transformation Quotes

“Nothing had changed. Everything had changed.”

“Mind is a fertile land and the crop depends on what you sow and how you nurture”

“Sometimes a man seems to reverse himself so you would say, ‘he can’t do that. It’s out of character’. Maybe it’s not. It could just be another angle, or it might be that the pressures above or below have changed his shape. You see it in war a lot - a coward turning a hero and a brave man crashing in flames.”

“Seth was altered by magic imposed upon him. But the potential to fall and become an imp is a fundamental aspect of being a fairy […] Muriel might be able to undo the enchantments forced upon Seth. Reversing the fall of a fairy would be far beyond her capacity.”

“A fairy with raven black hair and bumblebee wings approached the bowl. Mimicking Kendra, she dipped a finger and tasted it. In a whirling shower of sparks the fairy grew to nearly six feet tall.”

“The moment of truth had arrived. When she set foot on the island, either she would transform into a cloud of dandelion fluff and drift away, or she wouldn’t. Almost indifferent at this point, Kendra leaped out of the boat and landed on the shore.”

“I have learned two ways to tie my shoes. One way is only good for lying down. The other way is good for walking.”

“Every moment the patches of green grew bigger and the patches of snow grew smaller. Every moment more and more of the trees shook off their robes of snow. Soon, wherever you looked, instead of white shapes you saw the dark green of firs or the black prickly branches of bare oaks and beeches and elms. Then the mist turned from white to gold and presently cleared away altogether. Shafts of delicious sunlight struck down onto the forest floor and overhead you could see a blue sky between the tree-tops.”

“The truth can’t be stated in English any more than Beethoven’s Fifth can be.”

“What we do not claim remains invisible. That is why the process of personal transformation — the true work of spiritual growth, whether couched in religious terms or not — is the only antidote to the pernicious effects of society’s backlash against genuine female empowerment.”

“And they themselves grew and changed as the years passed over them. And Peter became a tall and deep chested man and a great warrior, and he was called King Peter the Magnificent. And Susan grew into a tall and gracious woman with black hair that fell almost to her feet and the Kings of the countries beyond the sea began to send ambassadors asking for her hand in marriage. And she was called Queen Susan the Gentle. Edmund was a graver and quieter man than Peter, and great in council and judgement. He was called King Edmund the Just. But as for Lucy, she was always gay and golden haired, and all Princes in those parts desired her to be their Queen, and her own people called her Queen Lucy the Valiant.”

“That was the magic of the cactus garden. Door succulents can play dumb, a common blue chalkstick can turn from a Cinderella into a princess in front of your very eyes.”

“As far as inner transformation is concerned, there is nothing you can do about it. You cannot transform yourself, and you certainly cannot transform your partner or anybody else. All you can do is create a space for transformation to happen, for grace and love to enter.”

“I’m just scared because everything feels weird. It’s as if everything’s changed. Not just you: everything!”

“Transformation doesn’t ask that you stop being you. It demands that you find a way back to the authenticity and strength that’s already inside of you. You only have to bloom.”

“Change isn’t always for the best.”

“She had tricked him. She had made him leave his old self behind and come into her world, and then before he was really at home in it but too late to go back, she had left him stranded there – like an astronaut wandering about on the moon. Alone.”

“Only through an inner spiritual transformation do we gain the strength to fight vigorously the evils of the world in a humble and loving spirit.”

“My name back then was Chiyo. I wouldn’t be known by my geisha name, Sayuri, until years later.”

“I’ve heard it said that the week in which a young girl prepares for her debut as an apprentice geisha is like when a caterpillar turns into a butterfly.”

“Every time I caught a glimpse of myself in the glass of a shop, I felt I was someone to be taken seriously; not a girl anymore, but a young woman.”

“I do remember my Jewish name: Ruchel Dwarja Zylska. My parents got rid of that name when we came to America and changed it to Rachel Deborah Shilsky, and I got rid of that name when I was nineteen and never used it again after I left Virginia for good in 1941. Rachel Shilsky is dead as far as I’m concerned. She had to die in order for me, the rest of me, to live.”

“But there’s a better way. You show her she is beautiful. You make mirrors of your eyes, prayers of your hands against her body. It’s hard, very hard, but when she truly believes you...Suddenly the story she tells herself in her own head changes. She transforms. She isn’t seen as beautiful. She is beautiful, seen.”

“The transformation of matter into energy in the cell is an ever-flowing process, one of nature’s cycles of renewal, like a wheel endlessly turning . . . one of the wonders of the living world”

“But I will rise there with so full a glory That I will dazzle all the eyes of France, Yea, strike the Dauphin blind to look on us.”

