Quotes About Transition

Anne Rivers Siddons

I'm falling into disrepair

He wanted to say, Muriel, forgive me, but since my son died, sex has... turned. (As milk turns; that was how he thought of it. As milk will alter its basic nature and turn sour.) I really don't think of it anymore. I honestly don't. I can't imagine anymore what all that fuss was about. Now it seems pathetic.

Sometimes people live first one life and then another life," her grandmother said. "First a family life and then later a whole other kind of life. That's what I'm doing.

The thing about old girlfriends, Micah reflected, is that each one subtracts something from you. You say goodbye to your first great romance and move on to the next, but you find you have less to give to the next. A little chip of you has gone missing; you're not quite so wholly there in the new relationship.

They entered Pennsylvania and the road grew smooth for a few hundred yards, like a good intention, before settling back to the old scabby, stippled surface.

Their growing up amounted, therefore, to a gradual dimming of the light at her bedroom door, as if they took some radiance with them as they moved away from her. She should have planned for it better, she sometimes thought. She should have made a few friends or joined a club. But she wasn't the type. It wouldn't have consoled her.

The only place I went wrong, he writes, was expecting things to be perfect. Abruptly, he signals for a turn, and when the light changes he heads east instead of continuing north.

Her three children, she saw, had been staring at the horizon with the alert, tensed stillness of explorers at the ocean's edge, poised to begin their journeys. And Delia, shading her eyes in the distance, had been trying to understand why they were leaving. Where they were going without her. How to say goodbye.

The truth was that lately, she had not had quite enough happening in her life. She and her husband had moved this past fall to a golfing community outside of Tucson. (Peter was passionate about golf. Willa didn't even know how to play.) She had had to leave behind an ESL teaching job that she loved, and she was hoping to find another one, but she hadn't exactly looked into that yet. She seemed to be sort of paralyzed

The trouble with dying is you don't get to see how everything turns out. You don't know the ending.

Derek glanced over at her. Then he closed his magazine, leaving a finger inside as a marker, and undid his seat belt and stood up. "Trade places with me," he said. Willa gazed up at him imploringly. "Come on. Move." She fumbled for her seat belt. She undid the buckle, holding her breath, and then she clutched her purse and sat forward, wincing as she braced for the slam of the bullet. Nothing happened.

And Saturday night they come over and he's polite as can be all evening. And Sunday morning he walks out, and him and her move in together.

She didn't even know if she liked them, in fact, and perhaps she didn't like them, but by now it hardly mattered because how would she ever start over with somebody new, at this point?

level where

She felt a lot less grateful to Derek now than she had when they were on the plane.

All those years when I was a child, longing for it to be 'my turn,' it hadn't ever occurred to me that my turn would be over, by and by.

And sometimes, he said, you get to what you thought was the end and you find it's a whole new beginning.

she grew numbly, wearily certain that there was no such thing on this earth as real change. You could change husbands, but not the situation. You could change who, but not what. We're all just spinning here, she thought, and she pictured the world as a little blue teacup, revolving like those rides at Kiddie Land where everyone is pinned to his place by centrifugal force.

We've lost the last remaining chick in our nest! It's natural we would feel low." And she did feel low; no question about it. In many ways David was the child closest to her heart, although she'd expected to feel closer to her girls. After Alice and Lily left home it was just David and his parents, and the chaos died down and sometimes Mercy was able to hold actual brief conversations with him.

She had fallen into particles over the course of a single evening.

But my family's passing came so sudden. Left me strap-hanging in empty space, like.

Sometimes people live first one life and then another life

just meant I had to get up the next morning and tell Denise, 'Don't fix any breakfast for me; I'm moving out