened but didn't. The magic momentsgo unrecognized, and then suddenly, the hand of destiny changes everything.
— Paulo Coelho, By the River Piedra I Sat Down and Wept
I am resolutely opposed to all innovation, all change, but I am determined to understand what’s happening. Because I don’t choose just to sit and let the juggernaut roll over me. Many people seem to think that if you talk about something recent, you’re in favor of it. The exact opposite is true in my case. Anything I talk about is almost certainly something I’m resolutely against. And it seems to me the best way to oppose it is to understand it. And then you know where to turn off the buttons.
— Marshall McLuhan, Forward Through The Rearview Mirror: Reflections On And By Marshall Mc Luhan
You cant rely on anybody being around for you, because things change.
— Kirsty Eagar, Night Beach
I think maybe Hell is a place. But you don't have to stay anywhere forever.
— Neil Gaiman, Season of Mists
That speaking the words, even if true, had little power to change the inevitable or even make him feel much better.
— Nicholas Sparks, The Last Song
You can't move so fast that you try to change the mores faster than people can accept it. That doesn't mean you do nothing, but it means that you do the things that need to be done according to priority.
— Eleanor Roosevelt
The world is inviolable: it has no beginning and no end. Those who seek to change it will be changed.
— Malinda Lo, Huntress
If you want to change something by Tuesday, theater is no good. Journalism is what does that.But, if you want to just alter the chemistry of the moral matrix, then theater has a longer half-life.
— Tom Stoppard
There is nothing that an intellectual less likes to change than his mind, or a politician his policy.
— Theodore Dalrymple
The Amish are islands of sanity in a whirlpool of change.
— Nancy Sleeth, Almost Amish: One Woman's Quest for a Slower, Simpler, More Sustainable Life
So, as a seventh grader,no, you weren't friends with people you didnt like. But sometimesyou also werent friends with people you did like, which was complicated, and which didnt make any sence if you tried to explain it. Sometimes things just changed. Thats where the sadness came in.
— Lauren Myracle
Do you always try to upset the world as much as possible?" Clare asked.He gave her a surprised look. "Of course. Otherwise how does anything change?
— Sam Starbuck, The Dead Isle
Life had called his name, and without thinking, he had stepped forward. He wondered if perhaps he was becoming the person he had always wanted to be.
— Simon Van Booy, Love Begins in Winter: Five Stories
It is the human habit to think in centuries from a grandparent to a grandchild because it just does take about a hundred years for things to cease to have the same meaning as they did before,
— Gertrude Stein, Narration: Four Lectures by Gertrude Stein
Not only are poor, unemployed, less will-educated and non-white people more likely to become depressed, but they are also least likely to benefit from treatment by either antidepressants or psychotherapy. That is why combating depression requires more than merely providing effective treatment for those who are already suffering from it. We also need the change the social conditions - such a racism, unemployment, poverty, unaffordable housing, and lack of adequate education - that put people at increased risk of becoming depressed.
— Irving Kirsch, The Emperor's New Drugs: Exploding the Antidepressant Myth
If anything normal were useful it would have been done already. That's why my motto is "Dare to Differ." Who know's what you'll find ?
— Matthew Goldfinger
It's only after the change is fully formed that you can see what's happened.
— Sebastian Faulks, Engleby
The twin guardian angels whose eyes and hands and wings had focused protective attention on the souls that lay there no longer faced each other. They stared blindly into a random middle distance. The scroll they held between them proclaiming eternal resurrection was broken in two.
— Clare Morgan, A Book for All and None
We as human beings appear to be in the most adverse stages in our evolution. How can the Mother Earth survive when the souls of Her sons are tainted with avarice, and the very minds which shape Her fate are dominated by ego? Minds that are prone to paranoia and can no longer trust its brothers. Humanity is at a crossroads. A crossroads which speaks of either profound change or ultimate destruction.
— Chris Cordova
They (the French) have taken genius instead of reason for their guide, adopted experiment instead of experience, and wander in the dark because they prefer lightning to light.
— Gouverneur Morris
If you can't talk about it, you can't change it.
— Matt L. Rawlins, There's an Elephant in the Room
If this generation doesn't end...then change towards a better one will be delayed.
