Quotes About Transition

AT THAT TIME in my personal life, I was coming to grips with the end of the world. The familiar world, anyway. Many of us were. Scientists said it was ending now, philosophers said it had always been ending. Historians said there'd been dark ages before. It all came out in the wash, because eventually, if you were patient, enlightenment arrived and then a wide array of Apple devices.

She gazed right through it to the future, another time and place without this jangling cascade of arbitrary noise.

I was eventually to become one person, gathered up maybe, during a pause, at a comma.

We crossed a wide river and then everything changed. There were no more fields, no houses, no trees, not even telephone poles. Even the colours were gone, all of them except brown and grey and blue of the late-afternoon sky. The world got emptier and emptier until it looked like a brown ocean of dead velvet, just emptiness covered with short dry grass and low scrub.

Is our world gone? We say Farewell. Is a new world coming? We welcome it, and we will bend it to the hopes of man.

The Spring can be more painful than any other time of the year. Summer is lazy and indifferent. Autumn is demanding and invigorating. Winter is numb and self-contained, but Spring has none of the palliatives. Every emotional nerve is close to the surface. Every sound and sight, every touch of the air is a summons to feel, to open your doors, to let life possess you and do what it likes with you.

The transitional nature of the 1920's can also be discerned in what may be labeled a new kind of 'dvoeverie' (or dual faith), a syncretistic belief that combined peasant ways and new Communist practices in tentative and uneasy assimilation. For example, there were reports of portraits of Lenin or Kalinin turning up in icon corners and of habit-ridden old peasants crossing themselves in front of these holy images.

Decker lifted his eyes skyward, expecting something to happen. He didn't know what, perhaps for the stars overhead to explode into shimmery fireworks, or for the sky to crack open and pour down rain and thunder to mark the moment. But nothing happened. The most important moment of his life arrived not with a bang as he'd always expected, but with the quiet rustle of wind through the trees and a serene breeze brushing his cheeks.

It was as if, once she was married, the woman had washed her hands of the girl. However, the welts on her back had been the final straw. Aye, they would leave for MacKay first thing tomorrow morning, Ross determined. He would take her home, where they could consummate their marriage in the bed where she would one day give birth to their children. Annabel's life here was done. She was his now.

Sometimes to get your life back, you have to face the death of what you thought your life would look like.

If this is dying, I don't think much of it.

Before I came to the city I cut off my hair. It was the first of many fatally symbolic gestures.

Then way I think of it is this: when you've done all the things worth doing, you're forced to start on the things that aren't.

The moment you step into a landscape it becomes another one.

The first time you came into my bar I saw that though you had been a pilot all your life, piloting was over for you.

This was how life went. A single moment seemed to extend forever, then suddenly you were snapped out of it. The forward motion of time stretched whatever rubbery glue-like substance had fixed you there until it failed catastrophically. You weren't the person you were before you got trapped; you weren't the person you were while you were trapped: the merciless thing about it, Liv discovered, was that you weren't someone entirely different either.

The times have changed. To move with them I had to give it up. I do not miss it. I thought I would, but I don't.

No, the sadness will soften, its edges will become less rough. In time missing him will be the way you love him.

I don't know where I am going, I just know I had to leave. Everything I was I carry with me, everything I will be lies waiting on the road ahead.

Observe now with what skill, with what art, I make the biggest transition in this book. Observe: my delirium began in the presence of Virgilia; Virigilia was the great sin of my youth; there is no youth without childhood; childhood presupposes birth; and so we arrive, effortlessly, at October 20, 1805, the date of my birth.

Verdadeiramente foi o princípio da minha vida; tudo o que sucedera antes foi como o pintar e vestir das pessoas que tinham de entrar em cena, o acender das luzes, o preparo das rabecas, a sinfonia... Agora é que eu ia começar a minha ópera.

I preferred to sleep, which is an interim way of dying.

Who would ever ask for the fragrance of morning when faced with the twilight of afternoon?

Tudo nos parece melhor e mais belo, — fruto da nossa ilusão, — e alegres com vermos o ano que desponta, não reparamos que ele é também um passo para a morte.