Quotes About Transition

People don't dislike change, they dislike being changed.

Science makes progress funeral by funeral: the old are never converted by the new doctrines, they simply are replaced by a new generation. —Max Planck

She left me then, surrounded by my extravagantly simple finery and I sat for a long time, uncomfortable both with the person I had been and the person I was finally becoming. Caught between the two of them, I felt rather lonely, as one often does with a new acquaintance.

When the light has fled but the stars have not yet shown themselves. That is the gloaming, the loveliest and saddest hour of the day.

Why? Death is part of life, child. It is not the end. It is not even the middle. It is merely a doorway. Alice is no further away from me than if she had stepped into the next room.

whilst I reboarded my train of thought.

To walk away from something is only half the picture. What are you walking towards?

Not me," Mary Alice said. "I'm being cremated and letting Akiko put my ashes in a nice urn. Maybe something from Pottery Barn. I can sit on the mantel and she can decorate me for holidays.

And when old words die out on the tongue, new melodies break forth from the heart; and where the old tracks are lost, new country is revealed with its wonders. —Closed Path Rabindranath Tagore

There were cycles in the life of a great house such as ours. When a lord is young, his family is boisterous and the house comes alive. But the wheel turns, as it must, and a quiet settles over the place as softly as a snowfall, muffling its gaiety as the lord ages and his family is flown. And then the wheel turns again and the house his handed over to the new lord and it stirs to life again, sheltering the family as it has so many before.

Death is part of life, child. It is not the end. It is not even the middle. It is merely a doorway. Alice is no further away from me than if she had stepped into the next room.

I sat for a long time, uncomfortable both with the person I had been and the person I was finally becoming. Caught between the two of them, I felt rather lonely, as one often does with a new acquaintance.

Things that came apart could be put together again, but never exactly the same.

The hope was, people like me got to finally find our place in college or in the actual world. People who understood this told you that high school wasn't the actual world, that it was more like a temporary alternate reality you were forced to believe in for four years. A video game you played, where you could never get to the next level no matter how hard you tried.

A person could leave you so quickly. So much history and time and memories, but they snuck away from you, and other things took their place. How could you hold on? Wait. A bigger question. The biggest. How could you hold on and let go?

Breaking up could sit in front of you for a while. It was a ring of fire you had to at last decide to run through. You finally got tired of standing there, looking at it, feeling the heat, tired enough to finally just let go. Getting burned at last seemed better than the waiting to get burned.

Maybe some people just had trouble with forever.

I mean it's purposeful, even if we don't realize it. The desire to put things in our path, to figure out how to finally leave the behind….

There are so many different fifteens. And eighteens. And forty-twos, for that matter. Mature fifteens and young fifteens and wise fifteens and lost fifteens. And angry fifteens.

Usually you just walk and walk among people who are not of your tribe, and then suddenly, there you are, in a place that feels familiar and known.

It was strange to have those papers signed. Like any big project or crisis that takes every waking and non-waking moment in your life, it was odd to have it concluded. A move, a college degree, a wedding--something long-strived-for is completed, whatever the outcome, and there is a huge space where it all once was. All that open time now, and a continuing nagging sense that there's something you need to be doing.

Running away can also be running to.

There are those moments, probably few in a life, where before and after split off from each other forevermore in your mind.

Good things don't always lead to bad ones, Crick.