Quotes About Transformation

Burn me," she said finally. "Turn me to ash." And so we did, though the ashes of her body were not what I'd expected. They weren't like ashes from a wood fire, silky and fine as sand. They were like pale pebbles mixed with a gritty gray gravel. Some chunks were so large I could see clearly that they'd once been bones.

The question isn't whether you should stay or go. The question is: How would your life be transformed if you choose to love this time with all your intelligence?

These things are your becoming.

This was once an empty bowl that took hundreds of years to fill. But hard as I tried, I couldn't see them in my mind's eye. Not the mountain or the wasteland or the empty bowl. They simply were not there anymore. There was only the stillness and silence of that water: what a mountain and a wasteland and an empty bowl turned into after the healing began.

If it is impossible for you to go on as you were before, so you must go on as you never have.

There was the woman I was before my mom died and the one I was now, my old life sitting on the surface of me like a bruise. The real me was beneath that, pulsing under all the things I used to think I knew.

I felt better than I'd ever felt in all of my life, now that the trail had taught me how horrible I could feel.

life is long, that people both change and remain the same, that every last one of us will need to fuck up and be forgiven, that we're all just walking and walking and walking and trying to find our way, that all roads lead eventually to the mountaintop.

It's the place where things are born, where they begin. Think about how a black hole absorbs energy and then releases it as something new and alive.

To us, they are not so much who they are as who they will become.

Of course, heroin could be had there too, I thought. But the thing was, I didn't want it. Maybe I never really had. I'd finally come to understand what it had been: a yearning for a way out, when actually what I had wanted to find was a way in. I was there now. Or close.O

The question isn't whether you should stay or go. The question is: How would your life be transformed if you chose to love this time with all your intelligence?

Inhabit the beauty that lives in your beastly body and strive to see the beauty in all the other beasts.

I set my toothbrush down, then leaned into the mirror and stared into my own eyes. I could feel myself disintegrating inside myself like a past-bloom flower in the wind. Every time I moved a muscle, another petal of me blew away. Please, I thought. Please.O

It seemed as alive in its dying as a hive of bees was in its life.

Difficulty, solitude, and risk are the three things that all rites of passage have in common. It's because putting ourselves in situations where we must do hard things that scare us without anyone there to intervene pushes us beyond what we previously thought ourselves capable of. It expands our perception of our own courage, strength, and endurance. It forges us out of who we were before into the person we will become.

that life is long, that people both change and remain the same, that every last one of us will need to fuck up and be forgiven, that we're all just walking and walking and walking and trying to find our way, that all roads lead eventually to the mountaintop.

Whatever happens to you belongs to you. Make it yours. Feed it to yourself even if it feels impossible to swallow. Let it nurture you, because it will. I have learned this over and over and over again.

It's one of the hardest things you'll ever have to do. And you're going to bawl your head off doing it. But I promise you it will be okay. Your tears will be born of grief, but also of relief. You will be better for them. They will make you harder, softer, cleaner, dirtier. Free. A glorious something else awaits.

There are so many tiny revolutions in a life, a million ways we have to circle around ourselves to grow and change and be okay. And perhaps the body is our final frontier. It's the one place we can't leave. We're there till it goes. Most women and some men spend their lives trying to alter it, hide it, prettify it, make it what it isn't, or conceal it for what it is. But what if we didn't do that?

she said things I already knew but needed to hear again. How in darkness, we are waiting. How it is in the times that we must search hardest for the light that we are most profoundly transformed.

But transformation often demands that we separate our emotional responses from our rational minds. Your rational mind knows that men leave their wives for younger women all the time. Your emotional response is you can't believe your father did. Your rational mind knows that it's hard for even strong, ethical people to sustain a long-term monogamy. Your emotional response is you're shocked your own parents failed to do so.

Transformation often demands that we separate our emotional responses from our rational minds

But transformation often demands that we separate our emotional responses from our rational minds.