Quotes About Transformation

Sow an act, reap a habit. Sow a habit, reap a character. Sow a character, reap a destiny.

Remember: at the end of the day, your job isn't to get the requirements right — your job is to change the world.

To his left he saw the other regiments, men from New York, Pennsylvania, Michigan. Men like these, he thought, just farmers and shopkeepers, and now we are soldiers, and now we are about to die.

looked watery, like it had suddenly filled

Brute force never changes people. People need to change themselves.

He had carved his face and filled the grooves with green pigment. He had forked his tongue and ground his teeth and nails into sharp points. Ying now looked like a dragon. A crazy, vengeful sixteen-year-old dragon. Malao

learning how to disappear is the best way I've found to make my true self visible to myself and others.

Would that not be the final humbling of the human condition? That the trees and birds, the fox and the rabbit, the wolf and the deer... reach a point at which they do not even notice us, as we are transformed.

Do you understand? Nothing thrives without being broken. Nothing exists without being dead first.

I doubt you will enjoy it. But that is the price of change. Someone always pays.

Once, it was different. Once, people had homes and parents and went to schools. Cities existed within countries and those countries had leaders. Travel could be for adventure or recreation, not survival. But by the time I was grown up, the wider context was a sick joke. Incredible, how a slip could become a freefall and a freefall could become a hell where we lived on as ghosts in a haunted world.

It was as if a different person put the key in the ignition and drove away from everything that was familiar. There was no going back now. There was no going forward either. He was going in sideways, sort of, and as frightening as that was, there was the thrill...

pretending often leads to becoming a reasonable facsimile of what you mimic, even if only from a distance.

What if an infection was a message, a brightness a kind of symphony? As a defense? An odd form of communication? If so, the message had not been received, would probably never be received, the message buried in the transformation itself. Having to reach for such banal answers because of a lack of imagination, because human beings couldn't even put themselves in the mind of a cormorant or an owl or a whale or a bumblebee.

There is no one with me. I am all by myself. The trees are not trees the birds are not birds and I am not me but just something that has been walking for a very long time . . .

Emanating from this giant thorn is an endless, perhaps automatic, need to assimilate and to mimic. Assimilator and assimilated interact through the catalyst of a script of words, which powers the engine of transformation.

I do not know how this thorn got here or from how far away it came, but by luck or fate or design at some point it found the lighthouse keeper and did not let him go. How long he had as it remade him, repurposed him, is a mystery. There was no one to observe, to bear witness—until thirty years later a biologist catches a glimpse of him and speculates on what he might have become. Catalyst. Spark. Engine.

Imagine these expeditions, and then recognize that they all still exist in Area X in some form, even the ones that came

The terrible thing, the thought I cannot dislodge after all I have seen, is that I can no longer say with conviction that this is a bad thing. Not when looking at the pristine nature of Area X and then the world beyond, which we have altered so much.

She liked the feeling of being winnowed down, as if there had been too much of her before, that anything unnecessary had been taken away and what was left was pure.

Perché, dopo averla rinviata in così tanti modi, credo che la mia trasformazione sarà più radicale del previsto, che potrei diventare davvero qualcosa di simile alla creatura lamentosa. A quel punto vedrò la luna vera?

and in the aftermath he'd taken back his name, asked that she call him Control again rather than John, which she respected. Some animals' shells were vital to their survival. Some animals couldn't live for long without them.

And, if I'm honest, I can't shake the sense that he is still here, somewhere, even if utterly transformed - in the eye of a dolphin, in the touch of an uprising of moss, anywhere and everywhere.

In the end, if you change the enemy enough, if you wear them down, perhaps losing is good enough.