Quotes About Transformation

The garden was planted four hundred years ago, when the surrounding area was poplar. The woman makes a sweeping gesture, and he nods in appreciation. And now, Less says, it's unpoplar.

By his forties, all he has managed to grow is a gentle sense of himself, akin to the transparent carapace of a soft-shelled crab.

They have come dressed as robots or space goddesses or aliens because a writer has changed their lives.

The beauty of his youth somehow taken from its winter storage and given back to him in middle age.

This is once-in-a-lifetime suffering and pain and heartache and yet it may be your only chance to decide what you really want. None of this I don't want to change bullshit. Hell no—you've changed. That's happened. Now what? Everything changes and this one fucking time, you're in charge of it, my God, so choose! Make the wrong choice, that's fine! That's fine! But choose.

What do we want from the past, anyway? For it to trifle with us no longer? For it to cease its surprises, its stirrings, its stings, for it to be fixed forever—for it to die? But the past is like those jellyfish that, when harmed, coil into themselves and revert to immature blobs from which they begin new lives and become, in simple terms, immortal. What can we do but look away from such painful miracles?

This is once-in-a-lifetime suffering and pain and heartache and yet it may be your only chance to decide what you really want. None of this I don't want to change bullshit. Hell no—you've changed. That's happened. Now what?

I guess being depressed all the time was actually a relatively safe place to be. I didn't have the real-world worries that everyone else has because I knew that I simply couldn't function well enough to take care of myself. What do I do now? Trying to break the habits of years of depression is what I'm doing for the moment with my doctor.

But you are never the same once you have acquired the knowledge that there is no self that will not crumble. We are told to learn self-reliance, but it's tricky if you have no self on which to rely.

I love the sense of vast transformation that hangs on us at this new millennium, the feeling that we are at the brink of knowing more than people have ever known before.

We do not seek painful experiences that adhere to our identities but rather we seek our identities in the wake of painful experiences

the polar opposite of suffering [is] boredom." I believe that pain needs to be transformed but not forgotten; gainsaid but not obliterated. I

I believe that pain needs to be transformed but not forgotten; gainsaid but not obliterated.

Creativity is the only viable source of change.

Work is the fruitful transformation of the world through human effort and skill, in ways that serve our shared human needs and give glory to God.

It is an almost precise inversion of Lord Acton's observation: the more power we have over our children, the more we are willing to sacrifice for them. Love transfigures power. Absolute love transfigures absolute power. And power transfigured by love is the power that made and saves the world.

History books are being re-written all the time

They say that time changes things, but you actually have to change them yourself.

They always say that time changes things, but you actually have to change them yourself.

Focus can change literally everything.

Sometimes it seemed as if the past was a painting that she had dipped in water, allowing the colours to run and drip, merge and fade so that an entirely altered landscape remained.

Such is the power of death -- to strip away breath and transform a person into an airy abstraction.

But after a while, that too passes, and she and Jack go back to normal, as they have been before, which is to say that they, like all the other couples Kathryn has ever known, live in a state of gentle decline, of being infinitesimally, but not agonizingly, less than they were the day before.

kind of necessary acceptance will form around her, like a lobster making its new shell, one that will be soft and easily breakable in the beginning but so hard that only lobster crackers can shatter it in the end. She can hardly wait.