Quotes About Transformation

Out of the dusk a shadow,Then a spark;Out of the clouds a silence,Then a lark;Out of the heart a rapture,Then a pain;Out of the dead, cold ashes,Life again.

This was in the days when I was making myself over. So difficult it was, to judge just so, to forge the fine discriminations, to maintain a balance--no one could know how difficult. If it had been a work of art I was fashioning they would have applauded my mastery. Perhaps that was my mistake, to do it all in secret, instead of openly, with a flourish. They would have been entertained; they would have forgiven me; Harlequin is always forgiven, always survives.

I think I am becoming my own ghost.

I realized after I got Jesus, I'd marry "that good woman who put me right with the Lord, got me away from the bottle and taught me what life is really all about." Which was to say, some church girl that resembles a pile of loose fat upholstered with pale goopy skin, and whose whole life is chocolate cake and visiting her sister.

Quantitative changes suddenly become qualitative changes. From all of Marxism, which I once thought attractive enough, I find only this dictum remaining in the realm of my opinions. Water grows colder and colder and colder, and suddenly it's ice. The day grows darker and darker, and suddenly it's night. Man ages and ages, and suddenly he's dead. Quantitative changes suddenly become qualitative changes; differences in degree lead to differences in kind.

In the past, poetry came in the form of spells and chants used to effect change.

If poetry alters the way in which the reader views the world, then it has had its desired effect.

The tombstone of coinage, arguably the most important measure in history, could read: Born Lydia, Anatolia, 7th century B.C. Died Washington, D.C., 20th century A.D.

We can become anything. That is why injustice is impossible here. There may be the accident of birth, there is no accident of death. Nothing forces us to remain what we were.

It proposes to each of us that we transform ourselves, or our lives, by buying something more. This more, it proposes,will make us in some way richer - even though we will be poorer by having spent our money. Publicity persuades us of such a transformation by showing us people who have apparently been transformed and are, as a result, enviable. The state of being envied is what constitutes glamour. And publicity is the process of manufacturing glamour. (P. 125)

The promise is that again and again from the garbage the scattered feathers the ashes and broken bodies something new and beautiful may be born

If the word revolution is used seriously and not merely as an epithet for this season's novelties, it implies a process. No revolution is simply the result of personal originality. The maximum that such originality can achieve is madness: madness is revolutionary freedom confined to the self.

The spectator-buyer is meant to envy herself as she will become if she buys the product. She is meant to imagine herself transformed by the product into an object of envy for others, an envy which will then justify her loving herself.

Springwater grow so thick it gonna clot and the pleasing ladies cease. I figure, yup, you is bad powers.

Hard on the land wears the strong sea and empty grows every bed.

You come in all clammed up, defences in depth, alibi-systems long established, delusions full-blown. In order to have a chance of staying sober, or rather of staying dry and becoming sober, you've got to change. Nobody likes to change. What you really want, when you come into hospital, even for the second or third or ninth time, is to stay just who you are and not drink. That's not possible, of course. Jack-Who-Drinks has got to alter into Jack-Who-Does- Not -Drink- And -Likes-It.

Thus, continues Langer, the question is no longer one of 'how a physical process can be transformed into something non-physical in a physical system, but how the phase of being felt is attained, and how the process may pass into unfelt phases again'.

True love heals and affects spiritual growth. If we do not grow because of someone else's love, it's generally because it is a counterfeit form of love.

When our instinctual life is shamed, the natural core of our life is bound up. It's like an acorn going through excruciating agony for becoming an oak, or a flower feeling ashamed for blossoming.

Know thyself." Sure, of course, you must. But afterwards, the project is to make yourself a stranger to yourself once more.

The joint realization that we live in a remarkable cosmic cocoon and can create languages and rocket ships in an otherwise apparently dumb universe ought to be transformative. Until we find other self-aware intelligences, we are how the universe thinks. We might as well start enjoying one another's company.

When we want things to stay the same, we'll always wind up playing catch-up. Better to go with the flow.

When you're facing in the wrong direction, progress means walking backward.

We fret about how to keep going the same old way when we should be casting around for another way that's better.