transformation « Quotenik

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transformation

“Don’t let anyone say there aren’t magic words.”

Siri Hustvedt

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source: The Blazing World (New York: Simon and Schuster, 2014), 17.

category: change, influence, magic, quotation, reading, transformation, words

medium: Fiction

“A writer, or any man, must believe that whatever happens to him is an instrument; everything has been given for an end. This is even stronger in the case of the artist. Everything that happens, including humiliations, embarrassments, misfortunes, all has been given like clay, like material for one’s art. One must accept it. For this reason I speak in a poem of the ancient food of heroes: humiliation, unhappiness, discord. Those things are given to us to transform, so that we may make from the miserable circumstances of our lives things that are eternal, or aspire to be so.”

Jorge Luis Borges

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source: “Blindness,” in Seven Nights (New York: New Directions, 2009), rev. ed., 120–21.

category: artist, compost, embarrassment, humiliation, misfortune, school of life, transformation

medium: Lecture

“Thought: To think you can change your life by changing its outward conditions is just like thinking, as I did as a boy, that by sitting on a stick and taking hold of it at both ends I could lift myself up.”

Leo Tolstoy

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source: January 15, 1891 entry, in Tolstoy’s Diaries Volume 1, 1847–1894, trans. by R. F. Christian (London: Faber and Faber, 2010), 300.

category: change, illusion, thought, transformation

medium: Journal

“We can remember readings that acted like transformations. There were times when a particular book, like a seed crystal, dropped into our minds when they were exactly ready for it, like a supersaturated solution, and suddenly we changed. Suddenly a thousand crystals of perception of our own formed, the original insight of the story ordering whole arrays of discoveries inside us, into winking accuracy.”