Anna Quindlen Quotes

All great changes are preceded by chaos.

Progress everywhere today does seem to come so very heavily disguised as Chaos.

The passion for destruction is also a creative passion.

Wanting to reform everything is the same thing as wanting to destroy everything.

Change will always be violent.

Look for me in the whirlwind.

Fire in the lake: The image of revolution.

I wonder why progress looks so much like destruction.

Our first work must be the annihilation of everything as it now exists.

All the posters on the walls All the leaflets in the streets Are mutilated, destroyed or run in rain, Their words blotted out with tears, Skins peeling from their bodies In the victorious hurricane.

Every revolution destroys the average middle first and most savagely.

The old world order changed when this war-storm broke. The old international order passed away as suddenly, as unexpectedly, and as completely as if it had been wiped out by a gigantic flood, by a great tempest, or by a volcanic eruption. The old world order died with the setting of that day's sun and a new world order is being born while I speak, with birth-pangs so terrible that it seems almost incredible that life could come out of such fearful suffering and such overwhelming sorrow.

Oh God! that one might read the book of fate, And see the revolution of the times Make mountains level, and the continent, Weary of solid firmness, melt itself Into the sea.

The world is upside down, it's going to take a lot of hands to turn it right side up.

The outline of the city became frantic in its effort to explain something that defied meaning. Power seemed to have outgrown its servitude and to have asserted its freedom. The cylinder had exploded, and thrown great masses of stone and steam against the sky.

Sometimes, 24 hours can bring a total revolutionary change.

Revolutions are like the most noxious dungheaps, which bring into life the noblest vegetables.

The kaleidoscope has been shaken. The pieces are in flux. Soon they will settle again. Before they do, let us re-order this world around us.

Passion makes a person stop eating, sleeping, working, feeling at peace. A lot of people are frightened because, when it appears, it demolishes all the old things it finds in its path.

Our age has need of violence," he writes. And he is violence.

I come down to the water to cool my eyes. But everywhere I look I see fire; that which isn't flint is tinder, and the whole world sparks and flames.

Life is good, and there's no reason to think it won't be--right up until the moment when everything explodes into a fireball of tiny, unrecognizable fragments, or it all goes skidding sideways, through the guardrail, over the embankment, and down the mountain. This will happen (and probably more than once).

About, about, in reel and rout the death fires danced at night.

All I heard was the blood rushing through my ears, and the distant rumble and crackle of the Lake of Fire. (And Khufu scratching himself and grunting, but that was nothing new.)

Brooding, she changed the pool into the sea, and made the minnows into sharks and whales, and cast vast clouds over this tiny world by holding her hand against the sun, and so brought darkness and desolation, like God himself, to millions of ignorant and innocent creatures, and then took her hand away suddenly and let the sun stream down.