Quotes About Transformation

There were only seven years between the first and last Beatles albums. That's nothing, seven years, when you think of how their hairstyles changed and their music changed. Some bands now go seven years without hardly bothering to do anything.

Surely we all occasionally buy books because of a daydream we're having--a little fantasy about the people we might turn into one day, when our lives are different, quieter, more introspective, and when all the urgent reading, whatever that might be, has been done. We never arrive at that point, needless to say....

He was a story at least, even if he never became anything else.

It had only taken me six years to change from a ten-year-old to a sixteen-year-old; surely six years wasn't long enough for a transformation of that magnitude.

How had I managed to edit all this out in the intervening years? How had I managed to turn her into the answer to all the world's problems?

like being able to see how I got from Deep Purple to Howlin' Wolf in twenty-five moves; I am no longer pained by the memory of listening to "Sexual Healing" all the way through a period of enforced celibacy, or embarrassed by the reminder of forming a rock club at school, so that I and my fellow fifth-formers could get together and talk about Ziggy Stardust and Tommy.

Taking your husband's name when you became his wife was one thing. Taking your town's name when you became its beauty queen was something else again.

Identity is the history that has gone into bone and blood and reshaped the flesh. Identity is not what we were but what we have become what we are at this moment.

Before 1521 we could have been anything and everything not Filipino; after 1565 we can be nothing but Filipino.

Once the little squirt has found a suitable home, it attaches itself soundly to the spot and then, needing it no longer, reabsorbs its own brain (a feat that arouses much admiration among university professors, Steve Jones quips).

Then, in the early spring of AD 33, he did something that changed things entirely, something really annoying: he raised a man from the dead.

There were three things that could fundamentally change a person: time, alcohol, and managing a bureaucracy.

She could become anyone she wishes. But how will she know she is still herself?

When I knew what I had to do / I took all my notebooks, all my manuscripts / and ate them page by page / so I could take my words with me

The flowers need watering the silver needs a shine. Daughter is a magnet drawn back to where she was last safe. She touches the tablecloth like a talisman. Tell me who I was. Tell me what I've become.

Will you have me, though I come to you corrupt? My armor tarnished with sin and decadence.

When at last I came upon the right book, the feeling was violent: it blew open a hole in me that made life more dangerous because I couldn't control what came through it.

In the beginning it was always the same. But. I kept trying. Then one day I accidentally moved as the shutter clicked. A shadow appeared. The next time I saw the outline of my face, and a few weeks later my face itself. It was the opposite of disappearing.

She was gone, and all that was left was the space where you'd grown around her, like a tree that grows around a fence.

In the months after the relationship ends, a person can seem to grow at a lightning rate, like in a nature documentary where weeks of footage is run at high speed to show a plant unfurling in seconds, but in reality the person has been growing all along, under the surface, and it is only in their new freedom, in their hair-raising aloneness, that the person can allow for these underground things to break through and unfurl themselves in the light.

The air felt different in my lungs. The world no longer looked the same. You change and then you change again. You become a dog, a bird, a plant that always leans to the left. Only now that my son was gone did I realize how much I'd been living for him. When I woke up in the morning it was because he existed, and when I ordered food in the night it was because he existed, and when I wrote my book it was because he existed to read it.

Childhood is a process of slowly recomposing oneself out of the borrowed materials of the world.

Doesn't part of the awe that fills us when we confront the unknown come from understanding that, should it at last flood into us and become known, we would be altered?

No sé qué decir de él sino que me ha conmovido del modo en que uno desea que lo conmueva cada libro que empieza a leer. Quiero decir que, de algún modo que casi no sabría describir, me ha transformado.