Rite Of Passage Quotes

It's a rite of passage for the everyman, to a higher ground. ~ Bob Seger

The problem for me, still today, is that I write purely with one dramatic structure and that is the rite of passage. I'm not really skilled in any other. Rock and roll itself can be described as music to accompany the rite of passage. ~ Pete Townshend

A word now about the bar exam: It's a necessary chore, a rite of passage for any just-hatched lawyer wishing to practice, and though the content and structure of the test itself vary somewhat from state to state, the experience of taking it - a two-day, twelve-hour exam meant to prove your knowledge of everything from contract law to arcane rules about secured transactions - is pretty much universally recognized as hellish. ~ Michelle Obama

I'm only interested in rites of passage stories. ~ Pete Townshend

Then science came along and taught us that we are not the measure of all things, that there are wonders unimagined, that the Universe is not obliged to conform to what we consider comfortable or plausible. We have learned something about the idiosyncratic nature of our common sense. Science has carried human self-consciousness to a higher level. This is surely a rite of passage, a step towards maturity. ~ Carl Sagan

This is the real work of woman of color feminism: to resist acquiescence to fatality and guilt, to become warriors of conscience and action who resist death in all its myriad manifestations: poverty, cultural assimilation, child abuse, motherless mothering, gentrification, mental illness, welfare cuts, the prison system, racial profiling, immigrant and queer bashing, invasion and imperialism at home and at war.

To fight any kind of war, Kahente Horn-Miller writes. "The Biggest single requirement is fighting spirit." I thought much of this as I read Colonize This! since this collection appears in print at a time of escalating world-wide war--In Colombia, Afghanistan, Palestine. But is there ever a time of no-war for women of color? Is there ever a time when our home (our body, our land of origin) is not subject to violent occupation, violent invasion? If I retain any image to hold the heart-intention of this book, it is found in what Horn-Miller calls the necessity of the war dance. This book is one rite of passage, one ceremony of preparedness on the road to consciousness, on the "the war path of greater empowerment. ~ Bushra Rehman

I liked the idea of creating a new pop-culture, folkloric hero character that I created with 'Django' that I think's gonna last for a long time. And I think as the generations go on and everything, you know, my hope is it can be a rite of passage for black fathers and their sons. Like, when are they old enough to watch 'Django Unchained'? ~ Quentin Tarantino

Freedom Summer, the massive voter education project in Mississippi, was 1964. I graduated from high school in 1965. So becoming active was almost a rite of passage. ~ Danny Glover

When we're struck with cruelty, we can either inflict the same on others like it's a rite of passage, or decide that here is where it stops. ~ Joyce Rachelle

I wanted to play a TV detective because it's a rite of passage; I wanted to experience every area of acting. I haven't done comedy or as much Shakespeare as I had intended. ~ Olivia Williams

He's a very nice man and all that, easy to get along with, fun, he never makes me cry. But is that love? I mean, is that all there is to it? Even when you learned to ride your two-wheeler, you had to fall off a few times and scrape both knees. Call it a rite of passage. And that was just a little thing. ~ Stephen King

No longer a mark of distinction or proof of achievement, a college education is these days a mere rite of passage, a capstone to adolescent party time. ~ William A. Henry III

I enjoyed acting at school and went to an acting workshop for kids in Nottingham. It was twice a week after school and free to go to - ITV subsidised it. Every now and again, a casting director would turn up. 'Peak Practice' became a rite of passage for us. It was the first job I had. ~ Joe Dempsie

What I do, it's personal. I take responsibility for it. It's me. It ain't some hormones or rite of passage or mass hysteria. I don't fucking cry about it in the morning. ~ Joshua Gaylord

The theme of submission as an essential attitude toward promotion of the successful initiation rite can be clearly seen in the case of girls or women. Their rite of passage initially emphasizes their essential passivity, and this is reinforced by the physiological limitation on their autonomy imposed by the menstrual cycle. It has been suggested that the menstrual cycle may actually be the major part of initiation from a woman's point of view, since it has the power to awaken the deepest sense of obedience to life's creative power over her. Thus she willingly gives herself to her womanly function, much as a man gives himself to his assigned role in the community life of his group. ~ C. G. Jung

