Quotes About Transformation

Having become permanent, the war ceased to be a war.

Y, ¡sí!, ocurrió casi como en un sueño. Casi con la misma habilidad que había imaginado, se quitó la ropa y la arrojó a un lado con aquel gesto majestuoso que parecía aniquilar a toda una civilización

If ever there had been a place to begin a religion, it was Los Angeles in the first half of the twentieth century.

Como pode chamar a si mesmo um homem livre, quando sua própria fraqueza o trouxe à condição em que se acha? Se um homem tem dentro de si a alma de um escravo, não é exatamente nisso que se transforma, não obstante seu nascimento, assim como a água procura o seu nível?

But what a difference now.

Tus cartas caen sobre mí como una lluvia que empapa la tierra y hace crecer de golpe lo que estaba en germen.

love make us poets, and the approach of death should make us philosophers.

Now I began to understand art as a kind of black box the reader enters. He enters in one state of mind and exits in another. The writer gets no points just because what's inside the box bears some linear resemblance to real life -- he can put whatever he wants in there. What's important is that something undeniable and nontrivial happens to the reader between entry and exit.

He is going, he realizes. He is going, and will not be coming back as Brad. He must try at least to retain this feeling of pity. If he can, whoever he becomes will inherit this feeling, and be driven to act on it, and will not, as Brad now sees he has done, waste his life on accumulation, trivia, self-protection, and vanity.

If at the moment when someone cuts us off in traffic or breaks our heart or begins bombing our ancestral village, we could withdraw from judging mode, and enter this other, more accepting mode, we could paradoxically, make ourselves more powerful. By resisting the urge to reduce, in order to subsequently destroy, we keep alive - if only for a few seconds more - the possibility of transformation. -The Thought Experiment

No worthy problem is ever solved in the plane of its original conception.

I could see that, over the years, my babies would slowly transform into selfish-dick babies, then selfish-dick toddlers, kids, teenagers, and adults, with me all that time skulking around like some unclean suspect uncle.

Three cars for two grown-ups, I thought. What a country. What a couple selfish dicks my wife and her new husband were. I could see that, over the years, my babies would slowly transform into selfish-dick babies, then selfish-dick toddlers, kids, teenagers, and adults, with me all that time skulking around like some unclean suspect uncle.

We might imagine a story as a room-sized black box. The writer's goal is to have the reader go into that box in one state of mind and come out in another. What happens in there has to be thrilling and non-trivial.

Reconsideration is hard; it takes courage. We have to deny ourselves the comfort of always being the same person, one who arrived at an answer some time ago and has never had any reason to doubt it.

Tolstoy is proposing something radical: moral transformation, when it happens, happens not through the total remaking of the sinner or the replacement of his habitual energy with some pure new energy but by a redirection of his (same old) energy.

That is why I came back. I was wrong in life, limited, shrank everything down to my size, and yet, in the end, there was something light-craving within me, which sent me back, and saved me.

Since, according to me, your life is going to be a gradual process of becoming kinder and more loving: Hurry up. Speed it along. Start right now.

Your life is going to be a gradual process of becoming kinder and more loving: Hurry up. Speed it along. Start right now. There's a confusion in each of us, a sickness, really: selfishness. But there's also a cure. Find out what makes you kinder, what opens you up and brings out the most loving, generous, and unafraid version of you—and go after those things as if nothing else matters. Because, actually, nothing else does.

Then, with no change in size at all (i.e., while still child-sized), he displayed his various future-forms (forms he had, alas, never succeeded in attaining): Nervous young man in wedding-coat; Naked husband, wet-groined with recent pleasure; Young father leaping out of bed to light a candle at a child's cry; Grieving widower, hair gone white; Bent ancient fellow with an ear trumpet, athwart a stump, swatting at flies All the while seeming quite innocent of these alterations

Reduced, ruined, remade. roger bevins iii Merciful, patient, dazzled. hans vollman And yet. roger bevins iii

Now I began to understand art as a kind of black box the reader enters. He enters in one state of mind and exits in another. The writer gets no points just because what's inside the box bears some linear resemblance to "real life"—he can put whatever he wants in there. What's important is that something undeniable and nontrivial happens to the reader between entry and exit.

I see the pain I've caused. I see the man I could have been, and the man I was, and then everything is bright and new and keen with love and I sweep through Sam's body, trying to change him, trying to shard, and feeling only hate and hate, solid as stone.

What transforms an anecdote into a story is escalation. Or, we might say: when escalation is suddenly felt to be occurring, it is a sign that our anecdote is transforming into a story.