Quotes About Transformation

The word t?l?t? means rite of growing up, becoming complete.

My husband said he wanted to have a relationship with a redhead, so I dyed my hair.

It's never to late- never to late to change your life,never to late to be happy

Have you noticed how we are presented with the same lessons, over and over and over, before a tipping point is reached? The lessons we need to learn circle round us, closing in, until finally we are ready to take them in. Take them in. Those are the words that matter, because until I had embodied the lessons I was supposed to learn, absorbed them into the warp and woof of my being, they didn't "take"; they remained a head trip and didn't lead to changes in my behavior.

I had it in my head. I thought I had it in my heart—in my body—but I didn't; not really. I couldn't. It was too scary, like stepping off a cliff without knowing if there was a trampoline below. It meant doing life differently.

For years of our lives the days pass waywardly, featureless, without meaning, without particular happiness or unhappiness. Then, like turning over a tapestry when you have only known the back of it, there is spread the pattern.

I will hear a noise, like a fish jumping, and when I look I'll see Lizzy coming to the surface, shaking off her pink scales, finding her new arms to do the breaststroke to shore.

One breath taken completely; one poem, fully written, fully read - in such a moment, anything can happen.

The heat of autumn is different from the heat of summer. One ripens apples, the other turns them to cider." [ Autumn ]

As water given sugar sweetens, given salt grows salty, we become our choices.

The desire of monks and mystics is not unlike that of artists: to perceive the extraordinary within the ordinary by changing not the world but the eyes that look… To form the intention of new awareness is already to transform and be transformed.

Good art is a truing of vision, in the way a saw is trued in the saw shop, to cut more cleanly. It is also a changing of vision. Entering a good poem, a person feels, tastes, hears, thinks, and sees in altered ways. Why ask art into a life at all, if not to be transformed and enlarged by its presence and mysterious means?

To plunge one thing into the shape or nature of another is a fundamental gesture of creative insight, part of how we make for ourselves a world more expansive, deft, fertile, and startling in richness.

You work with what you are given, the red clay of grief, the black clay of stubbornness going on after.

All writers recognize this surge of striking; in its energies the objects of the world are made new, alchemized by their passage through the imaginal, musical, world-foraging and word-forging mind. This altered vision is the secret happiness of poems, of poets. It is as if the poem encounters the world and finds in it a hidden language, a Braille unreadable except when raised by the awakened imaginative mind.

There is more and more I tell no one, strangers nor loves. This slips into the heart without hurry, as if it had never been. And yet, among the trees, something has changed. Something looks back from the trees, and knows me for who I am. from "Three Foxes by the Edge of the Field at Twilight" The Atlantic Monthly (vol. 277, no. 6, June 2016)

What is usual is not what is always. As sometimes, in old age, hearing comes back. Footsteps resume their clipped edges, birds quiet for decades migrate back to the ear. Where were they? By what route did they return? A woman mute for years forms one perfect sentence before she dies.

Enlightenment is the total sense of freedom that comes from letting go of the concept of being an individual "self". It is a long journey towards being able to trust that such freedom is possible.

Paradoxically, if we accept our own suffering and fully relate it with the suffering of others, we transform that pain into a means of liberation.

I learned this especially from sons and daughters of men who were abusive fathers. Once these fathers stopped drinking and raging, and showed that they wanted a loving relationship with their children, the grown kids I spoke with were eager to take them back into their lives.

Detroit is largely composed, today, of seemingly endless square miles of low-density failure.

if you always do what you have always done, you will always get what you have always gotten

draw on to change the circumstances she found herself in. She'd build a ladder with courage as a rung. Maybe kindness would lift her higher too. It was the image she fell asleep pondering.

Change isn't the end... It's an unfolding, the beginning of something different.