Quotes About Transition

When you stop being a kid, you lose your one chance at that too-tender-to-touch gold, that breathtaken everything and forever. Once you start growing up and getting sense, the outside world turns real, and your own private world is never everything again.

These children will not be coming of age, this or any other summer. This August will not ask them to find hidden reserves of strength and courage as they confront the complexity of the adult world and come away sadder and wiser and bonded for life. This summer has other requirement for them.

thought of the old superstition that the soul lingers near the body for a few days, bewildered and unsure.

I was twelve, after all, an age at which kids are bewildered and amorphous, transforming overnight, no matter how stable their lives are;

the air around us had split open and whirled and re-formed itself and there was one less person in the room.

When we left school, it was the early eighties. This country was on its knees. There were no jobs, none. If you couldn't go into Daddy's business, you emigrated or went on the dole. Even if you had the money and the points for college—and we didn't—that just put it off for a few years.

Selena had been singing along, absently, gazing into nowhere. She looked at us like she was trying to work out who we were, before she got up

The sun has started to slide down the sky.

The greens and golds have thinned to watercolor; the sky is one scoured sweep of pale blue

At first he wondered if he might be too old to get accustomed to it at all, but his body has come through for him.

I think it's just your basic teenage debris.

she was blanketed by sadness as deep as she'd felt the first months after her divorce.

I haven't changed. Something's happened to me, that's all.

Seven hours, fifteen minutes and counting… Shifting into high gear, Zoe started with the obvious—her clothes, her laptop, most of her toiletries. Most because, after eight years in the house, there was a lot that had accumulated simply because she couldn't throw things out. Zoe wasn't a hoarder by any stretch, but this was a sad fact: when one partner splurged at every opportunity, the other developed a mindset of scarcity. Even

PRO TIP: IF YOU'RE SAD AND ALONE IN THE PLACE YOU LIVE THEN YOU GO TO ANOTHER PLACE YOU WILL STILL BE SAD AND ALONE WHEN YOU COME BACK

He wanted more than anything, to walk over the bridge. To just leave Oyster Point and go to college in the city, where maybe people were different. But he also said that he was afraid that if he set out to cross that bridge, he might not make it to the other end without giving in to the temptation to jump and just be done with it.

go of these old familiar ways of being. Before we can turn to a more rational view, we need to empathize with our emotional needs—before we can change, we need to accept and be loving to ourselves.

Change is ceaseless.

I liked the idea of there being an alternative current that hums and crackles just at the edge of our visible world. Now I realize it is a metaphor for the sometimes confused and ill-at-ease way we feel in our lives , but as a child I thought of it more realistically: if you enter that forest, you'll go somewhere else. Somewhere exciting!

The reflex of fear was soon replaced with another, more useful emotion. Rage.

The bouncing cricket that was my brother is gone. Now when I look into his eyes, an old man stares back at me.

What were you doing when you were eight, thirteen, fifteen, and eighteen? The answer is, I suspect: not very much.

start her gradual return to society. Black gowns gave way to grey, mauve, and lavender, and could now be made from silk instead of crape or bombazine. To alert the members of her circle that she was ready to face society, a widow would leave calling cards at the houses of her acquaintances. She would begin to accept more invitations, always being careful only to attend events that were not too joyful and to behave in ways respectful of the memory of her husband

Change did not always lead to improvements, sometimes only to change.