Caeden grabbed my hand and grinned like a little boy in a candy shop. "Carnival time!" He drug me from the car and then behind him as he headed to a ring toss game. "I think I need to win my girl a prize," he said.
I laughed.
"What?" he shrugged. "It's like a rite of passage. Every boyfriend has to win his girlfriend a prize," he winked, turning my stomach to jelly. ~ Micalea Smeltzer

In a culture in which "connection" usually refers to the strength of the cell phone signal, quieting the mind - even just sitting alone in the backyard, much less in the forest - can be a difficult rite of passage. ~ Jon Young

Music, at the end of the day, is communicating something - emotion, a feeling, a rite of passage, where you are in life. ~ Ed O'Brien

Ultimately, wasn't dance a whispered question? A story told through the position of a foot, the tilt of a head, the touch of a hand, the brush of an eye. A rite of passage. A claiming. ~ Martina Boone

We have got to dispel this myth that bullying is just a normal rite of passage. ~ Barack Obama

I've always been interested in photographing traditions and customs - especially in America. The prom is an American tradition, a rite of passage that has always been one of the most important rituals of American youth. It is a day in our lives that we never forget - a day full of hopes and dreams for our future. ~ Mary Ellen Mark

Coffee is far more than a beverage. It is an invitation to life, disguised as a cup of warm liquid. It's a trumpet wakeup call or a gentle rousing hand on your shoulder ... Coffee is an experience, an offer, a rite of passage, a good excuse to get together. ~ Nichole Johnson

I choose to surround myself with happy human beings. I went through the angsty period. I think every single person does. I think it's a rite of passage to hate the world and feel like the victim. ~ Shailene Woodley

Every missed rite of passage leads to a new rigidification of the personality. ~ Richard Rohr

I'm not going to recommend recklessness but somewhere just short of it - testing yourself and proactively pursuing a rite of passage has become necessary because in western developed countries we've become very comfort-addicted. ~ Sean Penn

The world is full of widows--several among my closer friends. We have each known that grim rite of passage, have engaged with grief and loss, and have not exactly emerged but found a way of living after and beyond. It is an entirely changed life, for anyone who has been in a long marriage--forty-one years, for me: alone in bed, alone most of the time, without that presence towards which you turned for advice, reassurance, with whom you shared the good news and the bad. Every decision now taken alone; no one to defuse anxieties. And a thoroughly commonplace experience--everywhere, always--so get on with it and don't behave as though you are uniquely afflicted. I didn't tell myself that at the time, and I doubt if it would have helped if I had, but it is what I have come--not so much to feel as to understand. ~ Penelope Lively

Having a phone call from Steven Spielberg was just a fantastic rite of passage. I loved it, and he was very focused, very likable, strictly business, and really sharp. ~ Peter Morgan

Long a topic of interest for history and philosophy of science, the Copernican Revolution more recently has become a favorite symbol for popular science writers. This symbol is used in two main ways, both of which shade easily into the mythic. First, the Copernican Revolution is invoked to mark a point of grand transformation between anthropocentric and objective thinking. Second, many portrayals of the Copernican Revolution heroize its protagonist and ritualize his deed. The Copernican Revolution designates an alleged shift in worldview that took place in the past, but also a sort of personal microcosm of that event - a rite of passage that any mind aspiring to science must undergo. The term "myth" in some usages becomes a near-synonym for pre-Copernican thought - a definition that is maddeningly inadequate even though refreshingly concise. ~ Gregory Schrempp

I think it's sort of a rite of passage for a British actor to try and get the American accent and have a good crack at doing that. ~ Orlando Bloom

Working with the dying is like being a midwife for this great rite of passage of death. Just as a midwife helps a being take their first breath, you help a being take their last breath. ~ Ram Dass

Sometimes I feel that 'Footloose' is the rite of passage. ~ Craig Brewer

Rejections are painful, but inevitable. They're every writer's rite of passage. ~ Octavia Butler

Men cannot be men - much less good or heroic men - unless their actions have meaningful consequences to people they truly care about. Strength requires an opposing force, courage requires risk, mastery requires hard work, honor requires accountability to other men. Without these things, we are little more than boys playing at being men, and there is no weekend retreat or mantra or half-assed rite of passage that can change that. A rite of passage must reflect a real change in status and responsibility for it to be anything more than theater. No reimagined manhood of convenience can hold its head high so long as the earth remains the tomb of our ancestors ~ Jack Donovan

