Quotes About Transformation

Sometimes a reckoning comes of all the lives we have lost, and sometimes we take it upon ourselves to burn them to ashes.

what I should have realised, too, on those northern roads, is that what the mind does after losing one's father isn't just to pick new fathers from the world, but pick new selves to love them with.

I watch the cranes scratching their beaks with their toes and think of how the starling flocks that pour into reed beds like grain turn all of a sudden into birds perching on bowed stems, bright-eyed, their feathers spangled with white spots that glow like small stars. I marvel at how confusion can be resolved by focusing on the things from which it is made. The magic of the flocks is this simple switch between geometry and family.

For weeks I felt I was made of dully burning metal.

Memory and love and magic. What happened over the years of my expeditions as a child was a slow transformation of my landscape over time into what naturalists call a local patch, glowing with memory and meaning.

You are exercising what the poet Keats called your chameleon quality, the ability to 'tolerate a loss of self and a loss of rationality by trusting in the capacity to recreate oneself in another character or another environment'. Such a feat of imaginative recreation has always come easily to me. Too easily. It's part of being a watcher, forgetting who you are and putting yourself in the thing you are watching.

For one awful, long moment she is hanging head-downward, wings open, like a turkey in a butcher's shop, only her head is turned right-way-up and she is seeing more than she has ever seen before in her whole short life. Her world was an aviary no larger than a living room. Then it was a box. But now it is this; and she can see everything:

But what I should have realised, too, on those northern roads, is that what the mind does after losing one's father isn't just to pick new fathers from the world, but pick new selves to love them with.

And now, holding the card in my hands and feeling its edges, all the grief had turned into something different. It was simply love.

I'd turned myself into a hawk – taken all the traits of goshawks in the books and made them my own.

White had learned that going back in time was a way of fixing things; uncovering past traumas, revisiting them and defusing their power. Now he was going back in time with the hawk.

The hawk was everything I wanted to be: solitary, self-possessed, free from grief, and numb to the hurts of human life. I was turning into a hawk.

That the boy in short trousers was already the man they'd known, the man who had always got the picture, had always pulled the story from the jaws of defeat.

You are exercising what the poet Keats called your chameleon quality, the ability to 'tolerate a loss of self and a loss of rationality by trusting in the capacity to recreate oneself in another character or another environment'.

Out of the ugliness of the ironworks lepers will eat, children will be born, their parents will grow old.

Over the course of twenty years, however, science has evolved in breathtaking fashion.

But then you're put back together again, in a wholly different order . . ." "And it hurts so much you don't know if the new order will work." "It'll heal. It has to hurt before it heals, don't you think?" He

I can't explain, maybe it isn't something that needs explaining, how the sight of a broken cage just puts you up on stilts. The promise that the cage will always be empty, that its days as a jailhouse are done.

She didn't look into the mirror itself. She was becoming someone, it seemed. She had read somewhere that you only became a woman once your mother had died. But that wasn't what worried her. She worried about becoming as perfect as the person shown to her on paper in Lily's studio.

Edith Wharton novels for two Henry James novels, Lucia Berlin's short stories for John Cheever's, Elaine Dundy's The Dud Avocado for Dany Laferrière's I Am a Japanese Writer, Dubravka UgreÅ¡i?'s Lend Me Your Character for Gogol's How the Two Ivans Quarreled and Other Stories, Maggie Nelson's Jane: A Murder for Capote's In Cold Blood, Lisa Tuttle's The Pillow Friend for The Collected Ghost Stories of M. R. James.

Lily's eye transformed places. She looked at structures and they turned inside out and offered her their desolate jigsaw patterns. Once

Safiye looked as if she was formed of fire herself, particles of flame dancing the flesh of her arm into existence. That or she was returning to fire.

Miss Foxe's other passion was fairy tales. She loved the transformations in them. Everybody was in disguise, or on their way to becoming something else. And all was overcome by order in the end. Love could not prevail if the order of the tale didn't wish it, and neither could hatred, nor grief, nor cunning. If you were the first of three siblings, then you were going to make a big mistake, and that was that. If you were the third sibling, you couldn't fail.

I had never seen her wearing lipstick, but knew better than to say so in case she did that mysterious alchemy some girls do and transformed the comment into my accusing her of having gained weight.