Quotes About Transition

The hard and unexpected part is the realization not just that my son is not here but that the boy he was is gone forever. I would give anything to have them both back. But of course that cannot be. Life moves on. Kids grow up and move away, and if you don't know this already, believe me, it happens faster than you can imagine.

At last, some fourteen hundred years after the Romans withdrew, taking their hot baths, padded sofas, and central heating with them, the British were rediscovering the novel condition of being congenially situated.

We had remained friends in a kind of theoretical sense, but our paths had diverged wildly.

And thus I was to be found, in the first week of June, standing on the banks of the Shenandoah again, in Harpers Ferry, West Virginia, blinking at a grey sky and trying to pretend that with all my heart this was where I wanted to be.

Just passing through a door, being inside, surrounded by walls and a ceiling, was novel.

BEFORE HE CAME INTO a lot of money in 1839, Richard Plantagenet Temple Nugent Brydges Chandos Grenville, second Duke of Buckingham and Chandos, led a largely uneventful life.

Slowly it dawned on me what's going on here. The Natural History Museum can't afford to be a museum anymore, so the directors are stealthily turning it into a food court.

I took a place in one of the lines. Progress

The Glock is lighter by a good measure than the Beretta I was trained on, with a better grip, and I've heard it's accurate, but weapons are like cars—you know they have standard stuff like lights and an ignition and windshield wipers, but it still takes a few seconds to figure them out when they're unfamiliar. So I burn precious moments getting a feel for it before I'm ready to point and shoot—

Getting all the world's electricity from clean sources won't be easy. Today, fossil fuels account for two-thirds of all electricity generated worldwide. (bp Statistical Review of World Energy 2020)

And consider how long it took for oil to become a big part of our energy supply. We started producing it commercially in the 1860s. Half a century later, it represented just 10 percent of the world's energy supply. It took 30 years more to reach 25 percent.

Natural gas followed a similar trajectory. In 1900, it accounted for 1 percent of the world's energy. It took seventy years to reach 20 percent. Nuclear fission went faster, going from 0 to 10 percent in 27 years.

This chart shows how much various energy sources grew over the course of 60 years, starting from the time they were introduced. Between 1840 and 1900, coal went from 5 percent of the world's energy supply to nearly 50 percent. But in the 60 years from 1930 to 1990, natural gas reached just 20 percent. In short, energy transitions take a long time.

With all the additional electricity we'll be using, and assuming that wind and solar play a significant role, completely decarbonizing America's power grid by 2050 will require adding around 75 gigawatts of capacity every year for the next 30 years.

Bloodless revolutions are rare.

Armed with humility, we who once dreaded change as much as death can learn to face real life with a new courage and hope.

The problem about the future is that it keeps turning into the present.

For no reason I can think of, I've wandered far astray. And that is how I got to where I find myself today.

Childhood is for spoiling adulthood.

I don't think I'd have been in such a hurry to reach adulthood if I'd known the whole thing was going to be ad-libbed.

Know what's weird? Day by day, nothing seems to change. But pretty soon, everything's different.

No matter how old you are when a parent dies, it's like losing an anchor that kept you safely moored.

The name of the author is the first to go followed obediently by the title, the plot, the heartbreaking conclusion, the entire novel which suddenly becomes one you have never read, never even heard of, as if, one by one, the memories you used to harbor decided to retire to the southern hemisphere of the brain, to a little fishing village where there are no phones.

Neighborhood What do I care that they're tearing down the nice old houses and putting up brutal ones? Before very long, I'll be just a breeze blowing around town, trying to avoid all the wind chimes.