— Toba Beta, My Ancestor Was an Ancient Astronaut
You can’t change the road you traveled from a child, but you can certainly take a different road for the journey into your future.
— Shamarion Whitaker
This is what I say: I've got good news and bad news.The good news is, you don't have to worry, you can't change the past.The bad news is, you don't have to worry, no matter how hard you try, you can't change the past.The universe just doesn't put up with that. We aren't important enough. No one is. Even in our own lives. We're not strong enough, willful enough, skilled enough in chronodiegetic manipulation to be able to just accidentally change the entire course of anything, even ourselves.
— Charles Yu, How to Live Safely in a Science Fictional Universe
The wolf was sick, he vowed a monk to be - But when he got well, a wolf once more was he
— Walter Bower
Normally, Edward would have found intrusive, clingy behavior of this sort very annoying, but there was something about Sarah Ruth. He wanted to take care of her. He wanted to protect her. He wanted to do more for her. (page 135)
— Kate DiCamillo, The Miraculous Journey of Edward Tulane
Each of us has interests which conflict the interests of everybody else... 'everybody else' we call 'society'. It's a powerful opponent and it always wins. Oh, here and there an individual prevails for a while and gets what he wants. Sometimes he storms the culture of a society and changes it to his own advantage. But society wins in the long run, for it has the advantage of numbers and of age.
— B.F. Skinner, Walden Two
HARRINGTON: And God hears your prayer, doesn't he? We hear Joy's getting better....LEWIS: That's not why I pray, Harry. I pray because I can't help myself. I pray because I'm helpless. I pray because the need flows out of me, waking and sleeping. It doesn't change God, it changes me.
— William Nicholson, Shadowlands
Only those who'd changed could see things from a different point of view.
— Toba Beta, My Ancestor Was an Ancient Astronaut
It was the challenge of life too, was it not? People could never be fully understood. They were ever changing, different people at different times and under different circumstances and influences. And always growing, always creating themselves anew.How impossible it was to know another human being.How impossible to know even oneself.
— Mary Balogh, Slightly Tempted
I thank God today she found the courage in her heart to love me enough so that someday I could tell you that even a black ex-con from Angola that stabbed a man could maybe someday do some good in the world if he gets a chance.
— Ron Hall
History made when mindset changed.
— Toba Beta, Master of Stupidity
With grumble, nobody changes anything, even himself.
— Toba Beta, My Ancestor Was an Ancient Astronaut
You do not change anything, only need to make difference.
— Toba Beta, My Ancestor Was an Ancient Astronaut
This is where life as I knew it changed. This is where a new feeling slowly, eventually, permeated every cell of my body, changing the way I took in the world. My perceptions, opinions, everything changed the year I moved from Texas to Virginia.
— Sharon E. Rainey, Making a Pearl from the Grit of Life
By and large, the kind of science fiction which makes tomorrow's headlines as near as this morning's coffee has enlarged popular awareness of the modern, miraculous world of science we live in. It has helped generations of young people feel at age with a changing 
— Marion Zimmer Bradley, The Door Through Space
…move from emphasis on personal lifestyle issues toward creating political paradigms and radical models of social change that emphasize collective as well as individual change.
— bell hooks, Talking Back: Thinking Feminist, Thinking Black
It is always easier to destroy a complex system than to selectively alter it.
— Roby James, Commitment
Hap sighed. If he could change one thing about Umber-besides his constant need for the thrill of exploration-it would be his obsession with secrets and surprises.
— P.W. Catanese, Dragon Games
Perhaps they should feel this safe sand blow away so that their heads are uncovered for a time, so that they will have to taste not only the solid honesty of my red borscht, but the new flavor of the changing world.
— M.F.K. Fisher, The Art of Eating
[C]hange your thinking, your interpretation of he world, change the way you see! To change the way you see is to change the world. (50)
— Jean-Yves Leloup, Compassion and Meditation: The Spiritual Dynamic between Buddhism and Christianity
This world is too comfort to be changed.This world is too corrupt to be conserved.
