Quotes About Transition

When we lose that sense of the possible we lose it fast. One day we are absorbed by dressing well, following the news, keeping up, coping, what we might call staying alive; the next day we are not.

We all know that if we are to live ourselves there comes a time when we must relinquish the dead, let them go, keep them dead. Let them become the photograph on the table. Let them become the name on the trust accounts. Let go of them in the water. Knowing this does not make it any easier to let go of them in the water.

Life changes fast. Life changes in the instant. You sit down to dinner and life as you know it ends. The question of self-pity.

During the blue nights you think the end of day will never come. As the blue nights draw to a close (and they will, and they do) you experience an actual chill, an apprehension of illness, at the moment you first notice: the blue light is going, the days are already shortening, the summer is gone.

I know why we try to keep the dead alive: we try to keep them alive in order to keep them with us. I also know that if we are to live ourselves there comes a point at which we must relinquish the dead, let them go, keep them dead. Let them become the photograph on the table. Let them become the name on the trust accounts. Let go of them in the water. Knowing this does not make it any easier to let go of him in the water.

Grief turns out to be a place none of us know until we reach it.

Until now I had been able only to grieve, not mourn. Grief was passive. Grief happened.

In fact I had no idea how to be a wife.

I did not want to finish the year because I know that as the days pass, as January becomes February and February becomes summer, certain things will happen.

You had to feel the swell change. You had to go with the change.

It is the season of suicide and divorce and prickly dread, wherever the wind blows.

1966 and 1968 were a world removed from each other in the political and cultural life of the United States . . .

It was in fact the ordinary nature of everything preceding the event that prevented me from truly believing it had happened, absorbing it, incorporating it, getting past it.

I was raised to believe that what came in on the next roll would always be better than what went out on the last. I no longer believe that...

It also occurred to me that this was a promise I could not keep. I could not always take care of her. I could not never leave her. She was no longer a child. She was an adult. Things happened in life that mothers could not prevent or fix.

Bringing him back" had been through those months my hidden focus, a magic trick. By late summer I was beginning to see this clearly. "Seeing it clearly" did not yet allow me to give away the clothes he would need.           I

Havana vanities come to dust in Miami.

I suppose everything had changed and nothing had.

I would stay in New York, I told him, just six months, and I could see the Brooklyn Bridge from my window. As it turned out the bridge was the Triborough, and I stayed eight years.

We closed the deal and moved to New York. Where in fact I had lived before, from the time I was twenty-one and just out of the English Department at Berkeley and starting work at Vogue (a segue so profoundly unnatural that when I was asked by the Condé Nast personnel department to name the languages in which I was fluent I could think only of Middle English) until I was twenty-nine and just married.

La vie change vite. La vie change dans l'instant. On s'apprête à dîner et la vie telle qu'on la connaît s'arrête.

The death of a parent, he wrote, "despite our preparation, indeed, despite our age, dislodges things deep in us, sets off reactions that surprise us and that may cut free memories and feelings

Water under the bridge and dynamite it behind you.

a vida muda rapidamente. a vida muda em um instante. você se senta para jantar, e a vida que você conhecia termina. a questão da autopiedade.