Becoming Something Quotes

The best critique of what is wrong is the practice of something better. So let's stop complaining about the church we've experienced and work on becoming the church we dream of. ~ Shane Claiborne

The way Ty looks at her while she slips the jacked over his head, scrunched up and annoyed at first and then becoming something softer, more adoring…it's a fucking kick to my heart.
I want this. I want them.
Why can't this be my life. ~ Karina Halle

Basically, we are a whole world of people desperately trying to figure out what is the dark side of our natures and how much can we explore without becoming something else. ~ William Petersen

When we begin to take responsibility for our multi-bio-dimensional inner nature ... when we begin to see AND understand both the angel and the devil within us, and endless other tendencies and qualities, from sexual capacity to artistic and intellectual potential, from sadism to masochism, from gentleness and tenderness to roughness and brutality, from heart to heartlessness, from selflessness to selfishness, from kindness to hatred - only then do we begin to manifest our human fullness. It is ONLY at that point, fully human, that we are capable of becoming something more ... as in metamorphosis ... something born within from the opposites. ~ Christopher Zzenn Loren

I had discovered something; there was a pleasure in becoming something new. You could will yourself into a fresh shape. Now all I had to do was figure out how to do it out there, in my life. ~ Claire Dederer

Dill was in hearty agreement with this plan of action. Dill was becoming something of a trail anyways, following Jem about ... He only grew closer to Jem. (Lee 55) ~ Harper Lee

We are, finally, all wanderers in search of knowledge. Most of us hold the dream of becoming something better than we are, something larger, richer, in some way more important to the world and ourselves. Too often, the way taken is the wrong way, with too much emphasis on what we want to have, rather than what we wish to become. ~ Louis L'Amour

I am convinced that we humans are just at the beginning of our journey, on our way to becoming something more wonderful than we can imagine. ~ Danny Hillis

Take the pains required to become what you want to become, or you might end up becoming something you'd rather not be. That is also a daily discipline and worth considering. ~ Donald Trump

We are all capable of becoming something monstrous. ~ Cyraus Foldger

Perhaps we know only by comparing, by drawing distinctions from and similarities to what we already know. But when we use our terms of comparison to shut off any understanding of our connections with one another as human beings, we risk becoming something less than human ourselves. (7) ~ Martha Minow

The modern family is one in which the divergent values of our separate souls are supported, valued, encouraged. Diversity is not just tolerated, it is affirmed as the radical gift of relationship. Conflict is mediated with accepting love despite disagreement, and no one carries the assigned burden of becoming something other than what they are. ~ James Hollis

Men and women are what they make of themselves. ~ Seth Adam Smith

The house smelled like fireplace kindling, and hot water in old brass pipes - like metal melting into wood and becoming something all its own. It smelled like his childhood. Like chaos and terror and oatmeal cookies and lamb stew, and nighttime in front of that drafty front window. And the smell of it brought back thoughts, long past, about escaping from inside the walls and evoked the helplessness of every board that kept the place upright. ~ Melodie Ramone

Until fairly recently, every family had a cornucopia of favorite home remedies--plants and household items that could be prepared to treat minor medical emergencies, or to prevent a common ailment becoming something much more serious. Most households had someone with a little understanding of home cures, and when knowledge fell short, or more serious illness took hold, the family physician or village healer would be called in for a consultation, and a treatment would be agreed upon. In those days we took personal responsibility for our health--we took steps to prevent illness and were more aware of our bodies and of changes in them. And when illness struck, we frequently had the personal means to remedy it. More often than not, the treatment could be found in the garden or the larder. In the middle of the twentieth century we began to change our outlook. The advent of modern medicine, together with its many miracles, also led to a much greater dependency on our physicians and to an increasingly stretched healthcare system. The growth of the pharmaceutical industry has meant that there are indeed "cures" for most symptoms, and we have become accustomed to putting our health in the hands of someone else, and to purchasing products that make us feel good. Somewhere along the line we began to believe that technology was in some way superior to what was natural, and so we willingly gave up control of even minor health problems. ~ Karen Sullivan

As a result of Obamacare, we are becoming something of a part-time employment country. ~ Maria Bartiromo

Drinking is something people do; it's not what you are. But when it becomes what you are, you need to think about becoming something else. ~ Tim Cowlishaw