There aren't a lot of opportunities for that rite of passage that makes you a man. War is one of them, and violent sports are another. ~ Sylvester Stallone

It was a rite of passage each year at Manhattan Life Insurance Company. The golden doors would open every summer to a new crop of bright-eyed college students, all of which were over-qualified for a job that required little more than a high school-equivalent GED and a fully loaded MetroCard. ~ Phil Wohl

Death is the least civilized rite of passage. ~ Louise Erdrich

At Snortin' Reformatory, a notorious Washington, D.C. jail located in the northern Virginia suburbs, The Afro-Anarchists were being thrown into a cell. It was a situation that the three of them, like many young black males in the D.C. area, had long ago come to expect as a rite of passage.
As the door slammed shut behind them, Bucktooth spoke. "Man, Phosphate, they didn't read us our rights or nothin'."
"Yeah, Phos," Fontaine chimed in, "I didn't think they had to beat us, neither. And whoever heard of being charged with singing too loud and off-key in a public establishment? I don't believe there is no kind of law for that shit. ~ Donald Jeffries

When my father finally got around to teaching me to drive, he was impressed at my "natural" talent for driving, not knowing that I had already been secretly driving my mother's car around the neighborhood. When I took the test and got my license and my father gave me my own set of keys to the car one night at dinner, it was a major rite of passage for him and my mother. Their perception of me had changed and was formally acknowledged. For me the occasion meant a private sanction to do in public what I had already been doing in secret. ~ Robert Fulghum

The major sighed. "It's a cultural thing, Madam. Something to do with the embattled mentality they developed in the first centuries here when conditions were so harsh and they had no other way than the exoskeletal-mutations route. The only ones who think of full connection as essential are the ones who've gone to university on Pleth and had the visible exoskeletal mutations removed and acquired internal reinforcements - which, as I understand it, serves as a sort of rite of passage to adulthood. ~ L. Timmel Duchamp

If it is written and read with serious attention, a novel, like a myth or any great work of art, can become an initiation that helps us to make a painful rite of passage from one phase of life, one state of mind, to another. A novel, like a myth, teaches us to see the world differently; it shows us how to look into our own hearts and to see our world from a perspective that goes beyond our own self-interest. ~ Karen Armstrong

Nothing sadder than the adolescent rite of passage to have sex before understanding what sexy is. ~ Jessica Knoll

Few of us go through life without taking part in some kind of rite of passage. ~ Hank Nuwer

Ever since I first read Midori Snyder's essay, 'The Armless Maiden and the Hero's Journey' in The Journal of Mythic Arts, I couldn't stop thinking about that particular strand of folklore and the application of its powerful themes to the lives of young women. There are many different versions of the tale from around the world, and the 'Armless Maiden' or 'Handless Maiden' are just two of the more familiar. But whatever the title, we are essentially talking about a narrative that speaks of the power of transformation – and, perhaps more significantly when writing young adult fantasy, the power of the female to transform herself. It's a rite of passage; something that mirrors the traditional journey from adolescence to adulthood.

Common motifs of the stories include – and I am simplifying pretty drastically here – the violent loss of hands or arms for the girl of the title, and their eventual re-growth as she slowly regains her autonomy and independence. In many accounts there is a halfway point in the story where a magician builds a temporary replacement pair of hands for the girl, magical hands and arms that are usually made entirely of silver. What I find interesting is that this isn't where the story ends; the gaining of silver hands simply marks the beginning of a whole new test for our heroine. ~ Karen Mahoney

I want gifts and Christmas music. I don't care how many Draziri are out there. They won't take Christmas from me."

"Yes, but we don't have a suitable male," Orro said. "And only one dog."

I looked at him.

"What is this Christmas?" Wing asked.

Orro turned from the stove. "It's the rite of passage during which the young males of the human species learn to display aggression and use weapons."

Sean stopped what he was doing and looked at Orro.

"The young men go out in small packs," Orro continued. "They brave the cold and come into conflict with other packs and they have to prove their dominance through physical combat. Their fathers teach them lessons in the proper use of swear words, and the young men have to undergo tests of endurance, like holding soap in their mouths and licking cold metal objects."

