transformation
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.
“Blindness,” in Seven Nights (New York: New Directions, 2009), rev. ed., 120–21.
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.
January 15, 1891 entry, in Tolstoy’s Diaries Volume 1, 1847–1894, trans. by R. F. Christian (London: Faber and Faber, 2010), 300.
I have woven a parachute out of everything broken.
“Any Time,” in Allegiances (New York: Harper & Row, Publishers,1970), 67.
There is a way of living which makes for greater airiness, space, ease, freedom. It is like an airplane’s rise above the storms. It is a way of looking at obstacles as something to overcome; of looking at what defeats us as a monster created by ourselves, within ourselves, by our fears, and therefore dissolvable and transformable.
The Diary of Anaïs Nin (Vol. 4 1944–1947) (New York: Harcourt Brace Jovanovich, 1971), 148.