#ture

The book was in her lap; she had read no further. The power to change one’s life comes from a paragraph, a lone remark. The lines that penetrate us are slender, like the flukes that live in river water and enter the bodies of swimmers. She was excited, filled with strength. The polished sentences had arrived, it seemed, like so many other things, at just the right time. How can we imagine what our lives should be without the illumination of the lives of others? ↗

— James Salter

#literature #reading #words #change

The past has been there all along, reminding us: This time--maybe, hopefully, against all odds, we will get it right. ↗

— Leslie T. Chang

#inspirational #past-and-future #change

If we apply our minds directly and competently to the needs of the earth, then we will have begun to make fundamental and necessary changes in our minds. We will begin to understand and to mistrust and to change our wasteful economy, which markets not just the produce of the earth, but also the earth's ability to produce. We will see that beauty and utility are alike dependent upon the health of the world. But we will also see through the fads and the fashions of protest. We will see that war and oppression and pollution are not separate issues, but are aspects of the same issue. Amid the outcries for the liberation of this group or that, we will know that no person is free except in the freedom of other persons, and that man's only real freedom is to know and faithfully occupy his place - a much humbler place than we have been taught to think - in the order of creation. (pg.89, "Think Little") ↗

— Wendell Berry

#creation #earth #economy #freedom #nature

You must try to have a positive attitude. It does not matter how small a person is. One can still change the future. Size is only a state of mind. You know – it is how you use your wits that counts. Nothing can stop us, if we put our hearts into it. Anything is achievable girls, anything at all! ↗

— Nathalie M. Leblanc

#fairies #family #fantasy #magic #suspence

When we reject our origins, we become the product of whatever soil that we find ourselves planted; the colors of our leaves change as we consume borrowed nutrients with borrowed roots and, like a tree, we grow. ↗

— Mike Norton

#heritage #originality #reject #rejection #tree

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

#four-lectures #gertrude-stein #history #narration #change

It is difficult when reading the description of certain fictional characters not at the same time to imagine the real-life acquaintances who they most closely, if often unexpectedly, resemble. ↗

— Alain de Botton

#literature #philosophy-of-life #change

People grow, but they don't change. ↗

— Elizabeth Bard

#change

If she were alive today, she would be ashamed of me. I'm trying to change that. ↗

— Eric Wilson

#family-relationships #change

Flannery O'Connor, in a note to the editor of "Wise Blood" that pertained to changes he wanted to make, wrote "Perhaps I am prematurely arrogant . . . ↗

— Flannery O'Connor

#southern-writers #change