″(all over America high school and college kids thinking “Jack Duluoz is 26 years old and on the road all the time hitch hiking” while there I am almost 40 years old, bored and jaded in a roomette bunk crashin across that Salt Flat)”

“In fact, flying silently around my lamplit cabin at 3 o’clock in the morning as I’m reading (of all things) (shudder) Doctor Jekyll and Mister Hyde -- Small wonder maybe that I myself turned from serene Jekyll to hysterical Hyde in the short space of six weeks, losing absolute control of the peace mechanisms of my mind for the first time in my life.”

“One day spent with someone you love can change everything.”

“Revolution might sound a little dramatic, but in this world, choosing authenticity and worthiness is an absolute act of resistance. Choosing to live and love with our whole hearts is an act of defiance. You’re going to confuse, piss off, and terrify lots of people - including yourself. One minute you’ll pray that the transformation stops, and the next minute you’ll pray that it never ends. You’ll also wonder how you can feel so brave and so afraid at the same time. At least that’s how I feel most of the time...brave, afraid, and very, very alive.”

“I am going to say yes to everything.” “Everything? What do you mean everything?” Ian looked shocked. “When do you start?” “That’s just the thing, ” I said, finishing my pint and looking him dead in the eye. “I already have.”

“The children also put on mail shirts and helmets; a sword and shield were found for Edmund and a bow for Lucy—Peter and Susan were of course already carrying their gifts.”

“But I wasn’t getting married. There ought, I thought, to be a ritual for being born twice – patched, retreaded, and approved for the road, I was trying to think of an appropriate one when Doctor Nolan appeared from nowhere and touched me on the shoulder.”

“I lay, trying to slow the beating of my heart, as every beat pushed forth another gush of blood.”

″‘If you were coming along here when it was half dark, you could easily think those piles of rock were giants. Look at that one, now! You could almost imagine that the lump on top was a head […] And the things sticking out on each side are quite like ears. They’d be horribly big, but then I daresay giants would have big ears, like elephants. And—o-o-o-h!‘”

“Dad winked at Will. Will winked back. They stood now, a boy with corn-colored hair and a man with moon-white hair, a boy with a summer-apple, a man with a winter-apple face. Dad, Dad, thought Will, why, why, he looks…like me in a smashed mirror!”

“In America the dream is to make it out of the ghetto. In Soweto, because there was no leaving the ghetto, the dream was to transform the ghetto.”

“The cruel world slipped away from me, and with it went all the other bad things in my life;”

“People are fulfilled to the extent that they create their world (which is a human world), and create it with their transforming labor”

“If . . . one cannot change a situation that causes his suffering, he can still choose his attitude.”

“The more students work at storing the deposits entrusted to them, the less they develop the critical consciousness which would result from their intervention in the world as transformers of that world.”

“He had turned into a dragon while he was asleep. Sleeping on a dragon’s hoard with greedy, dragonish thoughts in his heart, he had become a dragon himself.”

“War makes monsters of us all.”

“Nothing is lost. . .Everything is transformed.”

“Ha! ha! ha!–he! he!–a very good joke indeed–an excellent jest. We shall have many a rich laugh about it at the palazzo–he! he! he!–over our wine–he! he! he!”

“He had been so intent on finding the cattle that he had forgotten all the events of the past days and past years. Hunting the cattle was good for that. Old Betonie was right.”

“The dry skin was still stuck to his body. But the effects of the witchery of the evil thing began to leave his body.”

“He had proven something to himself; it wasn’t as strong as it had once been. It was changing, unraveling like the yarn of a dark heavy blanket wrapped around a corpse, the dusty rotted strands of darkness unwinding, giving way to the air; its smothering pressure was lifting from the bones of his skull.”

“Tayo’s heart beat fast; he could see Josiah’s vision emerging, he could see the story taking form in bone and muscle.”

“She taught me this above all else: things which don’t shift and grow are dead things. They are things the witchery people want. Witchery works to scare people, to make them fear growth.”

“The point is, Simon drank one of those blue drinks-I told him not to, but he didn’t listen-and he turned into a rat.”

“The only cure I know is a good ceremony, that’s what she said.”

“It’s a matter of transitions, you see; the changing, the becoming must be cared for closely. You would do as much for the seedlings as they become plants in the field.”

“You’ve been doing something all along. All this time, and now you are at an important place in this story.”

″‘One night or nine nights won’t do it anymore,’ the medicine man said; ‘the ceremony isn’t finished yet.’ ‘Remember these stars,’ he said. ‘I’ve seen them and I’ve seen the spotted cattle; I’ve seen a mountain and I’ve seen a woman.‘”

“Old Betonie might explain it this way—Tayo didn’t know for sure: there were transitions that had to be made in order to become whole again, in order to be the people our Mother would remember; transitions, like the boy walking in bear country being called back softly.”

