Quotes About Transition

Then I thought that once my year of mourning was over and I put off my blacks, I would also put off the worst of my grief. And perhaps that has happened. But sometimes I think that grief is preferable to emptiness. At least grief is something. I have come to realize, I suppose, that they are not just dead. They are gone. There is nothing there where they were.

And so this was the end. The end of a friendship that had brightened his life through most of his adulthood. Not the end of his love. Now that he was conscious of it again, that would live on, perhaps for the rest of his life.

Already it felt like a dream. Already she felt the painful loneliness of the coming weeks and months—perhaps years.

She wondered how possible it was going to be to start a new life.

The timing of death, like the ending of a story, gives a changed meaning to what preceded it.

Moving is both liberating and debilitating. Undertaken too late, it is a very stressful process, one that sometimes seems to catapult people into frail old age, and undertaken too soon, it may preempt other possibilities. [p. 38]

We never promised we would stay the same,/But only we would shape our change/From this now single clay. [p. 82]

Of any stopping place in life, it is good to ask whether it will be a good place from which to go on as well as a good place to remain.

Sorting gets harder as time goes on--it requires a sort of ruthless decisiveness, while indecision results in endless dithering. Five moves, they say, equal a fire. But those who haven't moved may begin to need a fire. [p. 38]

Since few people arrive at retirement with an understanding that this transition will involve a rethinking of who they are, an interim pattern has emerged, in which travel offers a way of fulfilling deferred daydreams of adventure while the next stage takes shape. [p. 31]

The timing of death, like the ending of a story, gives a changed meaning to what proceeds it.

What unnatural words: always and forever! Not even stones are always and forever.

Sadie was at his side when the old desire to leave everything behind rose up in him again. "Suppose . . ." he began. "Suppose . . ." Then he moved on, one last time.

What he experienced was not so much the beginning of love as a cessation of pain.

Aunt Blythe went inside to check on Great-grandfather, but I sat on the front steps and watched the sun sink behind the trees across the highway. A little chill crept across my skin. Summer was almost over. Soon my parents would return and I'd go back to Chicago. There would be no more midnight meetings in the attic. No croquet games with Hannah, no boxing lessons from John, no fights with Edward.

I missed Mom, but I was just beginning to feel comfortable with Dad. If I left now, I might not have another chance to get to know him. Soon I'd be in college. After that I'd be on my own. Things wouldn't be the same then.

To be candid, things hadn't been good in our house since I'd turned thirteen and, as Mom put it, lost my mind overnight. Which meant I'd changed from an obedient child who never gave anyone a second's trouble into an obnoxious teenager who left wet towels on the bathroom floor and dirty dishes in front of the television, played loud music and argued about everything from politics to curfews.

This late-adolescent camaraderie gave their time at Meadow a fraught emotional quality that was like the shimmering fullness of a bead of water before it falls. They were all about to scatter and become different from one another, and this made them exult in their closeness and alikeness.

like people were all runny and liquid, running over this surface and that, looking for a container to hold everything in place, trying one thing, then the next, incessantly looking for the right one. Except the containers were only big enough for one personality trat at a time; you had to grab on to one trait, bring it out for a while, then put it back and pull out another one. For a while, we were loving; then we were alienated and angry, then ironic, then depressed.

There comes a time', the White Crow said, 'when you can't smell the air of any kind of a day without it bringing some other past day to mind. When that happens, you're not old, but you're no longer young.

The changes are coming fast and blind now, and in your skull sits an hourglass with a grain size hole through which numb seconds are sliding.

But the boys' bicycle pack also sent a stab of envy through me. If I couldn't yet capture John Cleary with my feminine wiles, then surely I deserved to enjoy the physical abandon he got, liberties I instinctively knew were vanishing. (I know, I know. Psychoanalytic theory would label this pecker envy and seek to smack me on the nose with it. To that I'd say, o please. Of actual johnsons I had little awareness. What I coveted was privilege.)

I pushed the button to shut the TV off. The picture shrank to a little blue star that hurtled backwards through the swampy dark.

What small whiz-kid luster I'd given off in grade school had gone to mist starting my sunglassed junior year. I knew some Shakespeare plays, and I'd read a couple great books till their spines split.