#v

We're only given one life, and it's the one we live, she had thought; how painful now, to realize that wasn't true, that you would have different lives, depending on how brave you were, and how ready. ↗

— Samuel Park

#life-changing #love #change

All that old road of the past unreeling dizzily as if the cup of life had been overturned and everything gone mad. My eyes ached in nightmare day (235). ↗

— Jack Kerouac

#on-the-road #travel #travel-writing #change

In history, the moments during which reason and reconciliation prevail are short and fleeting. ↗

— Stefan Zweig

#fleeting #history #moments #prevail #reason

I was a masterpiece; a painting in itself. He was changing me, molding me, and making me into something brand new. I was a blank canvas when I came to him, ready to absorb all the paint he would slather on me. He kept going, adding layer upon layer, sometimes even shedding them just so I could turn out beautiful. And he was done now, ready to let me leave and display me on a wall for people to see. ↗

— Evelyn Deshane

#evelyn-deshane #the-dove-keeper #art

How is it that you keep mutating and can still be the same virus? ↗

— Chuck Palahniuk

#mutation #virus #change

But it wasn't till he'd been there nearly two weeks that one morning Paris and its people suddenly became more than a background for his vacation. He was sitting in a café, out on the walk, having a tiny cup of Paris-tasting, Paris-smelling coffee, watching traffic stream by, pleased as always with the countless people on bikes expertly threading their way between and around the cars and buses and trucks. Then a traffic light changed, the stream stopped and waited, and a man on a bike, one foot on the pavement, lifted his arm and wiped his forehead with the back of his hand. And he turned real. In that instant he was no longer a quaint part of a charming background; he turned into a real man, tired from pumping that bike, and for the first time it occurred to my friend that there was a reason so many people picturesquely rode bikes through the heavy traffic, and the reason was to save bus fare and because they couldn't afford cars. After that, for the few days that were left to him there, my friend continued to enjoy Paris. But now it was no longer an immense travel poster but a real city, because now so were its people. ↗

— Jack Finney

#people #reality #travel #change

She'll be an excellent novelist: a monster of self-absorption. ↗

— Lan Samantha Chang

#self-absorbtion #change

Can a man change the stars?" "Yes William. If he believes enough, a man can do anything! ↗

— A Knights Tale

#belief #inspirational #change

Arf! Arf, arf, arf!" Oh, Jesus, the Antichrist's barking was going to split open his head. "Quiet, Tank," Grace said. "Toby, baby, grab him and put him in the laundry room, please. Anna, good, you're back. Get a phone in case we need to call nine-one-one." "Got it," Anna said, sounding so unusually shaken that Josh did open his eyes. Look at that, Antichrist number two was worried about him. Nice change. ↗

— Jill Shalvis

#grace-brooks #jill-shalvis #josh-scott #change

In answer to 'But violence hasn't solved anything!' The hell it hasn't. The application of violence - of killing and a willingness to be killed - on a massive scale is responsible for a lot of solutions. The most recent mass application of violence liberated Kuwait. The most recent mass application of violence on a global scale alone cleansed the world of the Third Reich. Nonviolence and passive resistance did less than nothing to stop Hitler and his henchmen. The Atlantic slave trade wasn't stopped by 'dialogue' or 'passive resistance' or conferences, but by the opened gunports of the Royal Navy; Dachau and Chang-I weren't liberated with pamphlets. ↗

— Markham Shaw Pyle

#violence #war #change