People, he had said, were always being looked at as points, and they ought to be looked at as lines. There weren't any points, it was false to assume that a person ever was anything. He was always becoming something, always changing, always continuous and moving, like the wiggly line on a machine used to measure earthquake shocks. He was always what he was in the beginning, but never quite exactly what he was; he moved along a line dictated by his heritage and his environment, but he was subject to every sort of variation within the narrow limits of his capabilities.
...
She shut her mind on that too. There was danger in looking at people as lines. The past spread backward and you saw things in perspective that you hadn't seen then, and that made the future ominous, more ominous than if you just looked at the point, at the moment. There might be truth in what Bruce said, but there was not much comfort. ~ Wallace Stegner

Looking out on the second day of our mission, I became aware that in the far distance, there was a distinctive-looking star. It stood out because, while all the other stars stayed exactly the same size and shape, this one got bigger and bigger as we got closer to it. At some point it stopped being a point of light and started becoming something three-dimensional, morphing into a strange bug-like thing with all kinds of appendages. And then, isolated against this inky background, it started to look like a small town.
Which is in fact what it is: an outpost that humans have built, far from Earth. The International Space Station. It's every science fiction book come true, every little kid's dream realized: a large, capable, fully human creation orbiting up in the universe.
And it felt miraculous that soon we'd be docked there, and the next phase of our expedition would begin. ~ Chris Hadfield

I worry that education is becoming a stick that some people use to beat other people into submission, or becoming something that people feel arrogant about. I think education is really just a process of self-discovery - of developing a sense of self and what you think. I think of it as this great mechanism of connecting and equalizing. ~ Tara Westover

Everything is in the process of becoming something else. It's the law of change. ~ C.J. Roberts

It seems to me that everything is on its way to becoming something else, giving itself up in the service of another. In ~ Ayana Mathis

Now she knows that in the intervening years Connell has been growing slowly more adjusted to the world, a process of adjustment that has been steady if sometimes painful, while she herself has been degenerating, moving further and further from wholesomeness, becoming something unrecognisably debased, and they have nothing left in common at all. ~ Sally Rooney

Why has marriage failed? In the first place, we raised it to unnatural standards. We tried to make it something permanent, something sacred, without knowing even the abc of sacredness, without knowing anything about the eternal. Our intentions were good but our understanding was very small, almost negligible. So instead of marriage becoming something of a heaven, it has become a hell. Instead of becoming sacred, it has fallen even below profanity. ~ Rajneesh

Boredom reigns on all levels. The rain is a welcome change. I have seen the pond swell and the creek surge. I press my palm against the glass, imagining the drops on my skin, imagining where they started out, where they will go, feeling them like a river, rushing, combining, becoming something greater than how they started out. ~ Mary E. Pearson

I want to stop becoming something & start being something. ~ Reece Hirsch

Nothing had changed in that moment when Violet and Jay had finally decided to have sex. Nothing-and everything.
Violet was amazed by what they'd done. Amazed that they'd shared themselves with each other, like that. It was wonderful, and beautiful, and not anything that Violet had expected it to be.
The pain had been more intense than she could have imagined, and she'd done her best not to cry out. But, of course, Jay had noticed as her body tensed, and then she shuddered. Tears dampened her lashes, yet she'd refused to let them fall.
Jay had insisted that they stop, but Violet wouldn't let him. Instead they'd waited, with Jay holding her, stroking her hair, her shoulders, her face, until the pain subsided, becoming something…less.
Later, when she was lying in his arms, she shuddered again.
Jay hugged her tight. "What's wrong? You're not sorry, are you?" The tenderness of his words made her heart twist.
"Of course not. How could I be sorry for that?"
He kissed her eyes, gently. "Then why are you shivering? I didn't mean to hurt you, Vi."
She shook her head, clumsily bumping his chin. "I don't know why." She ran her fingertips over his arm, memorizing the feel of his coarse hairs, his skin, the muscles beneath it all. "It's just…it's a lot. You know?"
Jay smiled. It was a satisfied smile. "Yeah." He leaned back and pulled her to him, tucking her against his shoulder. "It was a lot. A really good lot."
She wanted to shove him, t ~ Kimberly Derting

If I let him walk away now, we'll forever be a "just"; Just hockey player and skating coach. Just music swappers. Just friends. A not-quite-almost whose time passed through as quickly as the train, fading into the distance before it even had a real chance at staying, at becoming something more, because I didn't speak up. ~ Sarah Ockler

He tries not to think about The Core ... but he couldn't deny it ... they were all becoming something else entirely. Darwin's Children ~ Natasha Larry

Genius is becoming something you were all along. ~ David Whyte

It sounds creepy, but I always liked the idea of disappearing then becoming something new. That of course was before I disappeared. ~ Elizabeth Hand

