Quotes About Transformation

This is how your beliefs originate: they are fixed, unchanging ways of looking at a reality that is not fixed and unchanging at all, but constantly moving and changing. So, it is no longer the real world that you interact with and love, but a world created by your head. It is only when you drop your beliefs, fears, and the attachments that breed them that you will be freed from the insensitivity that makes you so deaf and blind to yourself and the world.

The nature of rain is the same, but it makes thorns grow in the marshes and flowers in the gardens.

Every child has a god in him. Our attempts to mold the child will turn the god into a devil. Children come to my school, little devils, hating the world, destructive, unmannerly, lying, thieving, bad-tempered. In six months they are happy, healthy children who do no evil.

Do you know what happens, Etienne," says Madame Manec from the other side of the kitchen, "when you drop a frog in a pot of boiling water?" "You will tell us, I am sure." "It jumps out. But do you know what happens when you put the frog in a pot of cool water and then slowly bring it to a boil? You know what happens then?" Marie-Laure waits. The potatoes steam. Madame Manec says, "The frog cooks.

Every hour, Robert thinks, all over the globe, an infinite number of memories disappear, whole glowing atlases dragged into graves. But during that same hour children are moving about, surveying territory that seems to them entirely new. They push back the darkness; they scatter memories behind them like bread crumbs. The world is remade.

He wants to tell her that when things vanish they become something else, in death we rise again in the blades of grass, the splitting bodies of seeds.

He blinks; he has to swallow back tears. The parlor looks the same as it always has: two cribs beneath two Latin crosses, dust floating in the open mouth of the stove, a dozen layers of paint peeling off the baseboards. A needlepoint of Frau Elena's snowy Alsatian village above the sink. Yet now there is music. As if, inside Werner's head, an infinitesimal orchestra has stirred to life.

Does it matter? In memory, in story, in the end, we can remake our lives any way we need. To be surprised, truly and utterly surprised by what came into your life - this, Winkler was learning, was the true gift.

Sublimity," Hauptmann says, panting, "you know what that is, Pfennig?" He is tipsy, animated, almost prattling. Never has Werner seen him like this. "It's the instant when one thing is about to become something else. Day to night, caterpillar to butterfly. Fawn to doe. Experiment to result. Boy to man.

But the cracks were splitting, finding power, thickening into chasms.

It is the rarest thing...that gets preserved, that does not get erased, broken down, transformed.

Maybe...a person can experience an illness as a kind of health. Maybe not every disease is a deficit, a taking away. Maybe what's happening to her is an opening, a window, a migration.

The Goddess of History looked down to earth. Only through the hottest fires can purification be achieved.

Gates were creaking open inside him - paths, long sealed off, revealed themselves once more.

We all come into existence as a single cell, smaller than a speck of dust. Much smaller. Divide. Multiply. Add and subtract. Matter changes hands, atoms flow in and out, molecules pivot, proteins stitch together, mitochondria send out their oxidative dictates; we begin as a microscopic electrical swarm. The lungs the brain the heart. Forty weeks later, six trillion cells get crushed in the vise of our mother's birth canal and we howl. Then the world starts in on us.

push back the hood of grief...

Only through the hottest fires, whispers the radio, can purification be achieved. Only through the harshest tests can God's chosen rise.

he smokes so much it as if he is turning himself into ash.

It's dirty and wormholed, colonized with mold, as though fungal hyphae, time, and water have collaborated to make an erasure poem.

Doors soar away from their frames. Bricks transmute into powder. Great distending clouds of chalk and earth and granite spout into the sky. All twelve bombers have already turned and climbed and realigned above the Channel before roof slates blown into the air finish falling into the streets.

Consider a single piece glowing in your family's stove. See it, children? That chunk of coal was once a green plant, a fern or reed that lived one million years ago, or maybe two million, or maybe one hundred million . . .

For Winkler each hour was another hour between Cleveland and Anchorage, between who they were becoming and who they had been.

Why can't healing happen as quickly as wounding? You twist an ankle, break a bone—you can be hurt in a heartbeat. Hour by hour, week by week, year by year, the cells in your body labor to remake themselves the way they were the instant before your injury. But even then you're never the same: not quite.

Five months ago the hillside beyond the wire was home to red squirrels black finches pygmy shrews garter snakes downy woodpeckers swallowtail butterflies wolf lichen monkey flowers ten thousand voles five million ants. Now what is it?