“Leopards don't change their spots”

“you are you for a reason don't try to change”

“Neighborhoods built up all at once change little physically over the years as a rule...[Residents] regret that the neighborhood has changed. Yet the fact is, physically it has changed remarkably little. People's feelings about it, rather, have changed. The neighborhood shows a strange inability to update itself, enliven itself, repair itself, or to be sought after, out of choice, by a new generation. It is dead. Actually it was dead from birth, but nobody noticed this much until the corpse began to smell.”

“The trouble with paternalists is that they want to make impossibly profound changes, and they choose impossibly superficial means for doing so.”

“Paintings! They're like TV, but they don't move. ”

“Can the leopard change his spots?” Emrys mused. “Leopards have, but the other leopards don’t like it.”

“If the Britannica has taught me anything, it's to be more careful. I don't want to turn into an unseemly noun or verb or adjective someday. I don't want to be like Charles Boycott, the landlord in Ireland who refused to lower rents during a famine, leading to the original boycott. I don't want to be like Charles Lynch, who headed an irregular court that hung loyalists during the Revolutionary War. I can't have "Jacobs" be a verb that means staying home all the time or washing your hands too frequently.”