Quotes About Transition

We call it getting a haircut," Flynne said, giving him a look as she got to her feet, "back in frontier days.

She was sometimes happy, in the sense of being somehow complete, and ready for what another day might bring. And knows she is no longer that, and that while she was, she scarcely knew it.

The sun in the west was a drop of burning gold that slid nearer and nearer the sill of the world. All at once they were aware of the evening as the end of light and warmth.

The world, that understandable and lawful world, was slipping away. Once there was this and that; and now—and the ship had gone.

You could see the damp spot where each flake died, then you could mark the first flake that lay down without melting and watch the whole ground turn white.

In mezzo a loro, col corpo sudicio, i capelli sulla fronte e il naso da pulire, Ralph piangeva per la fine dell'innocenza.

I've been in the revenge buisness for so long, now that it's over I don't know what to do with the rest of my life.

I have been in the revenge business so long, now that it is over I do not know what to do with the rest of my life.

Buttercup dried her tears and began to smile. She took a deep breath, heaved a sigh. It was all part of growing up. You got these little quick passions, you blinked, and they were gone. You forgave faults, found perfection, fell madly; then the next day the sun came up and it was over. Chalk it up to experience, old girl, and get on with the morning.

For the first time in my life, I became actively interested in a book. Me the sports fanatic, me the game freak, me the only ten-year-old in Illinois with a hate on for the alphabet wanted to know what happened next.

The infant is ten and he stays

What with one thing and another, three years passed.

It's not important, believe me; the past has a way of being past.

Who can know when his world is going to change? Who can tell before it happens, that every prior experience, all the years, were a preparation for . . . nothing.

Who can know when his world is going to change? Who can tell before it happens, that every prior experience, all the years, were a preparation for . . . nothing... who can sense revelation in the wind?

You're certainly blooming, Billy. Before my very eyes. I just don't know into what.

Worse, he died. Mr. Shog, I mean. (Don't ask how you could tell. It was easy. One morning he just stopped sweating, so there it was.)

Mainline American Protestantism, as is often the case, plodded wearily along as if nothing had changed. Like an aging dowager, living in a decaying mansion on the edge of town, bankrupt and penniless, house decaying around her but acting as if her family still controlled the city, our theologians and church leaders continued to think and act as if we were in charge, as if the old arrangements were still valid.

My little Asticot, I have abjured absinthe and forsworn cafés. I have broken my new porcelain pipe and have cut my finger-nails. As I enter on the path of happiness, I scatter the dregs and shreds and clippings of the past behind me. I divest myself of all the crapulous years.

History is nothing more than a series of small yesterdays.

There are two lives, the natural and the spiritual, and we must lose the one before we can participate in the other.

None of us are ever who we were yesterday.

The most violent revolutions in an individual's beliefs leave most of his old order standing. Time and space, cause and effect, nature and history, and one's own biography remain untouched. New truth is always a go-between, a smoother-over of transitions. It marries old opinion to new fact so as ever to show a minimum of jolt, a maximum of continuity.

These windings up of unfinished years continue till the unfinished life winds up.