Quotes About Transformation

You know how your eyes can deceive you at times--how a group of shapes and shadows can take on a certain form and then shift into another? It wasn't really like that; there was no physical change in him, he was exactly the same as he'd always been. I knew every line of his long body and every curl on his disheveled black head. I'd just never seen him before. you know what I'm trying to say, don't you? The change is in the heart.

The sun is born again from the womb of night," he said. "See how the light spreads, remaking the world.

Traits don't change, states of mind do.

If we do not alter with the times, the times yet alter us. We may stand perfectly still, but our surroundings shift round and we are not in the same relationship to them for long; just as a chameleon, matching perfectly the greenness of a leaf, should know that the leaf will one day fade.

for there must be, he reflected, a good deal more in her than he had supposed, for Lady Caroline to have become so intimate with her and so affectionate. And the more he treated her as though she were really very nice, the more Lotty expanded and became really very nice, and the more he, affected in his turn, became really very nice himself; so that they went round and round, not in a vicious but in a highly virtuous circle.

Those years in the back diningroom, like some dark tunnel through which one emerges into sunshine, had ended for her in glory. All the time she had been so miserable, she had really been heading straight for this. She was awestruck. Such great and unexpected blessings should bring forth fruit, she vowed, and she would show her gratitude by seeing to it that they did.

What I mean is this: Prozac has rather minimal side effects, the lithium has a few more, but basically the pair keep me functioning as a sane human being, at least most of the time. And I can't help feeling that anything that works so effectively, that's so transformative, has got to be hurting me at another end, maybe sometime further down the road. I can just hear the words inoperable brain cancer being whispered to me by some physician twenty years from now.

There is comfort in knowing that you don't have to pretend anymore, that you are going to do everything within your power to heal.

This choreography of ruin, the world breaking like glass under a microscope, the way it doesn't crack all at once, but spreads out from the damaged cavities. Still for a moment it all recedes. The backyard potatoes swell quietly buried beneath their canopy of leaves. The wind rubs its hands through the trees.

In spite of the horror, in spite of the tragedy, in spite of the weeks of sleepless nights, I'm finally alive. I'm not pretending. I feel real. I'm not playing charades anymore. I wouldn't go back to the way I was for anything. I'm really like a different person. I'm where I am, and I'm making the most of it. I know I'm courageous now. I found out I had it in me to face this. — Barbara

And Ferris had watched Alec go past him out of the door noted the bones...but he never would have connected that ragged man with the honey-and-acid creature who'd insulted him at Diane's house.

What matters is to leave what has always been, and look for what has never been yet. I had had riches and marriage and a child, and I had nothing. Nothing is not enough for any man. The only answer is to abandon that nothing, and go in search of something. A different kind of treasure, perhaps. A different kind of salvation. Perhaps not salvation at all, only the loss of oneself.

We shall not have succeeded in demolishing everything unless we demolish the ruins as well. But the only way I can see of doing that is to use them to put up a lot of fine, well-designed buildings.

To keep up even a worthwhile tradition means vitiating the idea behind it which must necessarily be in a constant state of evolution: it is mad to try to express new feelings in a "mummified" form.

Everything seems so small here now, old, mashed-in, more rundown even than I remember it, but with a heartbreaking familiarity at each door that makes me wonder if I can take in anything new, so strongly do I feel in Brownsville that I am walking in my sleep.

All foods which the animals as well as the humans use are, already, the result of the solar energy transformed into what may be called chemical energy. Transformation of energies is building up of life.

Their floe, which had once measured a mile in diameter, was now less than 200 yards across.

And slowly answer'd Arthur from the barge:The old order changeth, yielding place to new;And God fulfills himself in many ways,Lest one good custom should corrupt the world.

Ring out old shapes of foul disease,Ring out the narrowing lust of gold;Ring out the thousand wars of old,Ring in the thousand years of peace.

And from his ashes may be madeThe violet of his native land.

And out of darkness came the hands that reach thro' nature, moulding men.

Now sleeps the crimson petal, now the white;Nor waves the cypress in the palace walk;Nor winks the gold fin in the porphyry font:The firefly wakens: waken thou with me.

And ah for a man to arise in me,That the man I am may cease to be!

That knowledge which adds greatness to character is knowledge so handled as to transform every phase of immediate experience.