Quotes About Transformation

Maybe that was the real Bernice, I thought - kind and innocent. Maybe she was truly like that inside, and all the fighting we used to do and all her sharp and unpleasant edges - that was her way of struggling to get out of the hard skin she'd grown all over herself like a beetle shell. But no matter how she hit out and raged, she'd been stuck in there. That thought made me feel so sorry for her that I cried.

That is a reconstruction, too.

This may not seem ordinary to you now, but after a time it will. It will become ordinary.

Nothing changes instantaneously: in a gradually heating bathtub you'd be boiled to death before you knew it.

What to do with such a sorrow? It was like an enormous black cloud boiling up over the horizon. No: it was like a blizzard. No: it was like nothing he could put into language. He couldn't face it head-on. He had to transform it, or at the very least enclose it.

After a certain point, the ravages of experience reverse themselves; we put on innocence with advancing age, at least in the minds of others.

Melanie laughed and said, "No he isn't." I decided she was naive. I was the age at which parents suddenly transform from people who know everything into people who know nothing.

it's one of the shapes money takes when it freezes.

Is this really your fate, to enter poetry and become transparent?

I say her because I don't recall having been present, not in any meaningful sense of the word. I and the girl in the picture have ceased to be the same person. I am her outcome, the result of the life she once lived headlong; whereas she, if she can be said to exist at all, is composed only of what I remember. I have the better view - I can see her clearly, most of the time. But even if she knew enough to look, she can't see me at all.

The night before I left on the sealed bullet train, I reread my old diary, and then I knew what the Gardeners meant when they said, Be careful what you write. There were my own words from the time when I was so happy, except that now it was torture to read them. I took the diary down the street and around the corner and shoved it into a garboil dumpster. It would turn into oil and then all those red hearts I'd drawn would go up in smoke, but at least they would be useful along the way.

while he himself puts them on, like a sock over a foot, onto the stub of himself, his extra, sensitive thumb, his tentacle, his delicate, stalked slug's eye, which extrudes, expands, winces, and shrivels back into himself when touched wrongly, grows big again, bulging a little at the tip, traveling forward as if along a leaf, into them, avid for vision.

She found herself stepping into ritual as if into a pair of stone shoes.

But when you cross over the border, it is like passing through air, you wouldn't know you'd done it; as the trees on both sides of it are the same.

I don't think I've ever changed clothes so fast in my life, but once I got the silver dress off and those clothes on I began to feel more like myself.

but after a time it will. It will become ordinary.

Every day a bad-hair day? My hair was driving me crazy, but then Ã¢â'¬Â¦ I died. Don

And when I go that way, grow fur, start howling, scratch at your airwaves: no matter who I claim I am or how I love you, turn the key. Bar the window.

With you I could have more than one skin, a blank interior, a repertoire of untold stories, a fresh beginning.

The books I was given to learn from were about a boy and a girl called Dick and Jane. The books were very old, and the pictures had been altered at Ardua Hall. Jane wore long skirts and sleeves, but you could tell from the places where the paint had been applied that her skirt had once been above her knees and her sleeves had ended above her elbows. Her hair had once been uncovered.

was the age at which parents suddenly transform from people who know everything into people who know nothing.

I was the age at which parents suddenly transform from people who know everything into people who know nothing.

How little time it takes to change a face: carve it like wood, harden it.

I suppose you're wondering what happened to the mirror,' he said. 'Well …' 'I smashed it. Last week. With the frying-pan.' 'Oh,' she said.