Sean made a strangled noise.

"At the end of their trials, they go to see a wise elder in a red suit to prove their worth. If they are judged worthy, the family erects a ceremonial tree and presents them with gifts of weapons."

Sean was clearly struggling, because his head was shaking.

"Also," Orro added, "a sacrificial poultry is prepared and then given to the wild animals, probably to appease the nature spirits."

Sean roared with laughter. ~ Ilona Andrews

It's almost a rite of passage for the middle-aged, it seems, to invent generational stereotypes for dumping on the young. ~ Robin Marantz Henig

There are worse things than being thirty-five, single, and female in New York. Like: Being twenty-five, singled, and female in New York. It's a rite of passage few women would want to repeat. It's about sleeping with the wrong men, wearing the wrong clothes, having the wrong roommate, saying the wrong thing, being ignored, getting fired, not being taken seriously, and generally being treated like shit. But it's necessary. ~ Candace Bushnell

It seemed right to do it this way, because the rite of passage is a magic corridor and so we always provide an aisle - it's what you walk down when you get married, what they carry you down when you get buried. Our corridor was those twin rails, and we walked between them, just bopping along toward whatever this was supposed to mean. ~ Stephen King

First wives are a rite of passage into adult life. In many ways it's important that first marriages go wrong. That's how we learn the truth about ourselves. ~ J.G. Ballard

I think that we all have to have that rite of passage of dating the tortured artist who seems cooler than we think we are; we aspire to be like them, and we're excited that somebody is turning us on to new music or a new lifestyle. ~ Drew Barrymore

I think the prom is very serious also. It's an American ritual, it's a rite of passage, and it's very much a part of this country. ~ Mary Ellen Mark

I am your sire. I am to guide you through your first days as a vampire. Your first feeding is a rite of passage, a sacrament. It will not be wasted on some hormone-driven frenzy. This is why I wanted you to feed from me."
"I will not drink it in a house, I will not drink it with a mouse. I will not drink it here or there, I will not drink it anywhere," I wheezed, hoping I was able to communicate adequate sarcasm through the crippling belly cramps.
"Did you just quote Green Eggs and Ham? ~ Molly Harper

My rite of passage into my brave new world, life on the road. ~ Kenny Loggins

You know that point in your life when you realize that the house you grew up in isn't really your home anymore ... All of the sudden, even though you have some place to put your shit, that idea of home is gone ... Or maybe it's like this rite of passage ... You will never have that feeling again until you create a new idea of home for yourself, you know, for your kids, for the family you start. It's like a cycle or something. Maybe that's all family really is: a group of people that miss the same imaginary place. ~ Zach Braff

No nation can approve violence against the most innocent and vulnerable, and expect the effects of that approval to be limited. By 1995, what had seemed a purely private decision in rare circumstances would become a standard method of birth control, an industry, a political litmus test, a rite of passage...a central tenet of a whole culture that centers not around life, its promise and responsibilities, but around self, its creation and cultivation. Those unalienable rights to life and liberty Mr. Jefferson mentioned in the Declaration seem to have been eclipsed by a sad emphasis on the pursuit of happiness. And for all the happiness that the unbridled right to an abortion is supposed to make possible, no political question since slavery seems so heavy with guilt, and its denial. Or else there would be no reason for those who favor abortion to call it something else, "choice" being the most popular euphemism and "reproductive freedom" the most ironic. The signs of this culture of death are now so common that they no longer stand out. In politics and economics, pop culture and art, lifestyle long ago replaced life. ~ Paul Greenberg

The juniors were acting different because they are now the seniors. They even had T-shirts made. I don't know who plans these things. ~ Stephen Chbosky

If you really look at hip-hop dance, it's really a rites-of-passage thing. You never see the arms release down. They're always up in fighting position. It's going to war. What do we say? We say your're going to battle. You go out there and fight. ~ Rennie Harris

