Quotes About Transformation

All that is constant about the California of my childhood is the rate at which it disappears.

You sit down to dinner and life as you know it ends.

I have already lost touch with a couple of people I used to be.

We forget all too soon the things we thought we could never forget. We forget the loves and the betrayals alike, forget what we whispered and what we screamed, forget who we were. I have already lost touch with a couple of people I used to be; one of them, a seventeen-year old, presents little threat, although it would be of some interest to me to know again what it feels like to sit on a river levee drinking vodka-and-orange-juice and listening to Les Paul and Mary Ford and their echoes.

Some time later there was a song on all the jukeboxes on the Upper East Side that went but where is the school-girl who used to be me, and if it was late enough at night I used to wonder that.

A place belongs forever to whoever claims it hardest, remembers it most obsessively, wrenches it from itself, shapes it, renders it, loves it so radically that he remakes it in his image

people we used to be, whether we find them attractive company or not.

But time brings odd mutations, and there we were.

la historia de un hombre que regresa a un lugar que amó y se encuentra a las tres de la madrugada haciendo frente al conocimiento de que él ya no es la persona que amó ese lugar y ya no volverá a ser nunca la persona que había querido ser.

I have already lost touch with a couple people I used to be.

All I knew then was what I wasn't, and it took me some years to discover what I was.

Hero-ology, Spell-ology, Revenge-ology, Beast-ology, and Beautyology.

we live blindly. We repeat the same mistakes by rote until an emotional punch to the gut brings us up short. ...Sometimes it requires intense pain before we can take a good hard look at ourselves, before we ask the important questions. ... Who am I? What is important? What do I believe? What do I want?

That was the way to start, he knew: with unsureness. Only when the mind cracked open its own worldly certainties could a glimpse of light appear.

Long before I became a feminist in any explicit way, I had turned from writing love stories about women in which women were losers, and adventure stories about men in which the men were winners, to writing adventure stories about a woman in which the woman won. It was one of the hardest things I ever did in my life.

Putting our earthly nature to death isn't something we can do apart from God. It isn't meant to be a renovation we attempt on our own or a charade we play at until it becomes reality. Believe me, I've tried it that way, and it just doesn't work. And yet, while the Holy Spirit wants to help us, we must initiate the act. For in a very real sense, only we can choose to die.

Like a flower she grows towards the light, without thinking or examining the process which moves her to do so. I wish I could do the same.

You see, I do believe in miracles. I, who have passed through fire. I do believe.

Our lives are like these things I make. Turn 'em, build 'em, bake 'em in fire. That's what you've been, son. Baked and fired. But a pot don't have the right to choose whether he be for water, wine, or just left empty. You have, son. You have.

C'è un fascino indescrivibile nel maneggiare anonimi blocchi di copertura grezza, nel grattugiarli a mano nei grandi paioli di ceramica - non uso mai il miscelatore elettrico - e dopo nel sciogliere, mescolare, provare ogni mossa accurata con il termometro per lo zucchero fino a quando si raggiunge la giusta gradazione di calore per ottenere la trasformazione.

Pensate all'immagine che da una lastra fotografica si trasferisce sulla carta, diventando sempre più scura, da bianca all'oro più pallido, da ambra a seppia. Immaginate la luna mentre gira lentamente il profilo sottile fino a diventare piena, trascinando con sè le maree. Immaginate la crisalide quando schiude la bara dura della larva e mostra le ali al sole. L'insetto perfetto piange il bruco che un tempo è stato? E se ne ricorda?

Oh, she understood wine, my mother. She understood the sweetening process, the fermentation, the seething and mellowing of life in the bottle, the darkening, the slow transformations, the birth of a new vintage in a bouquet of aromas like a magician's bunch of paper flowers. If only she had had time and patience enough for us. A child is not a fruit tree. She understood that too late. There is no recipe to take a child into sweet, safe adulthood. She should have known that.

Take from it what you most need and pass it on to someone else, for this is how stories — and selkie — move on; changing, unchanging, like the tides, taking with them what they can and scattering tales to the four winds, like seeds upon the ocean.

Caelum non animum mutant, qui trans mare currant. They change the sky, not their souls, that run across the ocean.