About Changes and Leaving

Some good friends and some acquaintances who were here to study for a year are about to leave. Last Saturday we were sitting at a kafeneion, discussing about things, when one of the people there expressed something that I later found again in a quote from Anatole France:

Tous les changements, même les plus souhaités ont leur mélancolie, car ce que nous quittons, c'est une partie de nous-mêmes; il faut mourir à une vie pour entrer dans une autre.

from "Le Crime de Sylvestre Bonnard" and the same in an English translation:

All changes, even the most longed for, have their melancholy; for what we leave behind us is a part of ourselves; we must die to one life before we can enter another.

I had found the English version somewhere in my collection of mail .sig(nature) files. Found a source for the original French quote on wikiquotes (full text of the book on Project Gutenberg in English translation). Being someone who lives (again) far from where he came from (a vague definition with me, as it is in itself far from where I was born), having left friends behind many times, I know this sentiment all too well.