Quotes About Transition

if you hold on, if you force yourself as hard as you can to find some kind of patience in the middle of all your impatience, things can change.

She missed his young, vulnerable, ownable self. You never knew when you were lifting your child for the last time; it might seem like just a regular time, when it was taking place, but later, looking back, it would turn out to have been the last.

But of course she liked Isadora less now, because she needed her less and saw her more clearly.

But later on, having met in childhood can turn out to have been the worst thing, because you and your friends might have nothing to say to each other anymore, except, 'Wasn't it funny that time in tenth grade

I'd looked and looked at him for so long; I'd made a habit of it, a vocation, and I could stop looking now.

The men she met all seemed to say they were "several years out of Wesleyan." Their beds were never made, or else made poorly, when she climbed into them. No one yet had the time or inclination to take care of themselves, and it was unclear when that would ever begin.

This was an era in which sofa beds were frequently opened and unfolded; at this age people were still floating, not entirely landed, still needing places to stay the night sometimes. They were doing what they could, crashing in other places, living extemporaneously. Soon enough, the pace would pick up, the solid matter of life would kick in. Soon enough, sofa beds would stay folded.

We can't be afraid of change, or else we'll miss out on everything.

In a new environment, it was possible to transform.

It's weird," she said, "the way sometimes you're in your life, but other times you're looking back at it like a spectator. It kind of goes back and forth, back and forth." "And then you die." She laughed a little. "Yes. And then you die.

He was a little young to go crazy, but it happened to people.

I hadn't known that if you hold on, if you force yourself as hard as you can to find some kind of patience in the middle of all your impatience, things can change. It's big, and it's always incredibly messy. But there's no way around the mess.

Sometimes you had to let go of your convictions, or at least loosen them far more than you ever though you would.

When you have a child, it's like right away there's this grandiose fantasy about who he'll become. And then time goes on and a funnel appears. And the child get pushed through that funnel, and shaped by it, and narrowed a little bit.

Married life proved not very different from premarried life, except now there was the desire for solidity instead of expansion.

Then it wouldn't be long before they all found themselves shocked and sad to be fully grown into their thicker, finalized adult selves, with almost no chance for reinvention.

Greer, Zee, and Chloe were an unlikely trio, but she had heard this was typical of social life in the first weeks of college. People who had nothing in common were briefly and emotionally joined, like the members of a jury or the supervisors of a plane crash. Chloe took them across West Quad, and then they looped around behind the fortress of the Metzger Library, which was all lit up and poignantly empty, like a 24-hour supermarket in the middle of the night.

you sometimes feel totally unready for them, or even that they're

all the girls had secretly sprung up in height, even as the teachers and mothers had gotten squashed and lost height and calcium, their bones ground down with an invisible pestle.

when you're young, you don't really believe you'll ever be anything other than young.

Both beds had extra-long sheets, a weird detail of college life. After college, sheets would immediately shorten to their normal length.

She had rarely called him honey, and he thought: This is weird. Honey was for a moment of extremeness. She had reached out from their usual vocabulary and into that of some other generation; the words that they usually used wouldn't do. Honey was weird, but it was a bridge across the terrifying open space between where they had been and where they now were. A honeyed bridge that would take them forward as best it could.

You spend a long time waiting for life to start—the past year or two filled with all these firsts, everything new and terrifying and significant—and then it does start and you realize it isn't what you'd expected, or asked for.

Women have to live so much of their life in the in-betweens.