Quotes About Transformation

And I wanted to be able to listen, to digest bloody images, to paint them flat and unremarkable onto the vase of posterity. To release him from it and make him Achilles again

It wasn't my only gift. I had found a seasoned piece of ash and began to fashion it secretly, carving off its soft layers. Over nearly two months a shape had emerged—a boy playing the lyre, head raised to the sky, mouth open, as if he were singing. I had it with me now, as I walked.

Be witness to the power of Circe, witch of Aiaia.

Teti: "Non sono riuscita a far di lui un dio" Patroclo: "Ma hai fatto lui

I have heard that men who live by a waterfall cease to hear it——in such a way did I learn to live beside the rushing torrent of his doom. The days passed, and he lived. The months passed, and I could go a whole day without looking over the precipice of his death. The miracle of a year, then two.

I'm always this colour,' I said. 'Because I used to be made of stone'.

Losses are not retrievable. They are not setbacks. In the blankness left, perhaps other things come, a new thing, a different shape for the last thing's recollection.

No matter who you are, no matter what you did, no matter where you've come from, you can always change, become a better version of yourself.

You're never too old to become younger.

I used to be Snow White, but I drifted.

You are never too old to become younger!

I don't have ugly ducklings turning into swans in my stories. I have ugly ducklings turning into confident ducks.

I had no idea one ingredient could transform a perfume like that." "That's precisely where the magic is," said Polly, smelling her blotter again. "This is seriously sexy now. Do you like it, Guy?" His eyes were closed again, nose down to the smell, and he made a noise in the back of his throat, almost like a growl. "I love it," he said, opening his eyes and grinning at them.

You pass as a guy; I, as pregnant. Our waiter cheerfully tells us about his family, expresses delight in ours. On the surface, it may have seemed as though your body was becoming more and more "male," mine, more and more "female." But that's not how it felt on the inside. On the inside, we were two human animals undergoing transformations beside each other, bearing each other loose witness. In other words, we were aging.

A becoming in which one never becomes, a becoming whose rule is neither evolution nor asymptote but a certain turning, a certain turning inward, turning into my own / turning on in / to my own self / at last / turning out of the / white cage, turning out of the / lady cage / turning at last.

There is nothing you can throw at me that I cannot metabolize, no thing impervious to my alchemy.

As it turned out, my fears were unwarranted. Which isn't to say you haven't changed. But the biggest change of all has been a measure of peace. The peace is not total, but in the face of a suffocating anxiety, a measure of peace is no small thing.

I have been trying to place myself in a land of great sunshine, and abandon my will therewith.

I invent her, then, as a woman emerging from the sea. A tall man meets here on the black sand. You've come back, he says. Can barely see her in the sea-light. They make love there, and become horses. As night grows black they become weeds

I feel at once the need to die and be reborn one thousand years ago.

Whereas an art that affects you in the moment, but which you then find hard to remember, is straining to bring you to another level. It offers images or ideas from that other level, that other way of being, which is why you find them hard to remember. But it has opened you to the possibility of growing into what you are not yet, which is exactly what art should do.

I have sometimes found myself wondering if the same principle applies in other realms— if seeing a particularly astonishing shade of blue, for example, or letting a particularly potent person inside you, could alter you irrevocably, just to have seen or felt it. In which case, how does one know when, or how, to refuse? How to recover?

Really, though, it's more than a perfect match, as that implies a kind of stasis. Whereas we're always moving, shape-shifting. No matter what we do, it always feels dirty without feeling lousy.

Nonetheless, as Billie Holiday knew, it remains the case that to see blue in deeper and deeper saturation is eventually to move toward darkness.