Quotes About Transformation

underneath that I'd said something else: we were both a couple of asswipes, and now only I'm an asswipe; why? And underneath that, something else: once an asswipe, always an asswipe.

each time, the experience of music pouring directly against her eardrums—hers alone—is a shock that makes her eyes well up; the privacy of it, the way it transforms her surroundings into a golden montage

I wanted to send a young Charlotte into the world to live a different life from mine.

Basic exchanges elongate like time-lapse fruits ripening and dropping into outstretched hands.

It's all still there: the pool with its blue and yellow tiles from Portugal, water laughing softly down a black stone wall. The house is the same, except quiet. The quiet makes no sense. Nerve gas? Overdoses? Mass arrests? I wonder as we follow a maid through a curve of carpeted rooms, the pool blinking at us past every window. What else could have stopped the unstoppable parties? But it's nothing like that. Twenty years have passed.

A sudden reconfiguration of your past can change the fit and feel of your adulthood. It may cleave you from the mother whose single goal has been your happiness. If your husband has transformed greatly in his own life, he will understand your transformation.

Losing Pamela had left a shadow of sadness that he'd grown so used to, he'd stopped noticing it. And now it had lifted.

His sister's transformation from aging tart to fussing nanny seemed almost instantaneous

Redemption, transformation--God how she wanted these things. Every day, every minute. Didn't everyone?

Accept what you can not change-change that which is unacceptable.

it's the same monkeys, different barrel.

But surely the idea that one might slip away unseen and take up another life is nearly universal. Is there anything more fundamentally human than the desire to live in another world, as someone other than our own earthbound selves?

I used to stand at the lectern in my coat and tie, waving my glasses around, urging students to find the courage to become themselves. Then I'd go back to the office and lock the door and put my head down on the desk.

I really did "choose" to be Jim every single day, but that once I put my sword down I haven't chosen Jenny at all; I simply wake up and here I am.

I think it's very human, the hope that an all-encompassing love will change us into someone else, someone better. That this hope usually turns out to be false makes it no less human; the world is full of hopes far more unlikely than being transformed by love.

Probably no people embrace change more enthusiastically, at least in theory, than Americans. Who we are at birth is less important to us than who we will become. We are expected—indeed, obligated—not just to be, but to become.

In order to be a good help on someone's journey toward transformation, you need to understand the world as he sees the world, not as you see him.

A pregnancy tore up our lives. It's going to tear up hers. There's no hiding from that. A pregnancy's one of those things that doesn't hide well. It's kind of like trying to ignore an elephant in the living room.

It's true more often than we realize: each new love is built from the wreckage of the loves that came before. In Kath, Mike saw Lisa; in Art's eyes, she resembled our mother. I can't look at Mike's face without seeing Dad's. Art, to Ma, was the living ghost of Harry Breen. We love those who fit the peculiar voids within us, our hollow wounds. We love to fill the spaces the old loves left behind.

imagining her museum a centerpiece of Pittsburgh's renaissance, the city's transformation from dying steel town to gleaming technology center, from Rust Belt dinosaur to American Florence, a center of intellectual and cultural life. Or

He looks out over his back yard, what's left of it. With the forest gone, the property looks smaller than sixty acres, stripped and shrunken like a dog in the bath. Behind the house, the crew left a single patch of grass, twenty foot square. Beyond lies a vast expanse of bare earth, dry and cocoa-colored, enclosed with chain-link fence. A bleak view, but not half as bad as what lies over the hill. The

I wanted only a familiar voice, someone who knew me. Not some earlier, larval version of myself. . .

No aspect of personality can ever be changed through experience points.

We cannot think our way into a new kind of living. We must live our way into a new kind of thinking.