Quotes About Transition

Between whatever has happened already and whatever is to come hovers an invisible borderland, the known on one side and the unknown on the other.

October is here, and bright cold winds ought to pour off the ocean; leaves ought to tumble down the alleys. But the wind has come and gone. As if deciding it did not like the changes here.

It seems to Werner that the space between whatever has happened already and whatever is to come hovers an invisible borderland, the known on one side and the unknown on the other. He thinks of the girl who may or may not be in the city behind him.

These were the beginnings of a new existence; Winkler could feel it gestating.

The year swung past the fulcrum of another equinox.

Artillery has stopped for the moment, and the predawn fires inside the walls take on a steady middle life, an adulthood.

We all grew up before we we're grown up.

Gone or resolved to go; is there much difference?

Shrouded in his oxhide cape with snow on his shoulders he looks like a phantom from a woodcutter's song, a monster accustomed to doing terrible things, and though she tells herself that by morning the boy will join her husband on thrones in a garden of bliss, where milk pours from stones and honey runs in streams and winter never comes, the feeling of handing him over is a feeling like handing over one of her lungs.

They look like scarecrows shipping west to be staked in some terrible garden.

It seems to Werner that in the space between whatever has happened already and whatever is to come hovers an invisible borderland, the known on one side and the unknown on the other.

It feels appropriate somehow, to have reached the edge of the continent, to have only the hammered sea left in front of him. As though this is the end point Werner has been moving toward ever since he left Zollverein.

The last of autumn's leaves spiraling to earth.

A week ago, it all seemed so secure. So settled.

For Winkler each hour was another hour between Cleveland and Anchorage, between who they were becoming and who they had been.

Aethon: Lived 80 Years a Man, 1 Year a Donkey, 1 Year a Sea Bass, 1 Year a Crow.

We leave our bodies behind in this world so that we may take flight into the next.

All her life she has been led to believe that she is a child born at the end of things: the empire, the era, the reign of men on earth.

We are the bridge generations, the intermediaries, the ones who do the work so that our descendants will be ready.

as if the imminent could not wait to become the past, or the present lunged at the future, eager for what would be.

Death can seem so final, like a blade dropped through the neck. But the nature of death is not at all final. It is not some dark cliff off which we leap. I hope to show you it is merely a fog, something we can peer into and out of, something we can know and face and not necessarily fear. By each life taken from our collective lives we are diminished. But even in death we have much to celebrate. It is only a transition, like so many others.

What is death, after all, but a cessation of involvement with the world, a departure from those you love, and those who love you?

A second birth," Maria Montessori called it, when a child can move away from his mother on his own. And indeed Owen does seem like a new child, rarely crying, constantly at work on getting himself somewhere else.

You must learn to let go. Believe me, it's not easy. But you must let whatever will happen, happen