Quotes About Transition

Do you know how long a year takes when it's going away?' Dunbar repeated to Clevinger. 'This long.' He snapped his fingers. 'A second ago you were stepping into college with your lungs full of fresh air. Today you're an old man.

That was my first job after graduating (or being graduated from) high school.

All change is for the worse.

First, it is crucial to recognize that Washington's extraordinary reputation rested less on his prudent exercise of power than on his dramatic flair at surrendering it. He was, in fact, a veritable virtuoso of exits.

Having now finished the work assigned me, Washington solemnly said, I retire from the great theatre of Action....I here offer my Commission, and take leave of all the enjoyments of public life. The man who had known how to stay the course now showed that he also understood how to leave it. Horses were waiting at the door immediately after Washington read his statement. The crowd gathered at the doorway to wave him off. It was the greatest exit in American history.

Having now finished the work assigned me," Washington solemnly said, "I retire from the great theatre of Action. . . . I here offer my Commission, and take my leave of all the enjoyments of public life." The man who had known how to stay the course now showed that he also understood how to leave it. Horses were waiting at the door immediately after Washington read his statement. The crowd gathered at the doorway to wave him off. It was the greatest exit in American history.

life is always clothing itself anew. What people call death is but a journey to a new city in another dimension of life.

The past is history, the future's a mystery. Being alive in this moment is a gift—that's why they call it the present." Whether it's between shots, between holes, or between rounds, don't forget to smell the flowers along the way. This is the most important transition, because it is only in the present that we can connect with our nature of basic goodness and simply appreciate being alive.

As for this present unhappy time, haunted by ghosts from a dead world and not yet at home in its own, its predicament is not unlike the predicament of the adolescent who has not yet learned to orient himself without reference to the mythology amid which his childhood was passed.

She was the split-second experience that changes everything.; the car smash; the letter we shouldn't have opened; the lump in the breast or groin; the blinding flash. On my well-ordered stage-set the lights were up, and maybe at last I was waiting in the wings.

Very odd, old age. Always knew it would happen, if I was lucky. I just didn't expect it so soon.

She's out from my life, I don't know whether to laugh or cry

Congress was just a gray repository that got its OS replaced with each election.

Time is what turns kittens into cats.

I walk. I talk. I shop. I sneeze. I'm gonna be a fireman when the floods roll back. There's trees in the desert since you moved out, and I don't sleep on a bed of bones.

Though we have instructions and a map buried in our hearts when we enter this world, nothing quite prepares us for the abrupt shift to the breathing realm.

I walk in and out of several worlds every day.

Nobody goes anywhere though we are always leaving and returning. It's a ceremony. Sunrise occurs everywhere, in lizard time, human time, or a fern uncurling time.

Nothing ever stays the same, whether it be poems or humans.

At sunset say goodbye to hurt, to suffering, goodbye to the pain you caused others. Good bye, bye, don't cry.

I know I walk in and out of several worlds every day.

As I started a new life in Arizona, I knew I was losing myself. Even a lost place within yourself is a place, albeit liminal, a kind of border town. You can make a temporary home if you need to from found materials and shreds of forgotten dreams, and you can even dress to appear somewhat ordinary as you run away, a refugee from yourself. I rolled up the map of my known world and set it aside for some kind of strange autonomy.

You're gone now, and I'm still in this predicament called living, Charlie. I imagine things don't change much when you cross the line. You're still you. And I'm still here at the other end of this long, long wave, listening.

I'm nobody's daughter now. I'm through with that.