People don’t alter history any more than birds alter the sky, they just make brief patterns in it. (M)
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History isn’t like that. History unravels gently, like an old sweater. It has been patched and darned many times, reknitted to suit different people, shoved in a box under the sink of censorship to be cut up for the dusters of propaganda, yet it always –eventually – manages to spring back into its old familiar shape. History has a habit of changing the people who think they are changing it. History always has a few tricks up its frayed sleeve. It’s been around a long time. (M)
Granny subsided into unaccustomed, trouble silence, and tried to listen to the prologue. The theatre worried her. It
had a magic of its own, one that didn’t belong to her, one that wasn’t in her to control. It changed the world, and said things were otherwise than they were. And it was worse than that. It was magic that didn’t belong to magical people. It was commanded by ordinary people, who didn’t know the rules. They altered the world because it sounded better. (WS) Change the story, even if you don’t mean to, and the story changes you. (W)
'Nothing has to happen. You can let things happen. But that’s not the same.' (CP)
'But here’s some advice, boy. Don’t put your trust in revolutions. They always come around again. That’s why they’re called revolutions. People die, and nothing changes.' (NW)
If the landslide is big enough, even square pebbles will roll. (MR)
Give anyone a lever long enough and they can change the world. It’s unreliable levers that are the problem. (SG)
Changing was necessary. Change was right. He was all in favour of change. What he was dead against was things not staying the same. (Dig)
... people don’t like change. But make the change happen fast enough and you go from one type of normal to another. (MM)
'People like to be told what they already know. Remember that. They get uncomfortable when you tell them new
things. New things…well, new things aren’t what they expect. They like to know that, say, a dog will bite a man. That is what dogs do. They don’t want to know that a man bites a dog, because the world is not supposed to happen like that. In short, what people think they want is news, but what they really crave is olds.' (TT) 'We’ve always looked beyond the walls for the invaders,’ he said. ‘We always thought change came from outside, usually on the point of a sword. And then we look around and find that it comes from the inside of the head of someone you wouldn’t notice in the street. In certain circumstances it may be convenient to remove the head, but there seem to be such a lot of them these days.' (TT)
Lancrastrians never threw away anything that worked. The trouble was, they seldom changed anything that worked, either. (CJ)
'Don’t you talk to me about progress. Progress just means bad things happen faster.' (WA)
'It’s never happened before.’
‘Lots of things have never happened before. We’re only born once.' (ER) 'When people say “We must move with the times,”they really mean “You must do it my way.”' (FE)
It was a puzzle why things were always dragged kicking and screaming. No one ever seemed to want to, for example, lead them gently by the hand. (TT)
What you look at, you change. (CP)
... if it is true that the act of observing changes the thing which is observed, it’s even more true that it changes the observer. (SM)
... it is possible, after a while, to develop certain dangerous habits of thought. One is that, while all important enterprises need careful organization, it is the organization that needs organizing, rather than the enterprise. And the other is that tranquility is always a good thing. (TOT)
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The world has lost Sir Terry, and it's so much the poorer for that. Vale Sir Terry. Categories
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