Life moved, as inconstant and fickle as Wind Baby, frolicking, sleeping, weeping, but never truly still. Never solid or finished. Always like water flowing from one place to the next. Seed and fruit. Rain and drought, everything traveled in a gigantic circle, an eternal process of becoming something new. But we rarely saw it. Humans tended to see only frozen moments, not the flow of things. ~ Kathleen O'Neal Gear

I look to everyday magic in art to remember how to live: how to estrange and vivify ordinary objects and beings. So little, really, is ordinary, but to remember this I need the brain chemical of painting and film and reading I had a thrummy doomed oracular feeling when I wrote blackened baby teeth into my little blind boy story: I saw teeth and in an instant they were becoming something else. They were buckshot. They were food. They were tiny flightless corvids. ~ Noy Holland

Not becoming 'something' scares me the most. I just want to be remembered for something great. ~ Tony Harrison

We didn't grow up with the sense that where we were was where we were gonna be. We grew up with the sense that where we were almost didn't matter, because we will be becoming something greater. ~ Will Smith

I never had the idea of moving to Paris and becoming something. I liked the idea of living in Paris because it seemed to have so many parts of life I really enjoyed. The people there seemed to prize literature and art, food and drinking, a more hedonistic way of living. ~ Rosecrans Baldwin

Failure is when you talk yourself out of becoming something amazing. ~ Rudy Francisco

You can't have a relationship with a device whose limits are unknown to you, because without limits, it keeps becoming something else. ~ Brian Eno

Fidelity is a living, breathing entity. On wobbly footing, it can wander, becoming something different entirely. ~ Kay Goodstadt

I try to write something that would interest anybody and keep them turning the page. You must have a plot and good storyline. ~ Ernest Gaines

Why are we seeing George Bush on TV every two hours for nine or ten days at a time, like some kind of mutated Mr. Rogers clone? Something is dangerously wrong in any country where a monumentally-failed backwoods politician can scare our national TV networks so totally that they will give him anything he wants. ~ Hunter S. Thompson

Printing mistakes adds value because of the probability calculus, which makes their intrusion into something problematic and almost impossible, even when everything's conceived, precisely, to avoid the intrusion of human error. ~ Romain Gary

Fear has been a big battle, it runs rampant in my sport so I love to overcome that, to challenge it head on, because there is nothing that feels as accomplished as overcoming a fear, and something that has blocked you in such a big way. ~ Laura Wilkinson

I'm not a big fan of comedy roasts because most of the time I find them to be really mean, but once in a while, you'll hear something perfectly worded and well-crafted. ~ Greg Behrendt

A Republican philosophy goes something like this: If you take your car to the mechanic, and instead of fixing it, they take out the engine and charge you an arm and a leg, you should conclude that mechanics can't fix cars and you should probably just take yours to the junkyard and sell it for scrap metal. ~ Keith Ellison

If Bartleby is a new Messiah, he comes not, like Jesus, to redeem what was, but to save what was not. The Tartarus into which Bartleby, the new savior, descends is the deepest level of the Palace of Destinies, that whose sight Leibniz cannot tolerate, the world in which nothing is compossible with anything else, where "nothing exists rather than something. ~ Giorgio Agamben

We each have an infinite supply of love and happiness within us. We have been accustomed to thinking that we have to get something from outside of us in order to be happy, but in truth it works the other way: We must learn to contact our inner source of happiness and satisfaction and flow it outward to share with others - not because it is virtuous to do so, but because it feels really good! Once we tune into it we just naturally want to share it because that is the essential nature of love, and we are all loving beings. ~ Shakti Gawain

Sometimes Eli believed his mother was embarrassed by him. "I swear, my mom thinks if I do one thing differently than the average person, I'm weird," Eli said later. "It's like she thinks I'm a freak or something. No matter what I do, it's not 'normal' enough for her. ~ Alexandra Robbins

Literally, this is what enthios means - it is the root of enthusiastic - enthusiasmos means having the god/s within, thus becoming god-filled, or one with the god and in a state of participation mystique. ~ Erin Sullivan

Part of avoiding thoughts about something was not encouraging opportunities for that something to makes itself felt. ~ Kristin Cashore

A prudent person after all can pick something
Even from an enemy. ~ Aristophanes

The victim should have the right to end his life, if he wants. But I think it would be a great mistake. However bad life may seem, there is always something you can do, and succeed at. While there's life, there is hope. ~ Stephen Hawking

I am aware it's easy and may be fashionable to pose with a slum child, and the irony of getting the media along means that it can come across as disingenuous. But you take these things on board, and you hope you mean it whenever you get stuck into something. ~ Erin O'Connor

