Quotes on Change

I would change very little because I have been very, very fortunate. A lot of things fell into place for me simply by happenstance. When that happens you don't really want to change anything, even if you could. Editorially my regrets are few and for the most part minor. I look back on my first published book and think I held on to it too long, babied it too long.

It's not that our high school system was not designed well, but that it was designed in 1906 when the country was just out of the industrial era. There hasn't been a substantial systemic change the way we do high school since then.

As climate change moves from a model of the future to the reality of the present, health care systems across the country are facing a difficult set of questions. What are doctors supposed to do when wildfires, rising floodwater or other natural disasters threaten their ability to provide care for patients?

I had been educated in the rhythms of the mountain, rhythms in which change was never fundamental, only cyclical. The same sun appeared each morning, swept over the valley, and dropped behind the peak. The snows that fell in winter always melted in the spring.

And the day came when the risk to remain tight in a bud was more painful than the risk it took to blossom.

Few will have the greatness to bend history itself; but each of us can work to change a small portion of events, and in the total; of all those acts will be written the history of this generation.

We must all obey the great law of change. It is the most powerful law of nature.

Don't be too quick to draw conclusions from what happens to you; simply let it happen. Otherwise it will be too easy for you to look with blame... at your past, which naturally has a share with everything that now meets you.

When you speak up about any sense of unfairness or injustice, you're told that you're overreacting, you're too angry, too silly-shut up already. It takes a tremendous amount of fortitude to be able to live in this world as a woman, let alone a woman who wants things to change.

I was taught over and over again that the accumulation of random mutations led to evolutionary change - led to new species. I believed it until I looked for evidence.

The anchor in our world today is freedom, holding us steady in times of change, a symbol of hope to all the world.

Sometimes good things fall apart so better things could fall together.

Hardly a man in the world has an opinion upon morals, political, or religion which he got otherwise than through his associations and sympathies.

The freedom to make and remake our cities and ourselves is, I want to argue, one of the most precious yet most neglected of our human rights.

The customs and fashions of men change like leaves on the bough, some of which go and others come.

Most English writers are not interested in change but in the social novel. That demands a static backdrop. I'm intensely interested in change - probably as a matter of self-preservation. What the hell is going to happen next?

Nearly 100% of innovation-from business to politics-is inspired not by "market analysis" but by people who are supremely pissed off by the way things are.

There can't be a pure myth, especially when the myth has been handed down in the oral tradition. As the stories are told, they change. If the stories don't change they just die.

Failure is not fatal, but failure to change might be.

I have seen girls tackle every single big problem from cancer to lead poisoning to climate change to homelessness to bullying in schools. There is literally no problem that we can't solve.

The speed of change today is faster than the human psyche seems able to handle, and it's increasingly difficult to reconcile the rhythms of our personal lives with the rapidity of a twenty-four-hour news cycle.