(P170) In his passion to malign moneymaking, Keynes even resorted to calling on psychoanalysis for support. Fascinated like most of the Bloomsbury circle by the work of Sigmund Freud, Keynes valued it above all for the "intuitions" which paralleled his own, especially on the significance of the love of money . In his Treatise on Money, Keynes refers to a passage in a 1908 paper by Freud, in which he writes of the "connections which exist between the complexes of interest in money and of defaecation" and the unconscious "identification of gold with faeces." This psychoanalytical "finding" - by the man Vladimir Nabokov correctly identified as the Viennese Fraud - permitted Keynes to assert that love of money was condemned not only by religion but by "science" as well. ~ Ralph Raico

To paraphrase Augustine, if you want to know your God-given gifts, first know that the purpose of spiritual gifts is to bring unity to the church. Then "love God and do what you feel like doing." But there is more to the unleashing of gifts in the body. One of the bad fruits of an "I" church is that we don't tell people when they bless us. If someone has taught Sunday school and helped us understand a passage of Scripture, then we should tell the person and encourage his or her gift. If worship leaders left us rejoicing that we have been with God's people in his presence, then thank them for the specific ways they blessed you and the church. No one should have to ask what their gifts are; we should tell people their gifts as they minister to us. Can ~ Edward T. Welch

Rite To Ancestors:

Hail to those who have passed through the veil
From Life to Death, to Earth from Breath.
Hail to those who suffered to gift me with blood,
Hail to those who survived to gift me with body,
Hail to those whose songs gift me with inspiration.
Hail to those whom I knew and loved in life,
Whose memory I carry with me like a word of comfort,
Hail to those who left this land long ago,
Whose names I honor like a word of hope,
Or if I know not their names, whose lives I honor still.
I live and love because you lived and loved,
I speak and struggle because you spoke and struggled,
You live in me, as I will live in those who come after me.
Grant me the patience, O my beloved Dead,
To see the long view, and remember that what I do
Affects a million million souls I will never know. ~ Galina Krasskova

The composer Stravinsky had written a new piece with a difficult violin passage. After it had been in rehearsal for several weeks, the solo violinist came to Stravinsky and said he was sorry, he had tried his best, the passage was too difficult, no violinist could play it. Stravinsky said, 'I understand that. What I am after is the sound of someone trying to play it.' ~ Thomas Powers

Destiny was like the passage of time, however, immutable and unforgiving and uninterested in the personal opinion of those who breathed. ~ J.R. Ward

The holy heaven yearns to wound the earth, and yearning layeth hold on the earth to join in wedlock; the rain, fallen from the amorous heaven, impregnates the earth, and it bringeth forth for mankind the food of flocks and herds and Demeter's gifts; and from that moist marriage-rite the woods put on their bloom. ~ Aeschylus

Against firelight, he sees the face of the woman / Lean over, and the lips purse sweet as to bestow a kiss, but / This is not true, and the great glob of spit / Hangs there, glittering, before she lets it fall.
The spit is what softens like silk the passage of steel / On the fine-grained stone. It whispers. ~ Robert Penn Warren

Yet this is not a novel. It is a faithful transcription of my memories, some of them hazy, others riddled with holes left by the passage of the years, others patched up by time and the filters of experience and distance, and still others, no doubt, completely invented by the stubborn narrator we all have within us, who wants things to be the way they sound best to us now, and not the way they were. ~ Alma Guillermoprieto

When a brother is given the right to pass into the third life as a father, then he chooses his greatest rival or his truest friend to give him passage. You. Speaker - ever since I first learned Stark and read The Hive Queen and the Hegemon, I waited for you. I said many times to my father, Rooter, of all humans he is the one who will understand us. Then Rooter told me when your starship came, that it was you and the hive queen aboard that ship, and I knew then that you had come to give me passage, if only I did well."
"You did well, Human. ~ Orson Scott Card

HAVE you learned lessons only of those who admired you, and were tender with you, and stood aside for you?
Have you not learned the great lessons of those who rejected you, and braced themselves against you? or who treated you with contempt, or disputed the passage with you?
Have you had no practice to receive opponents when they come? ~ Walt Whitman

