#ang

When you lose a friend [in battle] you have an overpowering desire to go back home and yell in everybody's ear, "This guy was killed fighting for you. Don't forget him--ever. Keep him in your mind when you wake up in the morning and when you go to bed at night. Don't think of him as the statistic which changes 38,788 casualties to 38,789. Think of him as a guy who wanted to live every bit as much as you do. Don't let him be just one of 'Our Brave Boys' from the old home town, to whom a marble monument is erected in the city park, and a civic-minded lady calls the newspaper ten years later and wants to know why that 'unsightly stone' isn't removed. ↗

— Bill Mauldin

#friendship #war #change

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

#life #change

Great drama is great questions or it is nothing but technique. I could not imagine a theater worth my time that did not want to change the world. ↗

— Arthur Miller

#life #questions #change

Once someone appears to us primarily as an object, kindness has no place to root. ↗

— Sharon Salzberg

#compassion #inspirational #kindness #change

Now everything was changed. She walked about with cautious, anxious steps, staring constantly at the ground, on the lookout for things that crept and crawled. Bushes were dangerous, and so were sea grass and rain water. There were little animals everywhere. They could turn up between the covers of a book, flattened and dead, for the fact is that creeping animals, tattered animals, and dead animals are with us all our lives, from beginning to end. Grandmother tried to discuss this with her, to no avail. Irrational terror is so hard to deal with. [p. 136] ↗

— Tove Jansson

#change

The sign said "eight items or less". So I changed my name to Les. ↗

— Steven Wright

#humor #change

Rather than turning over a new leaf, prune your tree so that new leaves continue to blossom. ↗

— Feroz Bham

#change #leaf #life #change

The dunes are changed by the wind, but the desert never changes. That's the way it will be with our love for each other ↗

— Paulo Coelho

#change

I know I shouldn't say this—I know it as surely as I know the earth is round and beats are evil—and yet here it comes: “It's not too late to change your mind. ↗

— Sara Zarr

#change

I felt a wish never to leave that room - a wish that dawn might never come, that my present frame of mind might never change. ↗

— Leo Tolstoy

#leo-tolstoy #literature #russia #change