I really loathe [the bumper sticker] 'Proud Parent of a Terrific Kid!'
Why not a bumper sticker for the unlucky parents, something like: 'My Fifteen-Year-Old's in Detox and Not Speaking to Any of Us' or 'My Kid Robbed a 7-Eleven and is in a Center for Youthful Offenders. ~ Celia Rivenbark

O Christ, my life, possess me utterly.
Take me and make a little Christ of me.
If I am anything but thy father's son,
'Tis something not yet from the darkness won.
Oh, give me light to live with open eyes.
Oh, give me life to hope above all skies. ~ George MacDonald

I had an unfortunate habit of allowing my anger to blind me. An extremely unfortunate habit. Glate knew that, and he knew how to stop me from doing something stupid. He was my sense of reality in a world thrown off balance. But he wasn't here now. ~ Nicole Sobon

Pretty, pithy, petty Moon, born to a woman who had left the Market for the comforting climes of a world where fair value was something each person could negotiate for themselves, rather than having it imposed from without by an unimpeachable force of nature. Sweet, sharp, sour Moon, whose true name could never be given because it had been lost, who had seen her world narrow to an owl's understanding of hunt and hole and hover. This story could so easily have belonged to her. ~ Seanan McGuire

[I]f my faith depends on fear of punishment, what will happen to my faith when perfect love (Jesus) comes to cast it out? (1 John 4: 18) If God thinks that fear of punishment is something to be "cast out" like a demon, then our Gospel and our preaching better not rest on that foundation! Fear-based faith (a paradox) is the ultimate deception. We need to examine closely whether the devil has been hiding in plain sight - squatting within the very message that we've preached. Parasite and deceiver that he is, he found the ultimate host to help disseminate his terror campaign - the Church! If our faith message begins in fear, as it did for many evangelicals like me, it's in trouble. I am reminded of Jesus' warning, "Woe to you, teachers of the law and Pharisees, you hypocrites! You travel over land and sea to win a single convert, and when he becomes one, you make him twice as much a son of hell as you are" (Matt 23:15). The negation of negation. Does preaching on hell produce converts? Oh yes! But if in the process it also saddles someone with fear of punishment, then it has simultaneously reproduced a "son of hell. ~ Bradley Jersak

We found out that day, fairly quickly, how great and complex our fondness was for each other; I also had my first sense of something central about Caroline that would become a pillar of our friendship. When she was confronted with any emotional difficulty, however slight or major, her response as to approach rather than to flee. There she would stay until the matter was resolved, and the emotional aftermath was free of any hangover or recrimination. My instincts toward resolution were similar: I knew that silence and distance were far more pernicious than head-on engagement. This compatibility helped to ensure that there was no unclaimed baggage between us in the years to come. ~ Gail Caldwell

Life lives on life. This is the sense of the symbol of the Ouroboros, the serpent biting its tail. Everything that lives lives on the death of something else. Your own body will be food for something else. Anyone who denies this, anyone who holds back, is out of order. Death is an act of giving. ~ Joseph Campbell

Love is the desire to give, not to receive, something. Love is the art of producing something with the other's talents. ~ Bertolt Brecht

It may seem to you that your life is over now. Your future without the person you love is no future at all.
Death is a head-on collision with your plans.
But everything in life
the gold fillings of your teeth, the cotton of your sheets, the air you breathe, all the food you will ever eat
everything there is was born from a collision.
Inside every single thing that lives is a debt to a distant star that died.
Nothing new is ever created without one thing colliding into another.
And something new is created when the person you love dies.
Because they are not the only ones who die: you die, too. The person you were when you were with them is gone just as surely as they are.
This is what you should know about losing somebody you love. They do not travel alone. You go with them. ~ Augusten Burroughs

The more you lose yourself in something bigger than yourself, the more energy you will have. ~ Norman Vincent Peale

Are there any who don't heal?"
Christian's throat tightened at her question - that she would be so compassionate, when any other lady of her stature would be demanding the lives of the men who had assaulted her. It was something his mother would have done. "Unfortunately, aye. There are always some who can't adjust. Some kill themselves once they arrive home. A few have gone mad, and some, such as the Scot, live in perpetual torment and seclusion from the world."
She reached up to place her fingertips to his lips as she stared up at him with a warm, tender expression. "I wish you had come home to me so that I could have helped you."
He pulled the cloth away from her face and stared at her for a hard second. "Had I known what was waiting for me, my lady, I would have."
-Adara & Christian ~ Kinley MacGregor

You don't want to depend on an editor. If you want to regret something for the rest of your life, you want to make sure you're responsible for it. ~ Robert Stone

