Quotes About Transition

Almost any book was better than life, Audrey thought. Or rather, life as she was living it. Of course, life would soon change, open out, become quite different. You couldn't go on if you didn't hope that, could you? But for the time being there was no doubt that it was pleasant to get away from it. And books could take her away.

I stopped going out; I stopped wanting to go out. That happens very easily. It's as if you had always done that - lived in a few rooms and gone from one to the other.

I woke the next morning knowing that nothing would be the same. It would change and go on changing.

I am fading away. Slowly but surely. Like the sailor who watches his home shore gradually disappear, I watch my past recede. My old life still burns within me, but more and more of it is reduced to the ashes of memory.

I packed everything I had into the same suitcase I had brought with me. I was leaving the city with about as much stuff as I had arrived with. But I had learned a lot - about myself and other people.

Books and doors are the same thing. You open them, and you go through into another world.

Now that I have lost you I cannot allow you to develop, you must be a photograph not a poem.

Growing up is difficult. Strangely, even when we have stopped growing physically, we seem to have to keep on growing emotionally, which involves both expansion and shrinkage, as some parts of us develop and others must be allowed to disappear...Rigidity never works; we end up being the wrong size for our world.

It's not the one thing nor the other that leads to madness, but the space in between.

Walls protect and walls limit. It is in the nature of walls that they should fall. That walls should fall is the consequence of blowing your own trumpet.

It is not the one thing nor the other that leads to madness, but the space in between them.

I've lived my life like a serial killer; finish with one part, strangle it and move on to the next. Life in neat little boxes is life in neat little coffins, the dead bodies of the past laid out side by side. I am discovering, now, in the late afternoon of the day, that the dead still speak.

If I can't stay where I am, and I can't, then I will put all that I can into the going.

Going back after a long time will make you mad, because the people you left behind do not like to think of you changed, will treat you as they always did, accuse you of being indifferent, when you are only different.

Part broken - part whole, you begin again. ( from 'Why books seem shockproof against change.' THE TIMES: BOOKS)

I am much better at saying how I feel when I no longer feel it.

Life was a pre-death experience.

when the dying sun bled the blue sky orange.

Our own front door can be a wonderful thing, or a sight we dread; rarely is it only a door.

Every new beginning prompts a return.

the past is so hard to shift. It comes with us like a chaperon, standing between us and the newness of the present - the new chance.

I knew clearly that I could not rebuild my life or put it back together in any way. I had no idea what might lie on the other side of this place. I only knew that the before-world was gone forever.

How is it that one day life is orderly and you are content, a little cynical perhaps but on the whole just so, and them without warning you find the solid floor is a trapdoor and you are now in another place whose geography is uncertain and whose customs are strange?

It takes much longer to leave the psychic place than the physical place. (p.120)