Quotes About Transition

When he speaks of death as a necessary change, and points out that nothing useful and profitable can be brought about without change

So this is how a thoughtful person should await death: not with indifference, not with impatience, not with disdain, but simply viewing it as one of the things that happen to us. Now you anticipate the child's emergence from its mother's womb; that's how you should await the hour when your soul will emerge from its compartment.

Te embarcaste, navegaste, arribaste. Desembarca. Si es a otra vida, nada está vacío de dioses, tampoco allí. Si es en la insensibilidad[212], dejarás de soportar sufrimientos y placeres, dejarás de ser esclavo para un recipiente tan inferior como superior es la parte que manda comparada con la que sirve, porque mandan la inteligencia y el espíritu divino mientras que son sirvientes la tierra y los despojos sanguinolentos.

What of it then? You embarked, you set sail, you made port. Go ashore now. It is to another life, nothing is empty of the gods, even on that shore.

that the death of earth, is water, and the death of water, is air; and the death of air, is fire; and so on the contrary.

There is nothing bad in undergoing change—or good in emerging from it.

Everything's destiny is to change, to be transformed, to perish. So that new things can be born.

When near his death, being asked by the tribune for the watchword, he said, Go to the rising sun, for I am setting.

A rock thrown in the air gains nothing by going up and nothing by falling down

the seasons of life

By the time I began college, anxiety about hell had disappeared—not because I was confident that I was "saved," but because the whole package had become sufficiently uncertain that I didn't worry about it.

One must die to an old way of being in order to enter a new way of being... salvation is resurrection to a new way of being here and now.

being born again is not a single intense experience, but a gradual and incremental process. Dying to an old identity and being born into a new identity, dying to an old way of being and living into a new way of being, is a process that continues through a lifetime.

John Atkins, the naval surgeon, spoke of the transition from privateer to pirate as going from "plundering for others, to do it for themselves.

It's much easier, she realized, to be on the verge of something than to actually be it.

The ones who rise up and say, 'I know who you are and I am ready. Not that I want to go, of course, but I will come.' Those souls are always light because more of them have been put out. More of them have already found their way to other places.

Love blurs your vision; but after it recedes, you can see more clearly than ever. It's like the tide going out, revealing whatever's been thrown away and sunk: broken bottles, old gloves, rusting pop cans, nibbled fishbodies, bones. This is the kind of thing you see if you sit in the darkness with open eyes, not knowing the future. The ruin you've made.

Vanity is becoming a nuisance, I can see why women give it up, eventually. But I'm not ready for that yet.

Time folds you in its arms and gives you one last kiss, and then it flattens you out and folds you up and tucks you away until it's time for you to become someone else's past time, and then time folds again.

We thought we were running away from the grownups, and now we are the grownups.

So much for endings. Beginnings are always more fun. True connoisseurs, however, are known to favor the stretch in between, since it's the hardest to do anything with. That's about all that can be said for plots, which anyway are just one thing after another, a what and a what and a what.

This is the middle of my life, I think of it as a place, like the middle of a river, the middle of a bridge, halfway across, halfway over. I'm supposed to have accumulated things by now: possessions, responsibilities, achievements, experience and wisdom. I'm supposed to be a person of substance.

This is the solstice, the still point of the sun, its cusp and midnight, the year's threshold and unlocking, where the past lets go of and becomes the future; the place of caught breath, the door of a vanished house left ajar...

Her glass wings are gone.