Quotes About Transition

The final tormenting, unanswerable question: what is 'success' in mourning?

So, you see, we're a played-out generation. All the best ones went. We were left with the lesser ones. It's always like that in war. That's why it's up to your generation now.' But I don't feel part

So, you see, we're a played-out generation. All the best ones went. We were left with the lesser ones. It's always like that in war. That's why it's up to your generation now.

Isn't growing up a necessary process of losing one's innocence? Maybe, maybe not. But the trouble with life is, you rarely know when that loss is going to happen, do you? And how it will be, afterwards.

most people didn't experience "the sixties" until the seventies. Which meant, logically, that most people in the sixties were still experiencing the fifties—or, in my case, bits of both decades side by side. Which made things rather confusing.

I had a friend who trained as a lawyer, then became disenchanted and never practiced. He told me that the one benefit of those wasted years was that he no longer feared either the law or lawyers.

For here is the final tormenting, unanswerable question: what is "success" in mourning? Does it lie in remembering or in forgetting? A staying still or a moving on? Or some combination of both?

Time doesn't act as a fixative, rather as a solvent.

Grief, like death, is banal and unique. So, a banal comparison. When you change your make of car, you suddenly notice how many other cars of the same sort there are on the road. They register in a way they never did before. When you are widowed, you suddenly notice all the widows and widowers coming towards you. Before, they had been more or less invisible, and they continue to remain so to the other drivers, to the unwidowed.

Yes it was, but as I said, it depended on where—and who—you were. If you'll excuse a brief history lesson: most people didn't experience "the sixties" until the seventies. Which meant, logically, that most people in the sixties were still experiencing the fifties—or, in my case, bits of both decades side by side. Which made things rather confusing.

In those days, we imagined ourselves as being kept in some kind of holding pen, waiting to be released into our lives. And when that moment came, our lives—and time itself—would speed up. How were we to know that our lives had in any case begun, that some advantage had already been gained, some damage already inflicted? Also, that our release would only be into a larger holding pen, whose boundaries would be at first undiscernible.

His experience of life had left him with the belief that getting through the first sixteen years or so was fundamentally a question of damage limitation.

I was also gone in a sense that I was transformed, made over. You know that story of the man who wakes up and finds he's turned into a beetle? I was the beetle who woke up and saw the possibility of being a man.

God damn it, he was thinking, this dying business is difficult. They just won't let you get on with it, not on your own terms, anyway. You have to die on other people's terms, and that's a bore, love them as you might.

Things were just as they had been a moment before, and yet somehow the tone and substance had changed.

She was at that period of her life that almost everyone must pass through, when childhood is done with and a faux maturity, untrammeled by experience, gives one a sense that anything is possible until the arrival of real adulthood proves conclusively that it is not.

She was at that period of her life that almost everyone must pass through, when childhood is done with and a faux maturity, untrammeled by experience, gives one a sense that anything is possible until the arrival of real adulthood

be honest, he sometimes felt a creeping impatience for his father to quit the scene, leaving John as his uncle's direct heir.

It was the brightest entry into darkness.

How do you know me? she says. He looks at her through his narrow eyes. I was, he says. You were what? she asks. I was, he says again. And now I'm not.

When I was a child, I spoke as a child, I understood as a child, I thought as a child: but when I became a woman, I put away childish things.

And good luck to you, Miss Vale, wherever you may go.

Delilah had been transferred from her father's household to her husband's like crated porcelain.

She slid her arms