With Derrida, you can hardly misread him, because he's so obscure. Every time you say, "He says so and so," he always says, "You misunderstood me." But if you try to figure out the correct interpretation, then that's not so easy. I once said this to Michel Foucault, who was more hostile to Derrida even than I am, and Foucault said that Derrida practiced the method of obscurantisme terroriste (terrorism of obscurantism). We were speaking French. And I said, "What the hell do you mean by that?" And he said, "He writes so obscurely you can't tell what he's saying, that's the obscurantism part, and then when you criticize him, he can always say, 'You didn't understand me; you're an idiot.' That's the terrorism part." And I like that. So I wrote an article about Derrida. I asked Michel if it was OK if I quoted that passage, and he said yes. ~ John Rogers Searle

I flipped open to read the marked passage in Daily Strength: "It is not by regretting what is irreparable that true work is to be done, but by making the best of what we are. It is not by complaining that we have not the right tools, but by using well the tools we have. What we are, and where we are, is God's providential arrangement - God's doing, though it may be man's misdoing; and the manly and the wise way is to look your disadvantages in the face, and see what can be made out of them." - F. W. Robertson ~ Will Schwalbe

But books are curious objects. They have the power to trap, transport, and even transform you if you are lucky. But in the end, books - even magic ones - are only objects pieced together from paper and glue and thread. That was the fundamental truth the readers forgot. How vulnerable the book really was. To fire. To the damp. To the passage of time. And to theft. ~ Traci Chee

Humility and level-headedness are traits, which have accrued upon me over the years, during the rites of my passage through time. They were thrust down my throat by the hands of Destiny and the Almighty, both of who are far greater, far grander, and far more mysterious and mystic, than all that we ordinary mortals can ever humanly conceive or comprehend.
- Bhakti Vedanta Anandamurthy Thiruvadiar. ( A Character in the book) ~ Biju Vasudevan

When we're at the end of The Rite of Spring or of a Bruckner symphony, I want people to feel the music physically. ~ Esa-Pekka Salonen

With the perspective afforded by the passage of time, where does 9/11 rank as a turning point in our national history? For the victims and their families, innocents going about their lives, suddenly and brutally murdered, no other day can ever matter as much. ~ Jon Meacham

Terror thrives on the bottomless pit of imagination, and the imagination comes to life with the passage of time. Time is its vintner, the family its furtile field. ~ Mark Nykanen

The passage of the Civil Rights Act of 1964 represented precisely such a hope - that America had learned from its past and acted to secure a better tomorrow. ~ Aberjhani

A memorized scripture becomes an enduring friend that does not weaken with the passage of time. ~ Richard G. Scott

Suddenly she came upon a little three-legged table, all made of solid glass; there was nothing on it except a tiny golden key, and Alice's first thought was that it might belong to one of the doors of the hall; but, alas! either the locks were too large, or the key was too small, but at any rate it would not open any of them. However, on the second time round, she came upon a low curtain she had not noticed before, and behind it was a little door about fifteen inches high: she tried the little golden key in the lock, and to her great delight it fitted! Alice opened the door and found that it led into a small passage, not much larger than a rat-hole: she knelt down and looked along the passage into ~ Lewis Carroll

I was as secretive - indeed, as furtive - as any conspirator. Discovery, we knew, simply must not happen, or else all our time and effort would be wasted. If it were to be exposed that our particular group had got together and written a banking bill, that bill would have no chance whatever of passage by Congress. ~ Frank A. Vanderlip

The confessional writer will treat her story like a wailing wall. She kneels, and her story spills out, messy, improper. It isn't a protest or even graffiti, but her story is an offering of things that she overlooked or notices that others have overlooked. She is in danger of exposure but she remembers when she lived in hiding and that was worse. She cannot turn back now because this is how life has spun out of her, part vexing passage and part prayer. ~ Patricia Hickman

During these years in the small-talk wilderness, I also wondered why Americans valued friendliness with commerce so much. Was handing over cash the sacred rite of American capitalism - and of American life? On a day that I don't spend money in America, I feel oddly depressed. It's my main form of social interaction - as it is for millions of Americans who live alone or away from their families. ~ Karan Mahajan

I know this sounds like quite a pile. I know, too, that some of you will wonder why I don't just buy a Kindle. I see your point, but the trouble is that to do so would be to forgo the pleasure of the moment when, years in the future, sand falls from the pages of an old book, and you suddenly remember the Isle of Wight and A Passage to India, a Greek island and The Map of Love, or whatever. For me, a ghostly trace of Ambre Solaire rising from the pages of a sun-bleached paperback is a way back to the past: to favourite stories as much as to favourite beaches. ~ Rachel Cooke

