Quotes About Transformation

I read because one life isn't enough, and in the page of a book I can be anybody.

Aunt Agnes said, "It's hard to make a good Christian out of a cat.

The fraction of an ounce of beechnut now weighs more than she does. But the soil weighs just what it did, minus an ounce or two. There's no other explanation: almost all the tree's mass has come from the very air.

Trees fall with spectacular crashes. Planting is silent and growth invisible.

And you, fallen Wendy, eviscerated by the eternal recurrence of it all, hear Peter snarl at you for growing guilty and big and old...

When removed from their kind, individual human beings can change in remarkable ways .

Yes! And what do all good stories do?" There are no takers. Neelay holds up his arms and extends his palms in the oddest gesture. In another moment, leaves will grow from his fingers. Birds will come and nest in them. "They kill you a little. They turn you into something you weren't.

The boy thinks: Something slow and purposeful wants to turn every human building into soil.

What we care for, we will grow to resemble. And what we resemble will hold us, when we are us no longer...

By the time an ash has made a baseball bat, a chestnut has made a dresser.

I]t's not the world that needs saving, it's us. For us to be saved, as a lot of the very old myths say, we'll have to come home and be born again.

But then, everything on Earth was changing him. Every aggressive word from a friend over lunch, every click on his virtual farm, every species he painted, each minute of every online clip, all the stories he read at night and all the ones I told him: there was no "Robin," no one pilgrim in this procession of selves for him ever to remain the same as. The whole kaleidoscopic pageant of them, parading through time and space, was itself a work in progress.

the ill, insane, and disabled: all changed, unthinkably, over the centuries, into persons by the law.

And what do all good stories do? They kill you a little. They turn you into something you weren't.

And there's only the narrowest window of time in which to really see them, before these things that never were turn into things that have always been.

The blackest despair at the heart of them gets pressed to diamond.

Life is nothing but mutual infection. And every infecting message changes the message it infects.

What we care for, we will grow to resemble. And what we resemble will hold us, when we are us no longer. . . .

SIH HSUIN BECOMES WINSTON MA: a simple engineering fix. In myths, people turn into all kinds of things. Birds, animals, trees, flowers, rivers. Why not an American named Winston?

But Now, that next best of times, is long, and rewrites everything.

High above Adam's prison, new creatures sweep up into satellite orbit and back down to the planet's surface, obeying the old, first hungers, the primal commands - look, listen, taste, touch, feel, say, join. They gossip to one other, these new species, exchanging discoveries, as living code has exchanged itself from the beginning. They begin to link up, to fuse together, to merge their cells and form small communities. There's no saying what they might become, in seventy plus seventy years.

Down another branch, this one, she shouts, "Here's to unsuicide," and flings the cup of swirling green over the gasping audience.

The hills cast a shadow on themselves, bruise-blue turning to forgetful black. High up, [...] rocky outcrops crawl with manzanita, shedding their curling, crimson barks. Bay laurels rim the logger-made meadows. Canyons thicken with orange madrone peeling to creamy, clammy green. Coast live oaks [...] gather on the crags. And down in cool ripatian corridors smelling of silt and decaying needles, redwoods work a plan that will take a thousand years to realize [...]

La nostra vita a U. non somigliava affatto ai nostri ricordi. U. era cambiata in tutto, fuorché nei particolari. (p. 225)