Quotes About Transformation

The earth is rocky and full of roots it's clay, and it seems doomed and polluted, but you dig little holes for the ugly shriveled bulbs, throw in a handful of poppy seeds, and cover it all over, and you know you'll never see it again - it's death and clay and shrivel, and your hands are nicked from the rocks, your nails black with soil.

I do not understand the mystery of grace -- only that it meets us where we are and does not leave us where it found us.

My eyes are green, my hair is silver and I freckle; the rest is subject to change without notice.

If love wants you; if you've been melted down to stars, you will love with lungs and gills; with feathers and scales; with warm blood and cold.

It's an awful truth that suffering can deepen us, give a greater lustre to our colours, a richer resonance to our words.

I think that sometimes the great changes in our lives, the ones that divide time, happen so deep down and silently that we don't even know when they occur......It frequently happens that the seasons of the greatest change are the times that feel the most tranquil, the most suspended, the most...timeless.

Forsythia that I thought had been dozed into oblivion sprang up and misted the foundations with lemon icing I yearn for all winter.

Grief is in two parts. The first is loss. The second is the remaking of life.

Meanwhile in my head, I'm undergoing open-heart surgery.

Once I was beautiful. Now I am myself, Counting this row and that row of moccasins Waiting on the silent shelf.

I know that I have died before—once in November.

Sometimes I fly like an eagle but with the wings of a wren

Out of used furniture she made a tree.

Poetry led me by the hand out of madness.

God went out of me as if the sea dried up like sandpaper, as if the sun became a latrine. God went out of my fingers. They became stone. My body became a side of mutton and despair roamed the slaughterhouse.

I suffer for birds and fireflies but not frogs, she said, and threw him across the room. Kaboom! Like a genie out of a samovar, a handsome prince arose in the corner of the bedroom.

Once I was beautiful. Now I am myself... ("You, Doctor Martin")

The butterfly owns her now. It covers her and her wounds.

Sun, you hammer of yellow,  you hat on fire,  you honeysuckle mama,  pour your blonde on me!  Let me laugh for an entire hour  at your supreme being, your Cadillac stuff,  because I've come a long way  from Brussels sprouts. 

I am going to lose myself – or else, the chance is that poetry will save me.

Everyone in me is a bird. I am beating my wings. They wanted to cut you out but they will not. They said you were immeasurably empty bu you are not. They said you were sick unto dying but they were wrong. You are winging like a school girl. You are not torn.

We moved like angels washing themselves. We moved like two birds on fire. — Anne Sexton, from "How We Danced" in "The Death of the Fathers," The Norton Anthology of American Literature , ed. Baym et al, 5th edition, Volume 2, (New York and London: W. W. Norton & Co., 1998)

I do a death dance, I lay a snake skin…

For all you who are going, and there are many who are climbing their pain, many who will be painted out with a black ink suddenly and before it is time, for these many I say, awkwardly, clumsily, take off your life like trousers, your shoes, your underwear, then take off your flesh, unpick the lock of your bones. In other words take off the wall that separates you from God.