Quotes About Transformation

A snake can shed its skin but it still remains a snake.

He had started out the way nearly all writers do, and I'd seen it a hundred times--amateurs transformed into gibbering wrecks by actually being published; what once they'd done for fun ruined forever by the burden of expectation, the hope of sales and good reviews and riches, hobbyists turned authors made bitter by the knowledge that they'd missed their main chance.

A journey is not a cure. It brings an illusion, only, of change, and becomes at best a spartan comfort

A revolutionary is only a terrorist until he's achieved his revolution. After that he's a hero. An outcome makes a morality...

The dark laminated strands heaved, separated and became fiery filaments, then grey stamens of ash upon a glowing corolla.

The mind has exactly the same power as the hands: not merely to grasp the world, but to change it.

It is a long way from Mr. Polly's discovery (If you don't like your life you can change it) to: There is no way out or round or through.

Culture is always on the move.

The world, Left Coasters insisted, can be easily and frequently reinvented.

I've changed my mind, and when we're finished, Victoria, you won't remember your own name... let alone Viogets. ~ Max

Somewhere along the way, she'd ceased being Miss Stoker and had become Evaline. Not quite a friend, but no longer a stranger.

Best to let the broken glass be broken glass, let it splinter into smaller pieces and dust and scatter. Let the cracks between things widen until they are no longer cracks but the new places for things. That was where they were now. The world wasn't ending: it had ended and now they were in the new place. They could not recognize it because they had never seen it before.

Who are you after you finish something this magnificent—in constructing it you have also journeyed through it, to the other side. On one end there was who you were before you went underground, and on the other end a new person steps out into the light. The up-top world must be so ordinary compared to the miracle beneath, the miracle you made with your sweat and blood. The secret triumph you keep in your heart.

On one end there was who you were before you went underground, and on the other end a new person steps out into the light.

Cherish your old apartments and pause for a moment when you pass them. Pay tribute, for they are the caretakers for your reinventions.

They will have to destroy this city once we deliver the black box. The current bones will not accommodate the marrow of the device. They will have to raze the city and cart off the rubble to less popular boroughs and start anew.

Crossing a single street transformed the way people talked, determined the size and condition of the homes, the dimension and character of the dreams.

People get rid of plenty when they move--sometimes they're changing not just places but personalities.

Nowdays, Rosie the Rivetere was a former soccer mom who had just opened her own catering business when Last Night came down and her husband and kids were eaten by a parking attendant at the local megamall's discount- appliance emporium.

When they were done hauling, the boys had performed surgery—cut the rotten tissue from the house and plopped it on the tray of the curb.

The paint hung in thin rinds from the ceiling, and the sooty windows turned every hour overcast.

On the bed of damp earth, her breathing slowed and that which separated herself from the swamp disappeared. She was free. This moment. She had to go back.

She threw him a bone about the movement: 'Lyndon Johnson's carrying on President Kennedy's civil rights bill. And if that good old boy is doing right, you know things is changing. Be a whole different thing when you come home, Elwood.

She gulped the air like water, the night sky the best meal she had ever had, the starts made succulent and ripe after her time below.