Quotes About Transition

Yet the Beverly Wilshire seemed when Quintana was at UCLA the only safe place for me to be, the place where everything would be the same, the place where no one would know about or refer to the events of my recent life; the place where I would still be the person I had been before any of this happened.

All that is constant about the California of my childhood is the rate at which it disappears.

You sit down to dinner and life as you know it ends.

The apparent ease of California life is an illusion, and those who believe the illusion real live here in only the most temporary way.

I knew that it would cost something sooner or later—because I did not belong there, did not come from there—but when you are twenty-two or twenty-three, you figure that later you will have a high emotional balance, and be able to pay whatever it costs.

Here is the last stop for all those who come from somewhere else, for all those who drifted away from the cold and the past and the old ways.

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

But time brings odd mutations, and there we were.

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.

What gives those December days a year ago their sharper focus is their ending

I could taste the peach and feel the soft air blowing from a subway grating on my legs and I could smell lilac and garbage and expensive perfume and I knew that it would cost something sooner or later - because I did not belong there, did not come from there - but when you are twenty-two or twenty-three, you figure that later you will have a high emotional balance, and be able to pay whatever it costs.

All I mean is that I was very young in New York, and that at some point the golden rhythm was broken, and I am not that young any more.

Like when someone dies, don't dwell on it

There was nothing to do but venture forth, in search of the person I might become. At

A hot, dry breeze greeted the Swensen sisters and their mother when they emerged from the air-conditioned interior of McCarran International Airport in Las Vegas.

I've never been very good at leaving things behind. I tried, but I have always left fragments of myself there too, like seeds awaiting their chance to grow.

For a time, then, we stay. For a time. Till the changes.

Most adults assume that the feelings of adolescence don't count, somehow, and that those searing passions of rage and hate and embarrassment and horror and hopeless, abject love are something your grow out of, something hormonal, a practice run for the Real Thing. It wasn't. At 13 *everything* counts; there are sharp edges on everything, and all of them cut.

There's no such thing as a trivial thing. Everything costs; it all adds up until finally the balance shifts and we're gone again, back on the road, telling ourselves - well maybe next time

Il vento di marzo è un vento malato, diceva sempre mia madre. Eppure è piacevole, odora di linfa e ozono e del sale di mari lontani. Un buon mese, marzo, con febbraio che vola via dalla porta sul retro e la primavera che aspetta a quella principale. Un buon mese per un cambiamento.

At17, balanced on that precarious walkway between adolescence and adulthood, the world is a crazy obstacle course paved one day with broken glass, the next with apple blossom.

Pensate all'immagine che da una lastra fotografica si trasferisce sulla carta, diventando sempre più scura, da bianca all'oro più pallido, da ambra a seppia. Immaginate la luna mentre gira lentamente il profilo sottile fino a diventare piena, trascinando con sè le maree. Immaginate la crisalide quando schiude la bara dura della larva e mostra le ali al sole. L'insetto perfetto piange il bruco che un tempo è stato? E se ne ricorda?

Caelum non animum mutant, qui trans mare currant. They change the sky, not their souls, that run across the ocean.

Why do boys always run? And when did I stop running?