Quotes About Transition

Things in the margins, including humans who wander there, are often on the brink of becoming something else, or someone else.

Things in the margins, including humans who wander there, are often on the brink of becoming someone else, or something else, whose memory may not include the significance of old markers.

It's frightening when things you love appear suddenly changed from what you have always known.

Emelina and I took each other in. All morning I'd felt the strange disjuncture that comes from reconnecting with your past. There's such a gulf between yourself and who you were then, but people speak to that other person and it answers; it's like having a stranger as a house guest in your skin.

Every one of us is called upon, perhaps many times, to start a new life. A frightening diagnosis, a marriage, a move, loss of a job...And onward full-tilt we go, pitched and wrecked and absurdly resolute, driven in spite of everything to make good on a new shore. To be hopeful, to embrace one possibility after another--that is surely the basic instinct...Crying out: High tide! Time to move out into the glorious debris. Time to take this life for what it is.

The wonder is that you could start life with nothing, end with nothing, and lose so much in between.

Now I'm starting to think he wasn't supposed to be my whole life, he was just this doorway to me.

I thought I wouldn't live through it. But you do. You learn to love the place somebody leaves behind for you.

We came from Bethlehem, Georgia bearing Betty Crocker cake mixes into the jungle.

You never knew which split second might be the zigzag bolt dividing all that went before from the everything that comes next.

She is inhumanly alone. And then, all at once, she isn't.

It's a great freedom to give up on love, and get on with everything else.

Our childhood had passed over into history overnight. The transition was unnoticed by anyone but ourselves.

Listen: being dead is not worse than being alive. It is different though. You could say the view is larger.

For the first time in her life she could see perfectly well how a person arrived on that flight path: needing an alternative to the present so badly, the only doorway was a high window.

This household is like a pocketful of coins that jingled together for a time, but now have been slapped on a counter to pay a price. The pocket empties out, the coins venture back into the infinite circulation of currency, separate, invisible, and untraceable.

When your parent clocks out before you clock in, you can spend way too much of your life staring into that black hole.

The war's [World War II] end has left America with loads of get-up-and-go, and no place to go.

The last generation's worst fears became the next one's B-grade entertainment.

I think most people are the same. Until they've gone somewhere.

Having children was not like people said. Forget training them in your footsteps; the minute they put down the teething ring and found the Internet, you were useless as a source of anything but shoes and a winter coat.

Already? How can this be?" I would ask, shattered by the terrible truth that I needed a three-ring binder and some #2 pencils. It's not that school was a bad thing. Summer was just so much better.

I felt emptied-out and singing with echoes, unrecognizable to myself: that particular feeling like your own house on the day you move out.

While we watched without comprehension, she moved away to where none of us wanted to follow. Ruth May shrank back through the narrow passage between this brief fabric of light and all the rest of what there is for us: the long waiting. Now she will wait the rest of the time. It will be exactly as long as the time that passed before she was born.