— Toba Beta, My Ancestor Was an Ancient Astronaut
Memories do not change, and change is the law of existence. If our dead, the closest, the most beloved, were to return to us after a long absence and instead of the old, familiar trees were to find in our souls English gardens and stone walls -- that is to say, other loves, other tastes, other interests, they would gaze upon us sadly and tenderly for a moment, wiping away their tears, and then return to their tombs to rest.
— Teresa de la Parra, Las memorias de Mamá Blanca
I am choosing to flow with the current of life rather than lying in a tide pool experiencing the same things again and again.
— Marilyn Barnicke Belleghem
Fennel, which is the spice for Wednesdays, the day of averages, of middle-aged people. . . . Fennel . . . smelling of changes to come.
— Chitra Banerjee Divakaruni, The Mistress of Spices
Reality may not be what you want it to be, but it is the reality you now must face. You can deny this reality and try to wish it away, or you can accept it and not waste any energy on wanting it to be different.
— David W. Earle
To be always what I am - and so changed from what I was.
— Samuel Beckett, Happy Days
When you gaze out on a quiet, peaceful meadow, next to a still pond, under a motionless blue sky, you wonder how the noisy, busy cacophony of life could have arisen from such silent, motionless beginning.
— M.., The Meaning(s) of Life: A Human's Guide to the Biology of Souls
Not one country in existence today has had the same borders and government for as long as two hundred years. The world will continue changing.
— Jim Rogers, A Gift to My Children: A Father's Lessons for Life and Investing
All of those things - rock and men and river - resisted change, resisted the coming as they did the going. Hood warmed and rose slowly, breaking open the plain, and cooled slowly over the plain it buried. The nature of things is resistance to change, while the nature of process is resistance to stasis, yet things and process are one, and the line from inorganic to organic and back is uninterrupted and unbroken.
— William Least Heat-Moon
[Quoting Miss Harty:]"People come here from all over the country and fall in love with Savannah. Then they move here and pretty soon they’re telling us how much more lively and prosperous Savannah could be if we only knew what we had and how to take advantage of it. I call these people ‘Gucci carpetbaggers.
— John Berendt, Midnight in the Garden of Good and Evil
Be music always. Keep changing the keys, tones, pitch, and volume of each of the songs you create along your life's journey and play on.
— Suzy Kassem, Rise Up and Salute the Sun: The Writings of Suzy Kassem
Crying is like a thundershower for the soul. The air feels so wonderful after the rain. Don’t think too much. Breathe. Don’t be harsh or demanding on yourself. Just experience your feelings and know that your tears are announcing change in your life. Change is coming
—  like a summer rain — to wash away your pain. Have faith that things are getting better.
To have a solid foundation of skepticism, -that is to say, the faculty of changing at any moment, of turning back, of facing successively the metamorphoses of life.
— Rémy de Gourmont, Philosophic Nights in Paris,: Being Selections from Promenades Philosophiques
Only by speaking out can we create lasting change. And that change begins with coming out.
— DaShanne Stokes
I was not one man only but the steady advance hour after hour of an army in close formation, in which there appeared, according to the moment, impassioned men, indifferent men, jealous men.
— Marcel Proust, Albertine disparue
Every action in this world, every word, every thought, has an effect. But the actor is also acted upon by his action. The condition on which you are allowed to make a change in the world is that the world changes you as well.
— Yael Shahar, A Damaged Mirror: A story of memory and redemption
Self awareness is the key, and the first step in change. We cannot change our world or ourselves without the awareness of what needs to change. To shift the patterns that disempower you, you must get honest with yourself and become aware of what they are.
— Eileen Anglin
Life's been one tough little shit, but there's a very obvious reason why she hasn't let me get too comfy, settle too long or sink too deep. She knows she has to kick me in the ass sometimes to get me moving on my journey.
— Jennifer DeLucy
...by the time we understand the pattern we are in, the definition we are making for ourselves, it's too late to break out of the box. We can only live in terms of the definition, like the prisoner in the cage in which he cannot lie or stand or sit, hung up in justice to be viewed by the populace. Yet the definition we have made of ourselves is ourselves. To break out of it, we must make a new self. But how can the self make a new self when the selfness which it is, is the only substance from which the new self can be made?