“A transition was about to be completed: the sun was crossing the zenith to a winter place in the sky, a place where prayers of long winter nights would call out the long summer days of new growth. Tonight the old priests would be praying for the force to continue the relentless motion of the stars.”

“There would be miracles at the fair—the chocolate Venus de Milo would not melt, the 22,000 pound cheese in the Wisconsin Pavilion would not mold—but the greatest miracle was the transformation of the grounds during the long soggy night that had preceded Cleveland’s arrival.”

“I don’t cry, much.” “But how would you cry, if someone made you cry?” “I spit,” [Molly] said. “The ducts are routed back into my mouth.‘”

“For now, just think of death as a transformation—a bit more radical than puberty, but nothing to get particularly upset about. It’s just one of the body’s changes. When it happens, it happens. The warrior neither seeks death nor flees from it.”

“Probably for every man there is at least one city that sooner or later turns into a girl. How well or how badly the man actually knew the girl doesn’t necessarily affect the transformation. She was there, and she was the whole city, and that’s that.”

“It’s funny how the mother of the bride’s life undergoes an overnight transformation.”

“Inspiration and information without personal application will never amount to transformation.”

“It was a moon that could stir wild passions in a moo cow. A moon that could bring out the devil in a bunny rabbit. A moon that could turn lug nuts into moonstones, turn Little Red Riding Hood into the big bad wolf.”

“This book is intended as a correlative history of the modern soul and of a new power to judge.”

“On Wednesday he ate through three plums, but he was still hungry.”

″...he was a beautiful butterfly!”

“He was a big, fat caterpillar. ”

“Now he wasn’t hungry any more- and he wasn’t a little caterpillar any more. ”

“In the light of the moon a little egg lay on a leaf. ”

″ One Sunday morning the warm sun came up and -pop!- out of the egg came a tiny and very hungry caterpillar. ”

“The caterpillar ate through one nice green leaf, and after that he felt much better.”

“It was astonishing how the mask transformed her. All of a sudden she became once again a rather pretty young lady.”

“I suddenly made myself leave the darkness and go for it […] It was a dance of courage. I felt then, and still feel now, that I was transformed by those four steps.”

“And while the ending of Flour Babies is fortunately and appreciatively cautiously optimistic and hopeful, thankfully and realistically, Anne Fine also does not simply and completely have Simon Martin be transformed from somewhat of a slacker, a teenager with often annoying and frustrating attitudes and habits to some kind of a glowingly pure hero.”

“It should not surprise us to find in the one man the perfection of two such lines of activity if we remember that the daily press was already beginning to transform itself and to become what it is to-day- the gazette of crime.”

“They said the girl had surely become one of the wild horses at last.”

“And then one year she did not return and was never seen again. But when hunters next saw the wild horses there galloped beside the mighty stallion a beautiful mare with a mane and tail floating like wispy clouds about her. ”

“Unfortunately, the slow pace of transformation also makes it easy to let a bad habit slide.”

“Life is alchemy, and emotions are the fire that turns me to gold.”

“They have arrived just in time. The White Wizard is transforming into a silver flutterwing and is preparing to escape. But General Min has seen the change. She is about to pounce.”

In Venice, Italy, ten-year-old Elisa finds she must deal with all the unexpected consequences of her beloved eccentric grandmother’s transformation into a giant Aldabra tortoise, native to a small group of coral islands in the Seychelles.

“Rossamund had seen had seen them before. In them he knew women kept their rouges, blushes and balms: the tools of beauty ... even a young lad like himself could not help but be amazed by the simple yet profound transformation. He did not think a little rosying of the cheeks and lips and whitening of the nose could be so flattering.”

“To love is to be transformed into what we love. To love God is therefore to be transformed into God.”

“But Juliette- Juliette had been transformed through and through, the little beads of her pocketless flapper dress swishing with every movement. She stood out here, that much was certain. She was a bright, burning star, a symbolic figurehead for the vitality of the Scarlet Gang.”

“Leadership is energizing a community of people toward their own transformation in order to accomplish a shared”

“Don’t focus on whether your church is dying; keep your focus on being transformed into the leader God can use to transform his people for his mission.”

“the working definition of leadership we are using here: Energizing a community of people toward their own transformation in order to accomplish a shared mission in the face of a changing world.”

“Do not be conformed to this world, but be transformed.”

“She thought she was still just a little hen, perched up very high, near the ceiling. But then she found that she had a trunk and ivory tusks, and four huge feet, and a thick, rough skin in which there were still a few white feathers.”

“Clara’s death completely transformed life in the big house on the corner.”

“An infinite-minded leader does not simply want to build a company that can weather change but one that can be transformed by it.”

“Resilient companies may come out the other end of upheaval entirely different than they were when they went in (and are often grateful for the transformation).”