Quotes About Transition

So life goes on, I thought. (And now I think: It goes on, until it doesn't.)

It was always sad, the way the world was going. And always a new age dawning.

You couldn't make yourself stop feeling a certain way, no matter what the other person did. You had to just wait. Eventually the feeling went away because others came along. Or sometimes it didn't go away but got squeezed into something tiny, and hung like a piece of tinsel in the back of your mind.

But never mind, Olive thinks now. You move aside and make way for the new.

Women grieve, and men replace.

People always kept moving, her mother had said, it's the American way. Moving west, moving south, marrying up, marrying down, getting divorced—but moving.

But it's never starting over, Cindy, it's just continuing on.

The leaves were half-gone now. The Norway maples still hung on to their yellow, but most of the orangey-red of the sugar maples had found their way to the ground, leaving behind the stark branches that seemed to hang like stuck-out arms and tiny fingers, skeletal and bleak.

When Chrissie left for college, then Becka the next year, I thought—and it's not an expression, I'm saying the truth—I did think I would die.

Now the dismal autumn days have begun and one has to try and get light from within.

And so the day they had had together folded over on itself, was done with, gone. —

I thought of how my life had become so different from what I had ever imagined for myself during these—my last—years.

I stood for a moment, watching them drive away. I thought how different they—and their lives—had become from what I had expected. And I thought: It is their life, they can do what they want, or need to do.

a noted academic had said at a lecture last year. The dawning of a new age. There was always a new age dawning.

It has been said that the second year of widowhood is worse than the first—the idea being, I think, that the shock has worn off and now one has to simply live with the loss, and I had been finding that to be

I had often thought before: that there had been a last time—when they were little—that I had picked up the girls. This had often broken my heart, to realize that you never know the last time you pick up a child. Maybe you say "Oh, honey, you're getting too big to be picked up" or something like that. But then you never pick them up again.

Bob first greeted them at graduation, appeared

am in mourning for my life." It took me a moment. We were

Up in Shirley Falls, spring was slower to arrive. Nights were cold, but the way the dawn light cracked open along the horizon, bringing a gentle moistness that lightly touched the skin, spoke of a full-throated summer to come, and it was painful, all the promise in the air.

The trees off to the side have been cut down to make a parking lot. You get used to things, he thinks, without getting used to things.

I could not stop feeling that life as I had known it was gone. Because it was. I knew this was true.

So life goes on, I thought. (And now I think: It goes on, until it doesn't.)

Alas! it is not the child but the boy that generally survives in the man.

never in history, past or present, had an autocratic regime handed over power with so little upheaval or bloodshed.