“People did change, and a change could be a bloom as well as a withering…”

— Richard Yates, book Revolutionary Road

Source: Revolutionary Road

Last update June 3, 2021. History

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Richard Yates24

Novelist, short story writer 1926–1992

Susan Minot (1956) American author and screenwriter

Source: Evening

“The vilest deeds like poison weeds
Bloom well in prison-air:
It is only what is good in Man
That wastes and withers there”

Oscar Wilde book The Ballad of Reading Gaol

Pt. V, st. 30
The Ballad of Reading Gaol (1898)
Context: The vilest deeds like poison weeds
Bloom well in prison-air:
It is only what is good in Man
That wastes and withers there:
Pale Anguish keeps the heavy gate,
And the Warder is Despair.

“People say having kids is life changing, well that doesn't necessarily mean a good thing, does it? I could take one of my legs off. That would change my life.”

Karl Pilkington (1972) English television personality, social commentator, actor, author and former radio producer

The Moaning of Life, Karl on Kids

“It's so damn hard to bloom… to change. Even when you want to change, want it more than anything in the world, it's hard. Desire to change isn't enough. Or desperation. Couldn't be done without… love.”

Dean Koontz book Watchers

Part 1, Chapter 7.5; Nora's comment on her changes since meeting Travis
Watchers (1987)

“I was profoundly embarrassed by it [the White Australia Policy] and did all I could to change it.”

Gough Whitlam (1916–2014) Australian politician, 21st Prime Minister of Australia

Quoted in Paul Kelly, 100 Years – The Australian Story (Allen & Unwin, ABC Books, NSW, 2001), p. 196

“On me, on me
Time and change can heap no more!
The painful past with blighting grief
Hath left my heart a withered leaf.
Time and change can do no more.”

Richard Henry Horne (1802–1884) English poet and critic

Dirge; reported in Hoyt's New Cyclopedia Of Practical Quotations (1922), p. 342-44.

“The problem of independence did not lie in a change of forms but in change of spirit.”

José Martí (1853–1895) Poet, writer, Cuban nationalist leader

Our America (1881)
Context: America began to suffer, and still suffers, from the tiresome task of reconciling the hostile and discordant elements it inherited from the despotic and perverse colonizer, and the imported methods and ideas which have been retarding logical government because they are lacking in local realities. Thrown out of gear for three centuries by a power which denied men the right to use their reason, the continent disregarded or closed its ears to the unlettered throngs that helped bring it to redemption, and embarked on a government based on reason-a reason belonging to all for the common good, not the university brand of reason over the peasant brand. The problem of independence did not lie in a change of forms but in change of spirit.