Quotes About Transformation

There came a time, however, when death ceased to be the enforcer of finitude and began to look, instead, like the last opportunity for radical transformation, the only plausible portal to the infinite.

It's the fate of most Ping-Pong tables in home basements eventually to serve the ends of other, more desperate games.

It was as if the bones and veins were working their way to the surface; as if the skin were water receding to expose shapes at the bottom of a harbor.

He was like a person in two dimensions seeking freedom in a third.

Reality is constantly changing; as the Greek philosopher Heraclitus said, you can't step into the same river twice.

You wake up one day and realize you are a different person. That seems to be how life happens, how it establishes its patterns. The adult becomes a stranger to the boy he used to be. You become distant from everybody, especially yourself, even if, in the secrecy of your heart, you feel mostly unchanged.

A childhood never fully dies. Stories of life come up through cracks in the accounts, the spaces between death sentences, the pauses in obituaries, finding light and air to grow.

Eighth grade's a distant rumor, a tabled issue, and Dylan knows from experience that the summer between might change anything, everything. He and Mingus Rude too and even Arthur Lomb for that matter are released from the paint-by-numbers page of their schooldays, from their preformatted roles as truant or victim, freed to an unspoiled summer, that inviting medium for doodling in self-transformation.

Dylan never met anyone who wasn't about to change immediately into someone else. His was a special talent for encountering persons about to shed one identity or disguise for another.

Grips slipped. Hers had from every surface. She's shaped nothing after all, only been crushed and reshaped. No wonder she felt for the brownstones, the cripples, now filling chaotically with no regard for her plan.

You can't reclaim a thing that changes as you touch it.

The test of faith is whether I can make space for difference. Can I recognize God's image in someone who is not in my image, who language, faith, ideal, are different from mine? If I cannot, then I have made God in my image instead of allowing him to remake me in his.

The only way to overcome sadness is to consume it.

The end of the world has come often, and continues to come.

We were quiet on the car ride home. I turned on the radio and found a station playing Hey Jude. It was true, I didn't want to make it bad. I wanted to take the sad song and make it better. It's just that I didn't know how.

Once you hear something, you can never return to the time before you heard it.

She wrote, I wish I could be a girl again, with a chance to live my life again. I have suffered so much more than I needed to. And the joys I have felt have not always been joyous. I could have lived differently.

And here I am, instead of there. I'm sitting in this library, thousands of miles from my life, writing another letter I know I won't be able to send, no matter how hard I try and how much I want to. How did that boy making love behind that shed become this man writing this letter at this table?

Yesterday I wanted to turn inside out.

des verstorbenen Philosophen Pinchas T., der in seiner einzigen bedeutenden Abhandlung An den Staub: vom Menschen bist du, und zum Menschen sollst du werden argumentierte, es sei theoretisch möglich, das Leben und die Kunst gegeneinander auszutauschen.

I was pretending to be a monster, and I became a monster.

Hüznü aÅŸman?n tek yolu onu tüketmektir (...)

I beseech you to forgive us, and to make us better than we are. Make us good.

At first I thought I'd walked into a tree, but then that tree became a person, who was also recovering on the ground, and then I saw that it was her and she saw that it was me...