Quotes About Transformation

Those first few weeks are an unearthly season. From the outside you remain so ordinary, no one can tell from looking that you have experienced an earthquake of the soul. You've been torn asunder, invested with an ancient, incomprehensible magic. It's the one thing that we never quite get over: that we contain our own future.

In my opinion, mountains don't move. They only look changed when you look down on them from a greaty height.

She looked like Cinderella in reverse, stepped out from her life at the ball for a day of misery among the ashes.

I was a skeleton with flesh and clothes and thoughts.

When men want to kiss you they act like they are just on the brink of doing something that's going to change the whole wide world.

I looked hard out the window and understood suddenly that what I saw was full of color. A watercolor wash of summer light lay on the Catalina Mountains. The end of a depression is that clear: it's as if you have been living underwater, but never realized it until you came up for air.

All morning I'd felt the strange disjuncture that comes from reconnecting with your past. There's such a gulf between yourself and who you were then, but people speak to that other person and it answers; it's like having a stranger as a house guest in your skin.

El tiempo cura y nos mata. Time cures you first, and then it kills you.

In Congo, a slashed jungle quickly becomes a field of flowers, and scars become the ornaments of a particular face. Call it oppression, complicity, stupefaction, call it what you like, it doesn't matter. Africa swallowed the conqueror's music and sang a new song of her own.

To live is to be marked, to live is to change, to die one hundred deaths.

You can't just sashay into the jungle aiming to change it all over to the Christian style, without expecting the jungle to change you right back.

Here, all we can ever be is everything we've been.

Crisis is opportunity.

The pale-skinned boy stood shivering in water up to his waist, thinking these were the most awful words in any language: You will be surprised. The moment when everything is about to change.

The leopards will walk upright like men on our paths. The snakes will come out of the ground and seek our houses instead of hiding in their own.

Both of us were spared, in body at least, by the stone walls of our different imprisonments, and altered in spirit, in ways we're still struggling to understand.

Barbara Kingsolver

At the start of the service they did that song about Amazing God, and I felt exactly the opposite: I once could see but now I'm blind, was found but now I'm

People change, she said. Not everything stays with you all your life.

To live is to be marked, she said without speaking. To live is to change, to die one hundred deaths.

Certain ramshackle aspects of Dellarobia had also gone undercover, it seemed, just like the snow-covered barns. Some defects lurked, but for now her way seemed clear. She'd made plans.

But a thing grows teeth once it's put into words. Now I felt that worm digging

At some point in the evening Dellarobia had stopped being amazed that Ovid had turned into someone new, and understood he had become himself, in the presence of his wife. With the sense of a great weight settling, she recognized marriage. Not the precarious risk she'd balanced for years against forbidden fruits, something easily lost in a brittle moment by flying away or jumping a train to ride off on someone else's steam. She was not about to lose it. She'd never had it.

a good story doesn't just copy life, it pushes back on it. It's