Transition Quotes

“Look on every exit as being an entrance somewhere else.”
― Tom Stoppard, Rosencrantz and Guildenstern Are Dead

“In the space between chaos and shape there was another chance.”
― Jeanette Winterson, The World and Other Places: Stories

“We do on stage things that are supposed to happen off. Which is a kind of integrity, if you look on every exit as being an entrance somewhere else.”
― Tom Stoppard, Rosencrantz and Guildenstern Are Dead

“It’s a humbling realization that sometimes what we think we want may not align with what God knows we truly need.”
― Gregory S. Works, Triumph: Life on the Other Side of Trials, Transplants, Transition and Transformation

“Find people who are fighting the same illness that you are.”
― Gregory S. Works, Triumph: Life on the Other Side of Trials, Transplants, Transition and Transformation

“The great miraculous bell of translucent ice is suspended in mid-air.

It rings to announce endings and beginnings. And it rings because there is fresh promise and wonder in the skies.

Its clear tones resound in the placid silence of the winter day, and echo long into the silver-blue serenity of night.

The bell can only be seen at the turning of the year, when the days wind down into nothing, and get ready to march out again.

When you hear the bell, you feel a tug at your heart.

It is your immortal inspiration.”
― Vera Nazarian, The Perpetual Calendar of Inspiration

“We must live in the radiance of tomorrow, as our ancestors have suggested in their tales. For what is yet to come tomorrow has possibilities, and we must think of it, the simplest glimpse of that possibility of goodness. That will be our strength. That has always been our strength.”
― Ishmael Beah, Radiance of Tomorrow

“I've always believed there are moments in our lives which can be defined as a transition between the before and after, between the cause and the effect.”
― Benjamin X. Wretlind, Castles

“Trans” may work well enough as shorthand, but the quickly developing mainstream narrative it evokes (“born in the wrong body,” necessitating an orthopedic pilgrimage between two fixed destinations) is useless for some—but partially, or even profoundly, useful for others? That for some, “transitioning” may mean leaving one gender entirely behind, while for others—like Harry, who is happy to identify as a butch on T—it doesn’t? I’m not on my way anywhere, Harry sometimes tells inquirers. How to explain, in a culture frantic for resolution, that sometimes the shit stays messy? I do not want the female gender that has been assigned to me at birth. Neither do I want the male gender that transsexual medicine can furnish and that the state will award me if I behave in the right way. I don’t want any of it. How to explain that for some, or for some at some times, this irresolution is OK—desirable, even (e.g., “gender hackers”)—whereas for others, or for others at some times, it stays a source of conflict or grief? How does one get across the fact that the best way to find out how people feel about their gender or their sexuality—or anything else, really—is to listen to what they tell you, and to try to treat them accordingly, without shellacking over their version of reality with yours?”
― Maggie Nelson, The Argonauts

“Fennel, which is the spice for Wednesdays, the day of averages, of middle-aged people. . . . Fennel . . . smelling of changes to come.”
― Chitra Banerjee Divakaruni, The Mistress of Spices

“It is tempting to write the history of technology through products: the wheel; the microscope; the airplane; the Internet. But it is more illuminating to write the history of technology through transitions: linear motion to circular motion; visual space to subvisual space; motion on land to motion on air; physical connectivity to virtual connectivity.”
― Siddhartha Mukherjee, The Gene: An Intimate History

“I was ten when I heard the music that ended the first phase of my life and cast me hurtling towards a new horizon. Drenched to the skin, I stood on Dunoon’s pier peering seawards through diagonal rain, looking for the ferry that would take me home. There, on the everwet west coast of Scotland, I heard it: like sonic scalpels, the sounds of electric guitars sliced through the dreich weather. My body hairs pricked up like antennae. To my young ears these amplified guitars sounded angelic, for surely no man-made instrument could produce that tone. The singer couldn't be human. His voice was too clean, too pure, too resonant, as though a robot larynx were piping words through vocal chords of polished silver. The overall effect was intoxicating - a storm of drums, earthquake bass, razor-sharp guitar riffs, and soaring vocals of astonishing clarity. I knew that I was hearing the future.”
― Mark Rice, Metallic Dreams

“That's who is now, he reminds himself, someone who makes decisions, who doesn't let life just act upon him. Wasn't that the big lesson of transition, of detransition? That you'll never know all the angles, that delay is just form of hiding from reality. That you just figure what you what you want and do it? And maybe, if you don't know what you want, you just do something anyway, and everything will change, and then maybe that will reveal what you really want. So do something.”
― Torrey Peters, Detransition, Baby

“Look," Aracely said. "I know what you're going through."

"No you don't." Sam sat up. "I still have to live like this. Nothing is gonna fix me. There's no water that's gonna make me into something else."

