Quotes About Transformation

Then all the sharp intricate peaks on the monitor smoothed out to clean straight lines and my father made a terrible growling sound, but even without any of that I would have known, because the air around us had split open and whirled and re-formed itself and there was one less person in the room.

My memories of them had rubbed thin with overuse, worn to frail color transparencies flickering on the walls of my mind: Jamie scrambling intent and surefooted up to a high branch, Peter's laugh arcing out of the trompe-l'oeil dazzle of green ahead. Through some slow sea change they had become children out of a haunting storybook, bright myths from a lost civilization; it was hard to believe they had once been real and my friends.

What I saw transformed with a click like a shaken kaleidoscope. I stopped falling in love with her and started to like her immensely.

I needed to go into that bare, with nothing from my own life on my body, the way woodcutters' children in fairy tales have to leave their protections behind to enter the enchanted castle; the way votaries in old religions used to go naked to their initiation rites.

She was older, no longer the wicked limber girl with the stalled Vespa, but no less beautiful to me for that: whatever elliptical beauty Cassie possesses has always lain not in the vulnerable planes of color and texture but deeper, in the polished contours of her bones.

profound trauma—and clearly this would qualify—can transform a person's entire character, you know: turn a strong person into a trembling wreck, a happy nature melancholic, a gentle one vicious. It can shatter you into a million pieces, and rearrange the remains in an utterly unrecognizable form.

That girl in the photo isn't one solid person, feet set solidly in one irrevocable life; that girl is an illusive firework-burst made of light reflecting off a million different possibilities.

Honestly it wasn't Susanna I was tired of, not really; it was me, wronged innocent, white knight, cunning investigator, killer, selfish oblivious dick, petty provocateur, take your pick, what does it matter? it'll all change again

I thought of Mark's reckless eyes—The only things I believe in are out on that there dig—and then of revolutionaries waving ragged, gallant banners, of refugees swimming swift nighttime currents; of all those who hold life so light, or the stakes so dear, that they can walk steady and open-eyed to meet the thing that will take or transform their lives and whose high cold criteria are far beyond our understanding.

I felt different, changing. Like today was my day, if I could just figure out how. Like danger, but my danger, sweet tricky urgent luck, tumbling through the air, heads or tails?

She had had the sense and the guts to let go of her ruined old self and walk away so simply, start over again, start fresh and clean as morning.

I was doing exactly the same thing as Aislinn: getting lost so deep inside the story in my head, I couldn't see past its walls to the outside world. I feel those walls shift and start to waver, with a rumble that shakes my bones from the inside out. I feel my face naked to the ice-flavored air that pours through the cracks and keeps coming. A great shiver is building in my back.

the air around us had split open and whirled and re-formed itself and there was one less person in the room.

Leave her to sleep, sliding away forever down her secret underground river, while breathing seasons spun dandelion seeds and moon phases and snowflakes above her head.

He picked out a card, examined it, tucked it back. "The thing is, I suppose," he said, "that one gets into the habit of being oneself. It takes some great upheaval to crack that shell and force us to discover what else might be underneath." And looking up smiling, pushing his glasses up his nose: "And with all that philosophizing, I've forgotten whose go it was. Did I just put . . .

Chris had cracked the four of them right across. Even after he was gone, the fault line he made had kept widening, deep under the surface, while everything up on top shone beautiful as new. We were just finishing the job he had begun.

The wych elm's whole crown was gone, only the trunk left, thick stubs of branches poking out obscenely. It should have looked pathetic, but instead it had a new, condensed force: some great malformed creature, musclebound and nameless, huddled in the darkness waiting for a sign.

Wir kannten uns, seit wir in Windeln gesteckt hatten, aber das war der Sommer, als sich alles veränderte, so schnell, dass wir nicht mehr mitkamen.

She wasn't that smart after all. Susanna, of all people, should have realized how those great upheavals can crack bedrock, shift tectonic plates, transform the landscape beyond recognition.

The moment when Cassie had said, "We'll have it," had set in motion some unstoppable tectonic shift; familiar things were cracking open and twisting inside out before my eyes, the world turning beautiful and dangerous as a bright spinning blade.

None of them say anything. They keep their eyes closed. They lie still and feel the world change shape around them and inside them, feel the boundaries set solid; feel the wild left outside, to prowl perimeters till it thins into something imagined, something forgotten.

The thing is (…) that one gets into the habit of being oneself. It takes some great upheaval to crack that shell and force us to discover what else might be underneath.

In traditional science fiction, according to Robert Heinlein, there are three lines of thought that drive writers: "What if—" [What if we built a colony on Mars?] "If only—" [If only we could fix past mistakes by travelling through time.] And "If this goes on—

Maidens who stay maidens turn into saints. Old women become sorceresses. Tough jobs, both of these.