Merely quantitative differences, beyond a certain point, pass into qualitative changes.
It never failed to amaze me how the most ordinary day could be catapulted into the extraordinary in the blink of an eye.
Love, she thought, must come suddenly, with great outbursts and lightnings,--a hurricane of the skies, which falls upon life, revolutionises it, roots up the will like a leaf, and sweeps the whole heart into the abyss.
Life changes in the instant. The ordinary instant.
Something has gone wrong with Ronnie... He wasn't like that before. I don't know what went wrong with him.
That's something that rationally and logically I can't try to figure out, how somebody "transitions" so rapidly and so drastically, but I don't worry about it now.
Anything can happen in the blink of an eye. Anything at all. One. Two. Three. Blink.
History doesn't crawl; it leaps.
I fell in love. It felt exactly like a fall, a head-over-heels tumble into a state of unbearable lightness. The earth tilted on its axis. I did not believe in romantic love at the time, thinking it a human construct, an invention of fourteenth century Italian poets. I was as unprepared for love as I had been for goodness and beauty. Suddenly, my heart seemed swollen, too large for my chest.
Life can change in an instant.
Age doesn't arrive slowly, it comes in a rush. One day nothing has changed, a week later, everything has. A week may be too long a time, it can happen overnight. You are the same and still the same and suddenly one morning two distinct lines, ineradicable, have appeared at the corners of your mouth.
Things can change in the blink of an eye!
Ah, how fatefully swift is the move from one feeling to another.
I know in an existential sense that life can change on a dime ... something has instantly and inexorably changed in American life.
It's a mistake to suppose that capacities must evolve gradually. There are many known examples of sharp changes - slight genetic modification that yields substantial phenotypic effects, and much else.
It was funny, he reflected later, how one’s life could alter in an instant, how one minute everything could be a certain way, and the next it’s simply ... not
You never knew which split second might be the zigzag bolt dividing all that went before from the everything that comes next.
Radical changes of identity, happening suddenly and in very brief intervals of time, have proved more deadly and destructive of human values than wars fought with hardware weapons.
The night was ordinary. It usually is, I think, when your life changes. Most people aren't doing anything special when the carefully placed pieces of their life break apart.
