Quotes About Transformation

A weed is no more than a flower in disguise.

I'm tired of my life, my clothes, the things I say. I'm hacking away at the surface, as at some kind of gray ice, trying to break through to what is underneath or I am dead. I can feel the surface trembling—it seems ready to give but it never does. I am uninterested in current events. How can I justify this? How can I explain it? I don't want to have the same vocabulary I've always had. I want something richer, broader, more penetrating and powerful.

Certain things I remember exactly as they were. They are merely discolored a bit by time, like coins in the pocket of a forgotten suit. Most of the details, though, have long since been transformed or rearranged to bring others of them forward. Some, in fact, are obviously counterfeit; they are no less important. One alters the past to form the future.

Age doesn't arrive slowly, it comes in a rush. One day nothing has changed, a week later, everything has. A week may be too long a time, it can happen overnight. You are the same and still the same and suddenly one morning two distinct lines, ineradicable, have appeared at the corners of your mouth.

I can't explain it. It's what turns you to powder, being ground between what you can't do and what you must do. You just turn to dust.

Transformation is about change, and change needs to be proven. People can talk a good game. Someone can say he's sorry for stealing and wants to go straight. But until the thief returns the goods, we don't believe he's a changed person.  Change does involve an inner realization. But then, to prove itself, it must work outward in a visual form.

Something died in the American people on November 22, 1963—call it idealism, innocence or the quest for moral excellence. It is the transformation of human beings which is the authentic reason and motive for the Kennedy murder.

transform yourself by the renewing of your mind. When you believe differently, you act differently and start to get different results.

His smile grew into a feral grin. "Beyond all this… and into the mirror.

Change has to be hard because you're fighting against inertia.

morning light can make the most vulgar things tolerable.

and I think of what Hobie said: beauty alters the grain of reality.

Everything was raw and painful and confusing and wrong and yet it was as if I'd been dragged from freezing water through a break in the ice, into sun and blazing cold.

Everything was going beautifully, on the brink of taking wing, and I had a feeling that I'd never had, that reality itself was transforming around us in some beautiful and dangerous fashion, that we were being driven by a force we didn't understand, towards an end I did not know.

I hope we're all ready to leave the phenomenal world, and enter into the sublime?

I suppose there is a certain crucial interval in everyone's life when character is fixed forever.

It used to be a perfectly ordinary day but now it sticks up on the calendar like a rusty nail.)

Strange, I thought, as I jumped a sheet of water at the curb, how a few hours could change everything—or rather, how strange to find that the present contained such a bright shard of the living past, damaged and eroded but not destroyed.

Beauty alters the grain of reality.

Her death the dividing mark: Before and After. And though it's a bleak thing to admit all these years later, still I've never met anyone who made me feel loved the way she did. Everything came alive in her company; she cast a charmed theatrical light about her so that to see anything through her eyes was to see it in brighter colors than ordinary

Her death the dividing mark: Before and After.

Beauty is terror. We want to be devoured by it, to hide ourselves in that fire which refines us.

All things fall and are built again.

everything was soft and kind and infinitely forgiving. I noted a strange beauty in the faces of people previously repulsive to me. I smiled at everyone and everyone smiled back.