— Robert Penn Warren, All the King's Men
CHANGE: Don’t just talk about it, go out there and do it. Don’t just meditate about it, go out there and create it. Don’t just pray about it go out there and take action; participate in the answering of your own prayer. If you want change, get out there and live it. - Steve Maraboli
— Steve Maraboli
If the people of God were to transform the world through fascination, these amazing teachings had to work at the center of these peculiar people. Then we can look into the eyes of a centurion and see not a beast but a child of God, and then walk with that child a couple of miles. Look into the eys of tax collectors as they sue you in court; see their poverty and give them your coat. Look in to the eys of the ones who are hardest for you to like, and see the One you love. For God loves good and bad people.
— Shane Claiborne, Jesus for President: Politics for Ordinary Radicals
Real change requires you to change your behavior-not just your attitude.
— Phil Stutz, The Tools: Transform Your Problems into Courage, Confidence, and Creativity
Today I prayed for Boston, for America, my home away from home. Today, I realized how lucky we Sri Lankans are to have peace in our country. How I feel today, hearing of the bombs going off in the city brings back memories of how I used to feel four years ago in Sri Lanka when the LTTE was setting off bombs all around Colombo. That feeling I used to get when I hear about a bomb blast, the goosebumps, the school evacuation drills, the breaking news footage, and most of all, that fear we Sri Lankans used to feel, every second of everyday, it all came back to me today. Thank you God for bringing peace to my country, look after America the way you did Sri Lanka.
— Thisuri Wanniarachchi
Idle to pretend that we have lost paradise. We never had it
—  it is still to make.
But nothing is said of the closeness between two people: how they grew in the shade of each other's presence. No one speaks of that exchange of gift and character --- the way a person took on and recognized in himself the smile of a lover. Individuals are seen only in the context of these swirling social tides.
— Michael Ondaatje, Running in the Family
There no such thing as something! Why? Because everything's already turning into something else!
— David Mitchell, Black Swan Green
Our second danger is to associate tradition with the immovable; to think of it as something hostile to all change; to aim to return to some previous condition which we imagine as having been capable of preservation in perpetuity, instead of aiming to stimulate the life which produced that condition in its time. . . . a tradition without intelligence is not worth having . . .
— T.S. Eliot
Well, sometimes things don't change on their own. Sometimes we have to change them.
— Suzanne LaFleur, Eight Keys
Sometimes our lives can change so fast that the change outpaces our minds and hearts.
— Cassandra Clare
Something else emerges from this discussion about us as human individuals: we're not fixed, stable intellects riding along peering at the world through the lenses of our eyes like the pilots of people-shaped spacecraft. We are affected constantly by what's going on around us. Whether our flexibility is based in neuroplasticity or in less dramatic aspects of the brain, we have to start acknowledging that we are mutable, persuadable and vulnerable to clever distortions, and that very often what we want to be is a matter of constant effort rather than attaining a given state and then forgetting about it. Being human isn't like hanging your hat on a hook and leaving it there, it's like walking in a high wind: you have to keep paying attention. You have to be engaged with the world.
— Nick Harkaway, The Blind Giant
How can I explain to her that I just can't come home? It's too soon, it's too late; I do want to be with Helen every second of the day but at the same time I don't want to be with her at all. I want to have back what I felt at the beginning. I could no more leave her then than leave my arms or legs. How do you find the beginning, though? There are no roads or signs. You start to doubt it even exists. The hardest thing isn't deciding that I want to go back to when Helen and Gracie and I were us. The most difficult thing is finding the map to get there.
— Cath Crowley, The Life and Times of Gracie Faltrain
If we are ever going to achieve a rational approach to organizing our affairs, we have to dignify the process of admitting to being wrong. It doesn't help matters at all if the media, or your friends, accuse you of "flip-flopping" when you change your mind. Changing our minds is our hope for the future.
— Brian Eno, What Have You Changed Your Mind About?: Today's Leading Minds Rethink Everything
From the Buddhist perspective, the only lasting way to bring about change is for people themselves to change.
— Pat Allwright, Basics of Buddhism: Key principles and how to practise
We must throw out the old, fear-based thought-forms and evolve, and begin to live as higher beings of compassion.
— Bryant McGill
My change from girl to boy was far less dramatic than the distance anybody travels from infancy to adulthood.
