Quotes About Transition

The principle was, death should not be entered like some snug harbor. It should be an unambiguous refusal to surrender.

Is the child in that old photograph really an erstwhile version of you, your little hand waving farewell? The face of that child is nothing like the face you have now. That child's face is now melding with the blackness behind you, before you, around you. The child is waving and smiling and fading as your car keeps skidding toward your abruptly curtailed future. Bye-bye.

Children have made me nervous ever since I stopped being one of them.

The bodies of the newly dead are not debris nor remnant, nor are they entirely icon or essence. They are, rather, changelings, incubates, hatchlings of a new reality that bear our names and dates, our image and likenesses, as surely in the eyes and ears of our children and grandchildren as did word of our birth in the ears of our parents and their parents. It is wise to treat such new things tenderly, carefully, with honor.

When we bury the old, we bury the known past, the past we imagine sometimes better than it was, but the past all the same, a portion of which is inhabited. Memory is the overwhelming theme, the eventual comfort.

Watching my parents, I watched the meaning change, of what it was that undertakers do: From something done with the dead, to something done for the living, to something done by the living—everyone of us.

Change equals growth.

By your late thirties the ground has begun to grow hard. It grows harder and harder until the day that it admits you.

If we do have something like dignity we can demonstrate this fact by the way we confront the challenges to come... We could face the the historical transition in our image of ourselves creatively and with a will to clarity. It is also clear how we could lose our dignity: by clinging to the past, by developing a culture of denial, and by sliding back into the various forms of irrationalism and fundamentalism.

My lands showed like a full moon about me, but now the moon's i'the last quarter, waning, waning; and I am to think that moon was mine. Mine and my father's and my forefathers': generations, generations! Down goes the house of us, down, down it sinks. Now is the name a beggar, begs in me; that name, which hundreds of years has made this shire famous, in me and my posterity runs out.

The eye accustomed to darkness can hardly bear at first the broad daylight. It is by usage the eye learns to see, and it is the same in passing from any situation to its opposite.

he woke up one morning and realized that the conditions he had been accustomed to seeing as permanent had changed. He was no longer at the center of things. After his wife died the house had gone silent. It wasn't the hearth where the clan gathered for warmth and sustenance anymore. It was just a solitary man's place.

Some people are born where they belong, and some have to find their way there," said Alma Rivers. "There's no difference after that.

The enemy in retirement was that nothing you did seemed to cause you to look forward to anything. Weekends were the same as weekdays, and payday was just a notice from your bank that the check had arrived as usual.

What goes around may come around, but it never ends up exactly the same place, you ever notice? Like a record on a turntable, all it takes is one groove's difference and the universe can be on into a whole 'nother song.

Someday she might replace whatever of her had gone away by some prosthetic device, a dress of a certain color, a phrase in a letter, another lover.

The feeling came upon him one night as he lay asleep under his new Rabbit blanket with his two daughters and their mother that his Power had gone to another place; even the strength running deep in his bones fled.

klappt ihr Notizbuch zu und schaut aus dem runden Flugzeugfenster. Unter ihnen glitzert das weiche Abendlicht der untergehenden Sonne auf dem Atlantik. In wenigen Minuten werden sie in New York landen. Das hat der Pilot vorhin durchgesagt. Sprotte schnallt sich an und weckt den Siebzehnjährigen neben ihr. »Aufwachen, Fred, wir sind gleich da.«

Adulthood is the ever-shrinking period between childhood and old age. It is the apparent aim of modern industrial societies to reduce this period to a minimum.

For the first fourteen years for a rod they do whine, For the next as a pearl in the world they do shine, For the next trim beauty beginneth to swerve, For the next matrons or drudges they serve, For the next doth crave a staff for a stay, For the next a bier to fetch them away.

Childhood is a period of transitory psychosis.

He who is called of God, walks directly contrary to what he did before.

Then summer fades and passes, and October comes. Will smell smoke then, and feel an unsuspected sharpness, a thrill of nervous, swift elation, a sense of sadness and departure.

Perhaps this is our strange and haunting paradox here in America — that we are fixed and certain only when we are in movement.