Quotes About Transition

Like oceans, we ebb and flow and are in constant motion. We have a deep desire to keep things as they are, and a contradictory desire to expand beyond our current limits. Times of relative equilibrium allow us to build the strength we need for times of movement. It can be difficult for us to know which stage we are in and whether we are moving forward at all. But underneath our seemingly individual current, we are ultimately being pulled forward toward a connection with the greater whole.

There is a time in life when you expect the world to be always full of new things. And then comes a day when you realise that is not how it will be at all. You see that life will become a thing made of holes. Absences. Losses. Things that were there and are no longer. And you realise, too, that you have to grow around and between the gaps, [...]

What happens to the mind after bereavement makes no sense until later... what the mind does after losing one's father isn't just to pick new fathers from the world, but pick new selves to love them with.

There is a time in life when you expect the world to be always full of new things. And then comes a day when you realise that is not how it will be at all. You see that life will become a thing made of holes. Absences. Losses. Things that were there and are no longer. And you realise, too, that you have to grow around and between the gaps, though you can put your hand out to where things were and feel that tense, shining dullness of the space where the memories are.

We carry the lives we've imagined as we carry the lives we have, and sometimes a reckoning comes of all of the lives we have lost. The summer lunch recedes.

When I was an undergraduate we were told that history had ended, and we all believed it. When the Berlin Wall fell, what history was made of was over. No more Cold War. No more wars. And yet here it was, and is and all of it falling apart. Endings. Worlds dissolving. Weather systems, baking systems, the careful plans of municipal gardeners. Families, hearts, lives.

It takes a long time to be yourself, in the presence of a new hawk.

To move from darkness to light, from enclosed rooms into the open air, to stand at a distance, first, and then grow closer, over many days, to this alien world of raucous voices and swinging arms, of bright plastic buggies and roaring mopeds. Day by day, foot by foot, mouthful by mouthful, my hawk would come to see that these things were not a threat, and would look upon them with equanimity.

all of us were clinging to a world already gone.

I read that after denial comes grief. Or anger. Or guilt.

of plans and hasty departure.

Bölgelerin sahip oldu?u bütün o karma??k tarihleri ve onlar? silmenin, yerlerine daha basit, daha güvenli tarihler koyman?n ne kadar kolay oldu?unu dü?ünüyorum.

Wanderer, there is no road, the road is made by walking. The poem tells me it's no big deal that I'm not like Snow. I can be another thing; I'm meant to be another thing.

She didn't look into the mirror itself. She was becoming someone, it seemed. She had read somewhere that you only became a woman once your mother had died. But that wasn't what worried her. She worried about becoming as perfect as the person shown to her on paper in Lily's studio.

Miss Foxe occasionally wondered if she spent her life approaching invisibility and had finally arrived at it.

Edith Wharton novels for two Henry James novels, Lucia Berlin's short stories for John Cheever's, Elaine Dundy's The Dud Avocado for Dany Laferrière's I Am a Japanese Writer, Dubravka UgreÅ¡i?'s Lend Me Your Character for Gogol's How the Two Ivans Quarreled and Other Stories, Maggie Nelson's Jane: A Murder for Capote's In Cold Blood, Lisa Tuttle's The Pillow Friend for The Collected Ghost Stories of M. R. James.

I've come to think that there's an age beyond which it is impossible to lift a child from the pervading marinade of an original country, pat them down with a paper napkin and then deep-fry them in another country, another language like hot oil scalding the first language away.

So Mr. Pizarsky had been a poet? That was how he'd said it: "I was a poet." As if the poet had died. He was hiding, perhaps.

While telling her I realised that the story of her is much more to do with how she is ended than how she began.

The stormy night turned the window of Lucy's room into a door;

Mrs. Fletcher tells Mom over and over that she should be making more conversation with me, because apparently I'm at a "dangerous age." (She's got to be talking about menstruation. I haven't started yet, but there's probably some risk of bleeding to death if you're taken unawares the first time. I won't be caught unawares, though. That's not how I'm going out.)

The sedatives had done their work and she'd gone away and now she was coming home again. Exactly as if she'd been put in an envelope and posted abroad, then returned to sender

It was much more difficult to be alarmed by the events of a day that was almost over.

Maria Pavlovna)'s "Russian life was over." She and her kind had, she sadly admitted, "outlived our epoch and were doomed." "Everything disappears into the past, everything which is good everything which is bright and the only thing that's left is the terrible reality.