"And I'd start from where you are if it meant what happened that night didn't have to happen," Aracely said. "We don't get to become who we are for nothing. It costs something. You're fighting for every little piece of yourself. And maybe I got all of me at once but I lost everything else. Don't you dare think there's any water in the world that makes this easy.”
― Anna-Marie McLemore, When the Moon Was Ours

“At every step in our path, some possibilities die behind us while others bloom before us, and in every transition, even the joyful ones, there is grief.”
― Alua Arthur, Briefly Perfectly Human: Making an Authentic Life by Getting Real About the End

“Every ending writes the first chapter of something new.”
― Shivanshu K. Srivastava

“We realize too late, and oftentimes on our deathbed that there was nothing to be ashamed of in life.”
― Michael Bassey Johnson, Stamerenophobia

“Every second and every minute of the clock, we are getting closer and closer to our various destinations.”
― Michael Bassey Johnson, Stamerenophobia

“We are most vulnerable during moments of transition. Yet change presents an opportunity to reflect on and release our past. Each time we open a new chapter, sadness will find us, wearing different faces, delivered in different forms. Being present with it and creating space for it allows for its eventual release. Change is hardest to embrace when the loss of our past is palpable, and the payoffs are not yet in sight.

I call it courageous living. Others call it a leap of faith...

Courageous, creative living is the ability to act, leap, or keep moving forward, even when confidence is nowhere to be found.”
― Bonnie Wan, The Life Brief: A Playbook for No-Regrets Living

“It's the infatuation with the fantasy of what could be, that the chains exist and perpetuate the self-inflicted hindrance of onward and upward mobility.”
― Niedria D. Kenny

“Our needs are constantly changing and evolving.”
― Laurie E. Smith

“Yes, I am as one who tries to sail against the current up over a waterfall, and I feel that the current has grabbed me and overpowered me ...... I no longer know where it leads me ...... perhaps towards complete destruction ...... and
yet I cannot get off the boat now that I am halfway, the decision has been made ......
there is no turning back.”
― Lili Elbe, Lili: A Portrait of the First Sex Change

“Yes, I am as one who tries to sail against the current up over a waterfall, and I feel that the current has grabbed me and overpowered me ...... I no longer know where it leads me ...... perhaps towards complete destruction ...... and yet I cannot get off the boat now that I am halfway, the decision has been made ...... there is no turning back.”
― Lili Elbe, Lili: A Portrait of the First Sex Change

“Change is the revolution of time, urging the world to shed its shadows for light.”
― Aloo Denish Obiero

“From the moment I left my parents' house for Vermont
(my second year of college),
I never called it 'going home' there.
Home was always where I lived.
Still is.
In all these transitions,
in all this chaos.
Home is where I am.”
― Shellen Lubin

“Actually," she says, releasing his hand, "you do. I think you want to be you more than anything. You want to be the person you could have been without all the bullshit, yes?" He's frowning but he's receptive. "That's what I wanted, too. And that's what I eventually became. But it takes time, and it takes work - even the 'drag them into girlhood kicking and screaming' method requires something of you eventually - and more than anything else it takes understanding yourself. Picking out the parts of yourself that are real and not just more of the bullshit. Think of this as another shot at adolescence. It actually is, in many ways, since the basement can be a lot like a very small residential school and your body really is going through a whole lot of
changes. Your first adolescence wasn't quick, was it? And was it easy? No. You're growing up all over again, as someone kinda
new and kinda not, and you can't rush these things.”
― Alyson Greaves

“Actually," she says, releasing his hand, "you do. I think you want to be you more than anything. You want to be the person you could have been without all the bullshit, yes?" He's frowning but he's receptive. "That's what I wanted, too. And that's what I eventually became. But it takes time, and it takes work - even the 'drag them into girlhood kicking and screaming' method requires something of you eventually - and more than anything else it takes understanding yourself. Picking out the parts of yourself that are real and not just more of the bullshit. Think of this as another shot at adolescence. It actually is, in many ways, since the basement can be a lot like a very small residential school and your body really is going through a whole lot of changes. Your first adolescence wasn't quick, was it? And was it easy? No. You're growing up all over again, as someone kinda new and kinda not, and you can't rush these things.”
― Alyson Greaves

“Max refused to be detransitioned by death. Not matter what it took, even if it meant dying, he was going to do it as Max.”
― Logan-Ashley Kisner, Old Wounds

“In an interview I did with the incredible drag performer Taylor Mac, he describes his dazzling stage manifestation this way,
"On stage the drag isn't a costume, but something I'm exposing about myself; it's what I look like on the inside." Drag is how he makes his invisible self visible.

I am interested in this idea of an invisible self. I have always said that I walked around invisible for fifty years and that now what could not be seen on the inside is finally alive on the outside. Yes, the outside is a kind of costume but it reflects an inner knowing.”
― P. Carl, Becoming a Man: The Story of a Transition

“At its worst, the purpose of a psych ward is to normalize you back into a community that is anything but. Its purpose is not to heal you, but to make you stay sick so that you can function alongside the lies of a country steeped in them, so you can function alongside the lies you are forced to tell about yourself. We are all doubling in order to live, and the psych ward tells you to squash that inner knowing. It's simply not useful if you hope to thrive. At its best, psychiatric care gives you tools to let your inner knowing walk alongside the insanity of the world and create survival tools to trust what you know and survive the gaslighting and discrimination that seeks to burn down your house.”
― P. Carl, Becoming a Man: The Story of a Transition