Quotes About Metamorphosis

Metamorphosis has always been the greatest symbol of change for poets and artists. Imagine that you could be a caterpillar one moment and a butterfly the next.

What is lovely never dies, But passes into other loveliness.

It's not the Dark Destroyer no more, because everything synonymous with the Dark Destroyer I don't want to know.

In her novel Regeneration, Pat Barker writes of a doctor who 'knew only too well how often the early stages of change or cure may mimic deterioration. Cut a chrysalis open, and you will find a rotting caterpillar. What you will never find is that mythical creature, half caterpillar, half butterfly, a fit emblem of the human soul, for those whose cast of mind leads them to seek such emblems. No, the process of transformation consists almost entirely of decay.

When you were small, you would swing yourself up legs-first, but now you have to stick your head through the opening in the floor and then hoist the rest. You certainly have grown, you tell yourself.

New York is a city that will be replaced by another city.

Sweet as sugar. And then he hardened. I can't 'splain it another way. He was like sugar in a jar that hardens. And after a while you take it out, and it is one rock-solid lump.

I had been wrong about him Tuesday when I figured that he had always been fifty years old and always would be. He had already put on at least five years, and he had shrunk. Instead of tagging him a neat little squirt I would now call him a magnified beetle.

Art can only progress towards its own self-annihilation.

What the caterpillar calls the end of the world, the master calls a butterfly.

There is nothing in a caterpillar that tells you it's going to be a butterfly.

As clouds race towards their own release from form, they are replenshied by the mutable process which created them. They drift, not into continuity, but into other, temporary states of being, all of which eventually decompose to melt into the surrounding air. They rise and fall like vaporous civilizations....

Yes! And what do all good stories do?" There are no takers. Neelay holds up his arms and extends his palms in the oddest gesture. In another moment, leaves will grow from his fingers. Birds will come and nest in them. "They kill you a little. They turn you into something you weren't.

SIH HSUIN BECOMES WINSTON MA: a simple engineering fix. In myths, people turn into all kinds of things. Birds, animals, trees, flowers, rivers. Why not an American named Winston?

Noisy aspens and remnant birches, forests of cottonwoods and poplars, take up the chorus: The world is turning into a new thing.

Remember finally, that the ashes on your forehead are created from the burnt palms of last Palm Sunday. New beginnings invariably come from old false things that are allowed to die.

People who have been initiated broke through in what felt like breaking down.

How much can you change and get away with it, before you turn into someone else, before it's some kind of murder?

In death, we never much resemble who we were in life, for all the mystery is gone.

Sometimes small things can become very large, indeed.

He'd gone from sixteen to seventy-five in a matter of seconds, but the old-man smell happened instantly, like boom. Congratulations! You stink!

How old is she now? he asked. Hard to say. She was a tree for a while. Now she's immortal.

That is exactly how people beat Chinese handcuffs. They turn into iguanas.

I would've hit the water hard, but at the last second I changed into a falcon. ~Carter Kane