
“And that is how change happens. One gesture. One person. One moment at a time.”
Source: The Sweet Far Thing
Interview in Writers at Work Third Series (1967) edited by George Plimpton
Context: One's condition on marijuana is always existential. One can feel the importance of each moment and how it is changing one. One feels one's being, one becomes aware of the enormous apparatus of nothingness — the hum of a hi-fi set, the emptiness of a pointless interruption, one becomes aware of the war between each of us, how the nothingness in each of us seeks to attack the being of others, how our being in turn is attacked by the nothingness in others.
“And that is how change happens. One gesture. One person. One moment at a time.”
Source: The Sweet Far Thing
“You know, I think that only if one feels immensely important can one feel truly light.”
Source: Atlas Shrugged
“One can never ask anyone to change a feeling.”
Source: As Consciousness is Harnessed to Flesh: Journals and Notebooks, 1964-1980
The Development Hypothesis (1852)
Context: The supporters of the Development Hypothesis... can show that any existing species—animal or vegetable—when placed under conditions different from its previous ones, immediately begins to undergo certain changes fitting it for the new conditions. They can show that in successive generations these changes continue; until, ultimately, the new conditions become the natural ones. They can show that in cultivated plants, in domesticated animals, and in the several races of men, such alterations have taken place. They can show that the degrees of difference so produced are often, as in dogs, greater than those on which distinctions of species are in other cases founded.
“The most important person is the one you are with in this moment.”
Source: Path of Life (1909), p. 206
“One doesn't recognize the really important moments in one's life until it's too late.”