Quotes About Transformation

Add water, and the soil is so fertile that you could plant a pencil and harvest a book.

After all, Ignatius of Loyola, a soldier who had killed and whored and made a thorough mess of his soul, said you could judge prayer worthwhile simply if you could act more decently, think more clearly afterward. As D.W. once told him, "Son, sometimes it's enough just to act less like a shithead.

there are still times when the thief I started out to be feels more authentic to me than the priest I've been for decades. To be pulled out of a slum and educated is to be an outsider forever— He stopped talking, deeply embarrassed. Giuliani could never understand the price scholarship boys paid for their education: the inevitable alienation from your uncomprehending family, from roots, from your own first person, from the original I you once were.

Jesus Christ, Jimmy breathed, meeting the future by turning to the ancient past.

Lemme tell ya something, sweetface. I have been married at least four times, to four different men." She watched him chew that over for a moment before continuing, "They've all been named George Edwards but, believe me, the man who is waiting for me down the hall is a whole different animal from the boy I married, back before there was dirt.

Mary Doria Russell

Never more to find her where the bright waters flow...her smiles have vanished and her sweet songs flown

But who will I say you are? How will I explain you? People don't just appear out of nowhere. Lord A'mighty, Andrew exclaimed. Have you no brains? We're as alike as two peas in a pod. All we need to do is switch places.

By turning herself into a fucking machine, she has created a kind of temporary grid. But underneath, in the place of dream and feeling, she is going places that she, on the surface, would not understand.

I lock all my scaredness down in my stomach until the fear hardens into something I hardly notice. I myself harden into a person that I hardly notice.

You think you know the story so well. It's a mansion inside your head, each room just waiting to be described, but pretty much every memoirist I've ever talked to finds the walls of such rooms changing shape around her. There are shattering earthquakes, tectonic-plate-type shifts. Or it's like memory is a snow globe that invariably gets shaken so as to shroud the events inside.

Having devoted the first half of my life to the dark, I feel obliged to rever any pinpoint of light now.

They feed us the way the bread of communion does, with a nourishment that seems to form new flesh. According

I was miserable, of course, for I was seventeen, and so I swung into action and wrote a poem, and it was miserable, for that's how I thought poetry worked: you digested experience and shat literature. —William Matthews, "Mingus at the Showplace

PART I Escape from the Tropic of Squalor

personal experience has the possibility to transform both the tellers of it and the listeners to it. Just as the novel form once took up experiences of urban industrialized society that weren't being addressed in sermons or epistles or epic poems, so memoir—with its single, intensely personal voice—wrestles with family issues in a way readers of late find compelling.

I bent down the page, whose small triangle still marks the instant. Touching that triangle of yellowed paper today is like sliding my hand into the glove of my seventeen-year-old hand. Through magic, there are the Iowa fields slipping by with all the wholesome prosperity they represent. And there is my mother, not yet born into the ziplock baggie of ash my sister sent me years ago with the frank message Mom ½, written in laundry pen, since no one in our family ever stood on ceremony.

Then it hits me. I'm actually kneeling before a toilet. The throne, as other drunks call it. How many drunken nights and slungover mornings did I worship at this altar, emptying myself of poison. And yet to pray to something above me, something invisible, had—before now—seemed degrading.

Mary Kay Andrews

Weaved a different story in my head Painted it like glitter in the swamp

É por isso que, quando prego e funerais, digo que a morte é a derradeira cura, porque é na morte que nos tornamos finalmente quem somos.

Inspiration is nice, but not until we take action do we move into transformation.

Looking backward through life, one can see the points of change like great locks through which one glides on a flood wave, so smoothly, on such irresistible power that one is hardly aware of any movement. But life is never the same again. One has gone through the lock and lives on a new level.

She wondered if Howard, if Ken, would ever know love as she knew it. How would it come to them? It comes, she thought, not as affection or admiration, or any sentiment, but as if one suffered a blow, an impact; as if two elements rushed together and became one. It is all one can do to hold up under it. One is changed, and struggles along as a blinded, bewildered, changed being.