Quotes About Transformation

God's joy moves from unmarked box to unmarked box, from cell to cell. As rainwater, down into flowerbed. As roses, up from ground. Now it looks like a plate of rice and fish, now a cliff covered with vines, now a horse being saddled. It hides within these, till one day it cracks them open.

You can't logically get from where we were to where we are now. I think that is what they mean by grace.

New is life.

Gratitude is seeing how someone changed your heart and quality of life, helped you become the good parts of the person you are.

Who knows, maybe those two rogue leaders, Gandhi and Jesus, were right—a loving response changes the people who would beat the shit out of you, including yourself, of course. Their way, of the heart, makes everything bigger. Decency and goodness are subversively folded into the craziness, like caramel ribbons into ice cream. Otherwise, it's about me, and my bile ducts, and how unique I am and how I've suffered. And that is what hell is like.

Sometimes we have to get cancer or have a heart attack to stop the train of wired meaninglessness, to stop faking or stuffing it all back down.

I scuttled across the screen like Prufrock's crab. I was very clearly the one who was going to grow up to be a serial killer, or to keep dozens and dozens of cats. Instead, I got funny.

The plates of the earth had shifted and settled inside her, and the world should know.

know there's solace in making do with what you've got, making things a little bit better. What might have been thrown out went from tattered scraps to something majestic and goofy and honest that holds together, that keeps people's eyes off me and my family, yet lets in the light and sun, like a poem or a song.

A story does not need to be hot. Stories are usually about a modest salvation.

Rilke wrote: "I want to unfold. I don't want to stay folded anywhere, because where I am folded, there I am a lie.

What seems true is something in that something in life or in our own hearts is always being installed or being repaired or being torn down for the next installation or the mess of the repair or tear down is being cleaned and cleared out.

Honey,...you'll never draw another calm breath as long as you live. That blissful amniotic unconcerned state of people without children is a thing of the past.

You can change the world with a hot bath if you sink into from a place of knowing you are worthy of profound care, even if you are dirty and rattled.

Topsy-turvy is often a symptom for the presence of God--the last become first, the hungry are fed, the obnoxious are welcomed.

We can change. People say we can't, but we do when the the stakes or the pain is high enough.

It is time to end a story that began in sorrow and ordeal and has ended in a deep and lasting happiness. May it be so for others.

Each egg hatched a different way, but a crack at the right time speeded things up.

Write to save yourself,' Athos said, 'and someday you'll write because you've been saved.

And while people ran about proclaiming such things,] I could only think that everything exists because of loss. From the bricks of our buildings, from cement to human cells, everything exists because of chemical transformation, and every chemical transformation is accompanied by loss. And when I look up at the night sky I think: The astronomers have given every star a number.

Destruction doesn't create a vacuum, it simply transforms presence into absence.

It's not a person's depth you must discover, but their ascent. Find their path from depth to ascent.

I began the piling of words, to dig myself out to dare myself

Write to save yourself ... and someday you'll write because you've been saved. You will feel terrible shame for this. Let your humility grow larger than your shame.