Quotes About Transition

To go from a familiar thing, however undesirable, into the unknown, is always a matter for apprehension, and I suppose that is why so many people are afraid to die.

So much better to travel than to arrive.

Where to start is the problem, because nothing begins when it begins and nothing's over when it's over, and everything needs a preface: a preface, a postscript, a chart of simultaneous events.

we lived in the gaps between the stories

But in life, a tragedy is not one long scream. It includes everything that led up to it. Hour after trivial hour, day after day, year after year, and then the sudden moment: the knife stab, the shell burst, the plummet of the car from a bridge.

As we know from the study of history, no new system can impose itself upon a previous one without incorporating many of the elements to be found in the latter...

People change, though, especially after they are dead.

If you really want to stay the same age you are now forever and ever, she'd be thinking, try jumping off the roof: death's a sure-fire method for stopping time.

You are a transitional generation, said Aunt Lydia. It is the hardest for you. We know the sacrifices you are being expected to make. It is hard when men revile you. For the ones who come after you, it will be easier. They will accept their duties with willing hearts. She did not say: Because they will have no memories, of any other way. She said: Because they won't want things they can't have.

In pictures like these there are always empty shoes. It's the shoes that get to me. Sad, that innocent daily task - putting your shoes on your feet, in the firm belief that you'll be going somewhere.

Wild geese fly south, creaking like anguished hinges; along the riverbank the candles of the sumacs burn dull red. It's the first week of October. Season of woolen garments taken out of mothballs; of nocturnal mists and dew and slippery front steps, and late-blooming slugs; of snapdragons having one last fling; of those frilly ornamental pink-and-purple cabbages that never used to exist, but are all over everywhere now.

And consider: it is loss to which everything flows, absence in which everything flowers

The threshold of a new house is a lonely place.

A road is a process, not a location.

In the daylight we know what's gone is gone, but at night it's different. Nothing gets finished, not dying, not mourning;

When you are in the middle of a story it isn't a story at all, but only a confusion;

Of course you have always been an idealist, and filled with your optimistic dreams; but reality must at some time obtrude, and you are now turned thirty.

A space-time, between here and now and there and then, puncuated by dinner

she doesn't want to begin, she wants to continue. No: she wants to go back.

I would like to say my hair turned white overnight, but it didn't. Instead it was my heart: bleached out like meat in water

Last night I felt the approach of nothing. Not too close but on its way, like a wingbeat, like the cooling of the wind, the slight initial tug of an undertow.

I follow suit, said the lion, vacating his coat of arms and movie logos; and the eagle said, Get me off this flag.

Boys with their first beards can be a thorough pain in the neck.

And so I step up, into the darkness within; or else the light.