The last thing I wanted was infinite security and to be the place an arrow shoots off from. I wanted change and excitement and to shoot off in all directions myself, like the colored arrows from a Fourth of July rocket.
The art of life lies in a constant readjustment to our surrounding.
Grief does not change you, Hazel. It reveals you.
It’s like a snake that sheds its skin. The outside look different when the scales change, but the inside always the same.
You’re always you, and that don’t change, and you’re always changing, and there’s nothing you can do about it.
The strangeness of Time. Not in its passing, which can seem infinite, like a tunnel whose end you can’t see, whose beginning you’ve forgotten, but in the sudden realization that something finite, has passed, and is irretrievable.
Right now I want a word that describes the feeling that you get – a cold sick feeling, deep down inside – when you know something is happening that will change you, and you don’t want it to, but you can’t stop it. And you know, for the first time, for the very first time, that there will now be a before and an after, a was and a will be. And that you will never again quite be the same person you were.
There was novelty in the scheme, and as, with such a mother and such uncompanionable sisters, home could not be faultless, a little change was not unwelcome for its own sake.
Why do you go away? So that you can come back. So that you can see the place you came from with new eyes and extra colors. And the people there see you differently, too. Coming back to where you started is not the same as never leaving.
One child, one teacher, one book, one pen can change the world.
The changes we dread most may contain our salvation.
I wanted to change the world. But I have found that the only thing one can be sure of changing is oneself.