— Jeffrey Eugenides, Middlesex
He smiled at me, and just like that I was completely happy to be who I was. I knew it wouldn't be easy all the time, but right now it was as simple as sunshine because Nathan was here and had helped me to realize that I was still Ramsey, no matter how much things had changed.
— Markelle Grabo, The Spell Master
Today's Europeans and Americans who reached the age of awareness after midcentury when the communications revolution lead to expectations of instantanaiy are exasperated by the slow toils of history. They assume that the thunderclap of cause will be swiftly followed by the lightening bolt of effect.
— William Manchester, The Last Lion: Winston Spencer Churchill: Visions of Glory 1874-1932
Besides, Mrs. Quesnt, did it never occur to you that we are not changing at all-that rather, we are simply becoming more ourselves?
— Galen Beckett, The Master of Heathcrest Hall
When we were on trees, others had lived in skies. When we reach skies, descendant of primitives will someday convey this message.
— Toba Beta, My Ancestor Was an Ancient Astronaut
Adapting doesn't mean changing yourself......
— Adil Adam Memon
Deep and sustainable change...requires changes in behavior among those who do not welcome the change.
— Douglas B. Reeves, Leading Change in Your School: How to Conquer Myths, Build Commitment, and Get Results
Sometimes there is no choice but to walk into your own house. Far away, you think, and you do not want to see. You come home and you say do not tell me. You say, I have hunted the elk all over the snowfields of the Selway, and I do not want to know what happened here. And then there is a morning you walk in and take a look in your own house, like any traveler.
— William Kittredge, We Are Not in This Together: Stories
Writers and artists build by hand little worlds that they hope might effect change in real minds, in the real world where stories are read. A story can make us cry and laugh, break our hearts, or make us angry enough to change the world.
— Grant Morrison, Supergods: What Masked Vigilantes, Miraculous Mutants, and a Sun God from Smallville Can Teach Us About Being Human
All change comes from deepening your understanding of the salvation of Christ and living out the changes that understanding creates in your heart.
— Timothy J. Keller
Leadership, on the other hand, is about creating change you believe in.
— Seth Godin, Tribes: We Need You to Lead Us
Mountains, according to the angle of view, the season, the time of day, the beholder's frame of mind, or any one thing, can effectively change their appearance. Thus, it is essential to recognize that we can never know more than one side, one small aspect of a mountain.
— Haruki Murakami, A Wild Sheep Chase
To love a swamp, however, is to love what is muted and marginal, what exists in the shadows, what shoulders its way out of mud and scurries along the damp edges of what is most commonly praised. And sometimes its invisibility is a blessing. Swamps and bogs are places of transition and wild growth, breeding grounds, experimental labs where organisms and ideas have the luxury of being out of the spotlight, where the imagination can mutate and mate, send tendrils into and out of the water.
— Barbara Hurd, Stirring the Mud: On Swamps, Bogs, and Human Imagination
Sudden shifts and changes are no bad preparation for political life.
— Charles Dickens, Oliver Twist
Even if there were only two men left in the world and both of them saints they wouldn't be happy. One them would be bound to try and improve the other. That is the nature of things.
— Frank O'Connor
The fact that my circumstances had changed drastically but my behavior hadn't was beginning to wear on me.
— Anthony Kiedis, Scar Tissue
When things don't change, their sameness becomes an accretion. That is why all society puts on flesh. Succumbs to the cubicles and begins to fill them.
— Tennessee Williams
I can't change what's happened to me in my life, or make what's not occurred take place. But I can't say I like it, or accept it, or believe it's for the best. I don't and never shall, not even if I'm damned for it.
— Margaret Laurence, The Stone Angel
You know that smell, when you put your nose up to a pine tree?" I told her I did perfectly. "No matter how long it has been, you always will. Like you are storing a part of that tree in your own body. ... Everything stays true. You are yourself, no matter how much you have to change.
— Ramona Ausubel, No One is Here Except All of Us
It's so damn hard to bloom... to change. Even when you want to change, want it more than anything in the world, it's hard. Desire to change isn't enough. Or desperation. Couldn't be done without...love,
— Dean Koontz, Watchers