Quotes About Transformation

Our lives change when our habits change.

Because this is what I wanted to look like. I wanted to look different. So I made myself look different—better than just fine. If you want to be something, you make a decision, and then you make it happen. It's called personal responsibility.

When they dreamed of turning iron and metal into gold, they called it alchemy. The much more far-fetched dream of turning bound sheafs of plain paper into fortunes, they call publishing

It is the real power of a book - not what is on the page, but what happens when a reader takes the pages in, makes it part of himself.

It is especially so when, on some basic, primal level, you realize that the new world in front of you is somehow the place you were meant to be all along. For a little while, all you can do is gape in wonder. And then, if you are very brave, or very foolish, you take your first step. And at some point you realize---maybe then, maybe later---that the person who stepped through the doorway isn't the same person who emerged on the other side.

Meditation is not just blissing out under a mango tree. It completely changes your brain and therefore changes what you are.

We are very much like birds that have lived too long in a cage to which we return even when we get the chance to fly away. We have grown so accustomed to our faults that we can barely imagine what life would be like without them. The prospect of change makes us dizzy.

The ultimate reason for meditating is to transform ourselves in order to be better able to transform the world.

cadenassée. Les ceps nus, noirs, tordus, ressemblent

The child who gets lost in a book can emerge from the experience a changeling.

The wonderful thing about reality is that it is highly flexible. One minute, all is doom; the next, everything is abloom with possibility.

Maybe this was what Aunt Peg meant all along - returning was a weird thing. You can never visit the same place twice. Each time, it's a different story. By the very act of coming back, you wipe our what came before.

After that, I felt like I had two lives. There was the me I had been before the attack, the one people knew and wanted to relate to. The one people wanted to comfort and fix. And there was another me, a hidden me that no one ever saw. There was a me who had tasted death. That me knew things others people didn't know.

Don-Keun was a new man. The moment they arrived, he vanished for a second. We heard muffled ecstatic screaming coming from somewhere in the back of the Waffle House kitchen, then he reappeared, his face shining with the kind of radiance usually associated with religious epiphany.

Once skin touched tile and part of her soul died, she knew what slippers were for.

She's like the Hulk," Nate explained. "But instead of transforming when she gets mad, it's when she sees crafts. And she doesn't turn big and green. She just makes crafts. So not like the Hulk, really.

The more I looked, the more Christmasy it got.

All growth demands destruction.

In living entities, nature does not permit stillness: when one ceases to grow, one proceeds to disintegrate—in the mental realm no less than in the physical.

Foreign fighters, known as muhajireen, or migrants, began streaming into town—answering the call to fight Assad, to build a state in God's name, to find some dignity and purpose in the plains of Syria that had been absent in their lives in Europe or Tunisia or Morocco or Jordan. These foreigners became the leading lights of the transformed city.

Going away isn't going to help as much as you think. The memory stays with you, and the stain. It's not something you slough off once you leave.

Whoever fights monsters," Nietzsche had said, "should see to it that in the process he does not become a monster. And when you look long into an abyss, the abyss also looks into you.

We the Readers are like Dorothy or Alice: we step into this magical world in order to return and retell the story through our own eyes, thus giving new meaning to the story as well as to our lives.

We were, to borrow from Nabokov, to experience how the ordinary pebble of ordinary life could be transformed into a jewel through the magic eye of fiction.