Quotes About Transformation

Life was good. It was funny how just when you thought you knew yourself through and through, you stumbled on a new kind of strength, a fresh reserve of power inside you that you never knew you had, and all at once you found yourself burning a little brighter and hotter than you ever had before.

Everyone was pretending to be bored to tears, or maybe they actually were, but Quentin wasn't. He was unexpectedly happy, though he instinctively kept it a secret. In fact he was so fully of joy and relief he could barely breathe. Like a receding glacier the ordeal of the Beast had left behind a changed world, jumbled and scraped and raw, but the earth was finally putting up new green shoots again.

Do you know, I had almost lost faith in the goddess? I almost stopped believing in Her. But I realized I had to become something. I had to take what was done to me and use it to make myself into what I wanted to be. And I wanted this. And when I called Her, the goddess came.

There are things that a man must do, that a god may not. He who completes a quest does not merely find something. He becomes something.

a silver statue of a bird that seemed to be twitching. "Poor little thing," he said, petting it with his large hands. "Someone tried to change it into a real bird, but it got stuck in between. It thinks it's alive, but it's much too heavy to fly." The metal bird cheeped feebly, a dry, clicking noise like an empty pistol. Fogg sighed and put it away in a drawer. "It's always launching itself out of windows and landing in the hedges.

He had finished his quest, and it had cost him everything and everyone he'd done it for. The equation balanced perfectly: all canceled out. And without his crown, or his throne, or Fillory, or even his friends, he had no idea who he was. But something had changed inside him too. He didn't understand it yet, but he felt it. Somehow, even though he'd lost everything, he felt more like a king now than he ever did when he was one. Not like a toy king. He felt real.

June ripened into July, then burst and withered and dried and became August.

Remember what a good girl I was? Remember how meek and pleasing I was to everybody? For the first time in my life I could just be.

Life was briskly and efficiently stripping Quentin of his last delusions about himself, one by one, shucking them off in firm hard jerks like wet clothes, leaving him naked and shivering.

He was finally on the other side, down the rabbit hole, through the looking glass. He was going to sign the papers and he was going to be a motherfucking magician.

a book that did what books always promised to do and never actually quite did: get you out, really out, of where you were and into somewhere better.

He felt like he was coming back to life too. Not that he'd been dead, just ... not quite alive. Something else.

Tomorrow I'll take you out to see the gold beetles. They're amazing: they eat dirt and poop out gold ore.

it's like he's opening the covers of a book, but a book that did what books always promised to do and never actually quite did: get you out, really out, of where you were and into somewhere better.

You need to do more than memorize, Quentin. You must learn the principles of magic with more than your head. You must learn them with your bones, with your blood, your liver, your heart, your deek." He grabbed his crotch through his dressing gown and gave it a shake.

He was going to sign the papers and he was going to be a motherfucking magician.

Once in a while an entire sub-sub-category that had long been thought safely dormant would take wing with an indescribable papery susurrus.

I think you're magicians because you're unhappy. A magician is strong because he feels pain. He feels the difference between what the world is and what he would make of it. Or what did you think that stuff in your chest was? A magician is strong because he hurts more than others. His wound is his strength. "Most people carry that pain around inside them their whole lives, until they kill the pain by other means, or until it kills them. But

But at the same time I could feel the ordeal remaking me. You know? Like the desert itself was smelting me, melting away weaknesses and impurities and extracting what was hard and true.

Quentin's scales, he couldn't help but notice in passing, were the shiny metallic blue of a bitchin' muscle car.

She was used to doing a lot with a little. Now that she had a lot, she was going to work wonders with it. And she did.

cash was like a magic all its own: a way of turning one thing into another thing, producing something out of nothing, and he worked that magic all over town.

Two-thirds of his collarbone, and most of his right shoulder and biceps, now appeared to be composed of a smooth, highly polished fruitwood

I was perfectly happy where I was, deliquescing, atom by atom, amid a riot of luxury.