Weekend Words: Change
Last week, the world lost Ornette Coleman, whose 1959 releases The Shape of Jazz to Come and Change of the Century marked the advent of free jazz and changed the face of music forever.
Last week, the world lost Ornette Coleman, whose 1959 releases The Shape of Jazz to Come and Change of the Century marked the advent of free jazz and changed the face of music forever.
Artists to my mind are the real architects of change, and not the political legislators who implement change after the fact.
—William S. Burroughs
What does not change / is the will to change
—Charles Olson, “The Kingfishers”
Much of modern art is devoted to lowering the threshold of what is terrible. By getting us used to what, formerly, we could not bear to see or hear, because it was too shocking, painful, or embarrassing, art changes morals.
—Susan Sontag
A brave world, Sir, full of religion, knavery, and change: we shall shortly see better days.
—Aphra Behn, The Roundheads
Even a god cannot change the past.
—Agathon, quoted in Aristotle’s Nicomachaean Ethics
All change is not growth, as all movement is not forward.
—Ellen Glasgow
I shall sleep, and move with the moving ships,
Change as the winds change, veer in the tide.
—Algernon Charles Swinburne, “The Triumph of Time”
[…] as when the sun new-risen
Looks through the horizontal misty air
Shorn of his beams, or from behind the moon
In dim eclipse disastrous twilight sheds
On half the nations, and with fear of change
Perplexes monarchs.
—John Milton, Paradise Lost
It takes time for the absent to assume their true shape in our thoughts. After death they take on a firmer outline and then cease to change.
—Sidonie Gabrielle Colette
Ah! would ’t were so with many
A gentle girl and boy!
But were there ever any
Writhed not at passed joy?
To know the change and feel it,
When there is none to heal it,
Nor numbed sense to steal it,
Was never said in rhyme.
—John Keats, “In drear nighted December”
Never doubt that a small group of thoughtful, committed people can change the world. Indeed, it is the only thing that ever has.
—Margaret Mead
The great secret that all old people share is that you really haven’t changed in seventy or eighty years. Your body changes, but you don’t change at all. And that, of course, causes great confusion.
—Doris Lessing
These are the soul’s changes. I don’t believe in aging. I believe in forever altering one’s aspect to the sun. Hence my optimism.
—Virginia Woolf
A lot of people ask me where music is going today. I think it’s going in short phrases. If you listen, anybody with an ear can hear that. Music is always changing. It changes because of the times and the technology that’s available, the material that things are made of, like plastic cars instead of steel. So when you hear an accident today it sounds different, not all the metal colliding like it was in the forties and fifties. Musicians pick up sounds and incorporate that into their playing, so the music that they make will be different.
—Miles Davis, The Autobiography