I asked nothing better of life. I still ask nothing better of life. Strange to say - for surely it is strange not to have increased one's claims, during the passage from youth to maturity? - these very things, just sun on my face, the feel of spring round the corner, and nobody anywhere in sight except a dog, are still enough to fill me with utter happiness. How convenient. And how cheap. ~ Elizabeth Von Arnim

To be baptized means to make the passage with the people of Israel and with Jesus from slavery to freedom and from death to new life. It is a commitment to a life in and through Jesus. ~ Henri Nouwen

And, I think, this greening does thaw at the edges, at least, of my own cold season. Joy sneaks in: listening to music, riding my bicycle, I catch myself feeling, in a way that's as old as I am but suddenly seems unfamiliar, light. I have felt so heavy for so long. At first I felt odd- as if I shouldn't be feeling this lightness, that familiar little catch of pleasure in the heart which is inexplicable, though a lovely passage of notes or the splendidly turned petal of a tulip has triggered it. It's my buoyancy, part of what keeps me alive: happy, suddenly with the concomitant experience of a sonata and the motion of the shadows of leaves. I have the desire to be filled with sunlight, to soak my skin in as much of it as I can drink up, after the long interior darkness of this past season, the indoor vigil, in this harshest and darkest of winters, outside and in. ~ Mark Doty

Awareness born of love is the only force that can bring healing and renewal. Out of our love for another person, we become more willing to let our old identities wither and fall away, and enter a dark night of the soul, so that we may stand naked once more in the presence of the great mystery that lies at the core of our being. This is how love ripens us
by warming us from within, inspiring us to break out of our shell, and lighting our way through the dark passage to new birth. ~ John Welwood

When the writing is really working, I think there is something like dreaming going on. I don't know how to draw the line between the conscious management of what you're doing and this state ... I would say that it's related to daydreaming. When I feel really engaged with a passage, I become so lost in it that I'm unaware of my real surroundings, totally involved in the pictures and sounds that that passage evokes. ~ John Hersey

Alice Malloy had dark, stringy hair, and even her husband, who loved her more than he knew, was sometimes reminded by her lean face of a tenement doorway on a rainy day, for her countenance was long, vacant, and weakly lighted, a passage for the gentle transports and miseries of the poor. ~ John Cheever

Civilization is like air or water. Wherever there is a passage, be it only a fissure, it will penetrate and modify the conditions of a country. ~ Jules Verne

I think there's a greater detriment with our escalating progression toward the opposite extremity - the increasingly common ideology that assures people they're right about what they believe. And note that I used the word "detriment." I did not use the word "danger," because I don't think the notion of people living under the misguided premise that they're right is often dangerous. Most day-to-day issues are minor, the passage of time will dictate who was right and who was wrong, and the future will sort out the past. It is, however, socially detrimental. It hijacks conversation and aborts ideas. It engenders a delusion of simplicity that benefits people with inflexible minds. It makes the experience of living in a society slightly worse than it should be. ~ Chuck Klosterman

I loved reading historical novels when I was young, but I definitely don't think I wrote one. When I read my book through, when it was completely done and in printed galleys, I was surprised by how uninterested in the passage of time and history the book seemed to be. Even though you can feel it all there, that's just not what it's focused on. ~ Danielle Dutton

The Church, in her wisdom, maintains the distinction between engaged and married couples
they are not the same, today's culture and society have become rather indifferent to the delicate and serious nature of this passage. ~ Pope Francis

So if any man think philosophy and universality to be idle studies, he doth not consider that all professions are from thence served and supplied. And this I take to be a great cause that hath hindered the progression of learning, because these fundamental knowledges have been studied but in passage. ~ Francis Bacon

Unlike all the other art forms, film is able to seize and render the passage of time, to stop it, almost to possess it in infinity. I'd say that film is the sculpting of time. ~ Andrei Tarkovsky

Dance is an image. As painting is a song. Simulacra simulate. A rite repeats a metaphora (a voyage). Moving trucks in modern-day Greece still have the word METAPHORA on their sides. A myth is the danced image of the rite itself, which is expected to attract the world. ~ Pascal Quignard