Quotes About Transition

as if this tragedy marked the end of the family. And perhaps it did. And perhaps it did not.

Mummy sighs. "We grew up, Dad," she says. "We grew up.

Before we became criminals. Before we became ghosts.

If a man cannot lead up to passion, he can at all events lead down from it

The volume of their past must be restored to its shelf, and here, here was the place, amid darkness and perishing flowers. He owed it to Alec also. He could suffer no mixing of the old in the new.

Out with the cold, in with the woo.

The normal form of motion always involves telos or goal," I say, trying to get a word in edgewise. "Motion involves the transition from an acorn to an oak. Newton made violent motion the paradigm for all motion because it was the perfect description of the actions of William of Orange, the usurper whom the Whigs put on the throne in England. The impetus for all motion now came from without. There was no telos. All motion was a function of human will and intention.

History is movement; and movement implies comparison.

Someone dying asks if there is life after death. Yes, comes the answer, only not yours.

They looked at one another for a moment before beginning new lives. "What an ending," he sobbed, "What an ending.

though nothing is damaged, everything is changed.

A funeral is not death, any more than baptism is birth or marriage union. All three are the clumsy devices, coming now too late, now too early, by which Society would register the quick motions of man.

When you come back you will not be you. And I may not be I.

It is thus, if there is any rule, that we ought to die--neither as victim nor as fanatic, but as the seafarer who can greet with an equal eye the deep that he is entering, and the shore that he must leave.

I suppose I shall have to live now

The advance of regret can be so gradual that it is impossible to say "yesterday I was happy, today I am not.

We move between two darknesses.

When love flies it is remembered not as love but as something else.

They travelled for thirteen hours down-hill, whilst the streams broadened and the mountains shrank, and the vegetation changed, and the people ceased being ugly and drinking beer, and began instead to drink wine and to be beautiful.

I rather mistrust young men who slip into life gracefully.

I was yours once till death if you cared to keep me, but I'm someone else's now--I can't hang about whining for ever--and he's mine in a way that shocks you, but why don't you stop being shocked and attend to your own happiness?

Every life ought to contain both a turn and a return.

Because a thing is going strong now, it need not go strong for ever,' she said. 'This craze for motion has only set in during the last hundred years. It may be followed by a civilization that won't be a movement, because it will rest on the earth. All the signs are against it now, but I can't help hoping.

Houses have their own ways of dying, falling as variously as the generations of men, some with a tragic roar, some quietly, but to an after-life in the city of ghosts, while from others—and thus was the death of Wickham Place—the spirit slips before the body perishes . . . By September it was a corpse, void of emotion, and scarcely hallowed by the memories of thirty years of happiness.