Quotes About Transition

She is too absorbed in the difficulties of being seventeen to want to hear the confusions of forty-four.

My future was mapped in negatives. Next year, I could be anywhere but here.

I had just dropped out of medicine in my first year of residency, a few months shy of becoming a licensed M.D. I'd discovered there was something serious, mainly a matter of nerve and perhaps empathy, that stood in my way.

To live is to be marked, to live is to change, to die one hundred deaths.

I knew it was only shadow and the angle of the sun, but still it's frightening when things you love appear suddenly changed from what you have always known.

The pale-skinned boy stood shivering in water up to his waist, thinking these were the most awful words in any language: You will be surprised. The moment when everything is about to change.

Was this what they meant by hot flashes? But they didn't feel hot. Her body felt full and heavy and slow and human and absent somehow, just a weight to be carried forward without its enthusiastic cycles of fertility and rest, the crests and valleys she had never realized she counted on so much. Dead weight? Was that what she was now; an obsolete female biding its time until death?

The women that loomed large in my life were all getting small.

That's high school for you, a bevy of people unfit for adult life encounters in any form.

No matter what kind of night you're having, morning always wins.

Let me claim that Africa and I kept company for a while and then parted ways.

Probably Emmy had moved now. I would be in Knoxville soon, she'd be in Lee County, and whoever was sitting at control center of the universe, laughing his ass off.

He assumed it was normal in a new marriage to feel one has joined forces with a stranger.

People change, she said. Not everything stays with you all your life.

The day comes, they hand you a new rule book.

Any one moment could be like this, I thought. A continental divide.

AS LONG AS I KEPT MOVING, my grief streamed out behind me like a swimmer's long hair in water. I knew the weight was there but it didn't touch me. Only when I stopped did the slick, dark stuff of it come floating around my face, catching my arms and throat till I began to drown.

The tree was intact, not cut or broken by wind. What a waste. After maybe centuries of survival it had simply let go of the ground, the wide fist of its root mass ripped up and resting naked above a clay gash in the wooded mountainside. Like herself, it just seemed to have come loose from its station in life.

Every one of us is called upon, probably many times, to start a new life. A frightening diagnosis, a marriage, a move, loss of a job or a limb or a loved one, a graduation, bringing a new baby home: it's impossible to think at first how this all will be possible. Eventually, what moves it all forward is the subterranean ebb and flow of being alive among the living.

Loser is a cliff. Once you've gone over, you're over.

As I planted the beans, Turtle followed me down the row digging each one up after I planted it and putting it back in the jar. "Good girl," I said. I could see a whole new era arriving in Turtle's and my life.

A quality diet is not an elitist option for the do-it-yourselfer. Globally speaking, people consume more soft drinks and packaged foods as they grow more affluent; home-cooked meals of fresh ingredients are the mainstay of rural, less affluent people. This link between economic success and nutritional failure has become so widespread, it has a name: the nutrition transition.

Five days and the train has passed through many underworlds.

Was this me now, for life? Taking up space where people wished I wasn't? Once on a time I was something, and then I turned, like sour milk. The dead junkie's kid.