Quotes About Transition

Disasters often begin silently with an almost imperceptible shift in the way things are expected to be.

As the future ripens in the past, so the past rots in the future -- a terrible festival of dead leaves.

I'm fine, she said. But her smile was bleak, without light or warmth. And for the first time I thought of what it must be like to know that you were going to die, that the trees would bud, flower, leaf, dry, die, and you would not be there to see any of it.

It is interesting to note how often a technological development—such as Gutenberg's—promotes rather than eliminates that which it is supposed to supersede.

I thought I had a handle on my future. But the future, it turns out, is not a tote bag.

as though I had been flat water and now I was carbonated.

Sometimes things have to come when you're ready for them.

The problem was that she'd thought that at a certain point she would be a finished product.

When we think of longer life expectancy, we may envision ten years added to our existence later on. But it may also be that we've added time to adolescence, which now stretches past the teen years and into the twenties.

But her smile was bleak, without light or warmth. And for the first time I thought of what it must be like to know that you were going to die, that the trees would bud, flower, leaf, dry, die, and you would not be there to see any of it.

First we were so young and then we were so busy and then one day we awoke to discover that we were an age we once thought of as old.

When you look back on your life there are always times that you remember as the hard times, even if they're the hard times a girl has, not the hard times of a woman, with grief and loss and real hardship.

The difference between fifty and sixty is nothing; the difference between eight and eighteen is more or less a lifetime.

knew, that for a birthday or a holiday or simply a dinner party offering, they could bring her a snow globe. Except that Dorothea was no longer charmed by snow

It was wonderful what a change had come over Joe. John laughed, and said he had grown an inch taller in that week, and I believe he had. He was just as kind and gentle as before, but there was more purpose and determination in all that he did—as if he had jumped at once from a boy into a man.

We have long known that in closed societies, the arrival of democracy, with its clashing voices and differing opinions, can be "complex and frightening," as Stenner puts it, for people unaccustomed to public dissent.

It took some time for acceptance to be reached, and at first she was bitterly lonely ('It is not all a bed of roses to live in a strange country and I am as strange to the people and their ways as they are to me')

Her past is behind her, her future is of little concern. She moves towards the grave, at her own speed.

Nothing had happened yet in my life except the need to get out of it.

the kind of person took milk in his tea on one day and decided against it on the next.

I have been falling for months. I have been falling into my own life, for months. And I am about to hit it now.

To nature lovers, the season of new beginnings is the spring, but to people who excel in school, it's the fall.

Looking back, I realize that this period of my life has irrevocably come to a close; my happy-go-lucky, carefree schooldays are gone forever. I don't even miss them. I've outgrown them. I can no longer just kid around, since my serious side is always there.

Things were different when I was growing up.