Quotes About Transformation

Frankie had always played the same songs, but they had nonetheless always been different, changing in a thousand different ways that Kevin could scarcely name.

Christa hardly recognized her student. Black spandex jeans gave way to boots that rattled with lengths of chain. Leather jacket. Studded belts. A T-shirt that had been deliberately slashed into a borderline state between legality and indecency. Bandannas fluttered from ankles, elbows, wrists. Melinda had added perhaps a good six inches to her height with a teasing comb and liberal application of hairspray. Her blue eyes sparkled at Christa from within dark walls of eyeliner and shadow.

You know, Motorcycle Diaries has no incredible stories, no sudden plot twists, it doesn't play that way. It's about recognizing that instance of change and embracing it.

In light of his own new acquaintance with Kate, Rohan suddenly did not find Max's romantic agonies several months ago quite so droll as he had at the time. But he chased Kate fiercely out of his mind once again, determined that they should detect no change in his demeanor. And she had changed him. He knew it down to the core of his barbaric soul. She made him... what was that foreign word---? Oh, yes. Happy.

I know now that we never get over great losses; we absorb them, and they carve us into different, often kinder, creatures.

I know now that we never get over great losses; we absorb them, and they carve us into different, often kinder, creatures. ...We tell the story to get them back, to capture the traces of footfalls through the snow.

It's taken years for me to understand that dying doesn't end the story; it transforms it. Edits, rewrites, the blur, aand epiphany of one-way dialogue. Most of us wander in and out of one another's lives until not death, but distance, does us part-- time and space and heart's weariness are the blander executioners or human connection.

Most of all I told this story because I wanted to say something about hope and the absence of it, and how we keep going anyway. About second chances, and how they're sometimes buried amid the dross, even when you're poised for the downhill grade. The narrative can always turn out to be a different story from what you expected.

You got sober. You started work at the Globe. You started therapy. You got Clementine" (my first Samoyed). Here she gave me the side-eye and smiled. "And me, I might add.

Finding Caroline was like placing a personal ad for an imaginary friend, then having her show up at your door funnier and better than you had conceived. Apart, we had each been frightened drunks and aspiring writers and dog lovers; together, we became a small corporation.

The heart breaks open.

And yet I sensed that I had not just been pummeled by death but reshaped by it, poised now at some crucial junction between darkness and endurance, which is the realist's version of hope.

If we are lucky, we love what we love in part because the object is worth the effort. But sometimes the love itself-the elixir of desire-is enough to bestow the object with the transformative glitter it requires.

IT'S TAKEN YEARS FOR ME TO UNDERSTAND THAT dying doesn't end the story; it transforms it. Edits, rewrites, the blur and epiphany of one-way dialogue. Most of us wander in and out of one another's lives until not death, but distance, does us part—time and space and the heart's weariness are the blander executioners of human connection.

When you become a teenager, you step onto a bridge. You may already be on it. The opposite shore is adulthood. Childhood lies behind. The bridge is made of wood. As you cross, it burns behind you

Things change, people change, but that doesn't mean you should forget the past.

Nobody gets to grow old in the America they grew up in.

Pearl spent the passing days buried so deep in the musty, dusty sorcery tomes that sometimes when she emerged, she spoke in archaic english. "Hast thou a light?" she'd asked him this afternoon when her study room had grown dark with gathering clouds.

you're a whole new kind of fish.

There are two kinds of people. One kind, you can just tell by looking at them at what point they congealed into their final selves. It might be a very nice self, but you know you can expect no more suprises from it. Whereas, the other kind keep moving, changing... They are fluid. They keep moving forward and making new trysts with life, and the motion of it keeps them young. In my opinion, they are the only people who are still alive. You must be constantly on your guard against congealing.

There are things we can't undo, but perhaps there is a kind of constructive remorse that could transform regrettable acts into something of service to life.

But what we ought to fear is the kind of death that happens in life. It can happen at any time. You're going along, and then, at some point, you congeal. You know, like jelly. You're not fluid anymore. You solidify at a certain point and from then on your life is doomed to be a repetition of what you have done before.

How glibly and thoughtlessly that phrase 'make us grow' slides off our tongues. As if growth were always a happy, shapely matter: leaves unfurling, blossoms opening, hearts and minds joyously stretching toward more light. Whereas the fact of the matter was, when we asked for growth, we were asking for a mess. Exploding tempers, privately nursed little petri dishes of resentments, insecure stumblings into dangerous new places.

If we don't change, we don't grow. If we don't grow, we aren't really living.