Quotes About Transition

Change is also loss

It had been, in other words, our family home, and I had stayed to watch it become the grave of something I could no longer definitively call either a reality or an illusion.

There's a certain point in life at which you realise it's no longer interesting that time goes forward – or rather, that its forward-going-ness has been the central plank of life's illusion, and that while you were waiting to see what was going to happen next, you were steadily being robbed of all you had.

I]t has struck me that along with all other losses, I might lose friendship, too. I am not equal anymore to the people that I know, and what is friendship but a celebration of equality?

I said that I lived in London, having very recently moved from the house in the countryside where I had lived alone with my children for the past three years, and where for the seven years before that we had lived together with their father. It had been, in other words, our family home, and I had stayed to watch it become the grave of something I could no longer definitively call either a reality or an illusion.

Leaving things behind and starting again is a way of coping with difficulties. I learnt very early in my life that I was able to leave a place and still remain myself.

It had never even occurred to him that the relationship could end. He remembered hit coming, a feeling of incipient coldness, like the first hint of winter, a bewildering sensation of wrongness, as though something had broken deep down in the engine of his life. For a while, he pretended that he couldn't hear it, couldn't feel it, but nonetheless his existence with Marc inexorably ground to a halt.

La personalidad debía adaptarse a las nuevas circunstancias lingüísticas para crearse de nuevo

Change is also loss, and in that sense a parent can lose a child every day, until you realise that you'd better stop predicting what they're going to become and concentrate on what is right in front of you.

was a funny idea, writing in a language not your own. It almost makes you feel guilty, she said, the way people feel forced to use English, how much of themselves must get left behind in that transition, like people being told to leave their homes and take only a few essential items with them.

Sometimes, I said, the loss of transition became the gain of simplicity.

Parece que o sucesso leva você para longe daquilo que conhece, disse ele, enquanto o fracasso o condena a isso.

I was eager to find a new form that was less confrontational," says Cusk. "There's not that much difference for me as a writer. It's just adjusting the frame.

the way people feel forced to use English, how much of themselves must get left behind in that transition, like people being told to leave their homes and take only a few essential items with them.

He offered a stool next to his, but I went and sat in the old ladder-back chair beside the empty fire instead, a piece of furniture I have held on to throughout my adult life and that for reasons I have forgotten I had chosen to put there, in the second place. Perhaps it had reminded me too much of the life before Tony

and that while you were waiting to see what was going to happen next, you were steadily being robbed of all you had.

I hadn't realised, I said, how much of navigation is the belief in progress, and the assumption of fixity in what you have left behind.

I felt myself becoming empty, he said, as though I had been living until now on the reserves I had accumulated over the years and they had gradually dwindled away.

For most of the people she knew, people in their forties, this was a time of softening and expanding, of expectations growing blurred, of running a little to seed or to fat after the exhaustion of the chase: she saw them beginning to relax and make themselves comfortable in their lives.

But what other people thought was no longer of any help to me. Those thoughts only existed within certain structures, and I had definitively left those structures.

Father's death left us very badly off, a fact mother circled round with us for a considerable time – she had her own bearings to get.

the Seagrave kids', who, in point of fact, were, at the time of our move, four endlessly lanky young women of up to nineteen years old, with the face that goes with brogue shoes and tweed hats, and about as much bosom as imported rabbits.

The borderlands of madness used to have much sterner signage around them than they do now.

That's what peace processes are about - changing bullets for votes.