A civilised man is someone who has discovered something more satisfying than combat. ~ John Keegan

I remember one particular moment (I don't actually know how old I was, but I guess around 7 or something like that) when I remember actually weeping. I was by myself in a room in the house, and I was just crying because I realized how much Jesus loved me. ~ N. T. Wright

During the terrible years of the Yekhov terror I spent seventeen months in the prison queues in Leningrad. One day someone 'identified' me. Then a woman with lips blue with cold who was standing behind me, and of course had never heard of my name, came out of the numbness which affected us all and whispered in my ear - (we all spoke in whispers there):
'Could you describe this?'
I said, 'I can!'
Then something resembling a smile slipped over what had once been her face. ~ Anna Akhmatova

Have I told you about the tension of opposites? he says. The tension of opposites? Life is a series of pulls back and forth. You want to do one thing, but you are bound to do something else. Something hurts you, yet you know it shouldn't.
You take certain things for granted, even when you know you should never take anything for granted.
A tension of opposites, like a pull on a rubber band. And most of us live somewhere in the middle.Sounds like a wrestling match, I say.
A wrestling match. He laughs. Yes, you could describe life that way.
So which side wins, I ask?
Which side wins? He smiles at me, the crinkled eyes, the crooked teeth.
Love wins. Love always wins. ~ Mitch Albom

It's not just about the words. It's about how music takes us out of ourselves, how it relieves our pains, lets loose something in our hearts, makes us feel better in ways we never knew we could. ~ Michael Zadoorian

This said, we couldn't get by without light. Light wipes away our tears, and when we're bathed in light, we're happy. Perhaps we just love how its particles pour down on us. Light particles somehow console us. I admit this is something I can't quite explain using logic. ~ Naoki Higashida

I was beginning to think waiting was often the worst idea. Sometimes the longer you thought about something, the harder it became to make a decision. ~ Camille Pagan

It is unholy because it is heretic. It is foul. It is abominable to need something so badly that you cannot picture living without it. It is a contradiction to the condition of mankind. ~ Shirley Jackson

I spent, whether consciously or unconsciously, most of my career trying to be something other than William F. Buckley's son. ~ Christopher Buckley

There is something about the mental act of thanksgiving that seems to carry the human mind far beyond the region of doubt into the clear atmosphere of faith and trust, where "all things are possible." ~ H. Emilie Cady

You can't substitute the act of making people laugh. It's definitely something that actors like to do. ~ Thomas Gibson

Murder was deeply human. A person was killed and a person killed. And what powered the final thrust wasn't a whim, wasn't an event. It was an emotion. Something once healthy and human had become wretched and bloated and finally buried. But not put to rest. It lay there, often for decades, feeding on itself, growing and gnawing, grim and full of grievance. Until it finally broke free of all human restraint. Not conscience, not fear, not social convention could contain it. When that happened, all hell broke loose. And a man became a monster. ~ Louise Penny

Gemma." His voice is rough and heated. "Some people may expect nothing. Most people expect something. But you, you, should expect everything. ~ Karina Halle

Wine to me is something that brings people together. Wine does promote conversation and promote civility, but it's also fascinating. It's the greatest subject to study. No matter how much you learn, every vintage is going to come at you with different factors that make you have to think again. ~ Robert M. Parker, Jr.

It's a great feeling, its something that I've dreamt about since I was little, and it's finally come true. It couldn't be better. Well I think that we stuck to the game plan. We got shots on net, and just used our power. ~ Rebecca Johnston

These Negroes, they're getting pretty uppity these days and that's a problem for us since they've got something now they never had before, the political pull to back up their uppityness. Now we've got to do something about this, we've got to give them a little something, just enough to quiet them down, not enough to make a difference. For if we don't move at all, then their allies will line up against us and there'll be no way of stopping them, we'll lose the filibuster and there'll be no way of putting a brake on all sorts of wild legislation. It'll be Reconstruction all over again. [Said to Senator Richard Russell, Jr. (D-GA) regarding the Civil Rights Act of 1957] ~ Lyndon B. Johnson

Catie Conrad, just because we think we deserve something, it doesn't mean God is going to allow it to happen in the snap of a finger. ~ Angie Spady

I've never understood how something could be considered a curse that requires me to spend every moment with you, and that grants me the mercy of leaving a world that doesn't have you in it. ~ Jamie McGuire

But secrets can also keep things precious. Private. That's what can be hard for people to understand. It can be nice to have something you don't share with the world. -Bridgette ~ Michele Jaffe

Layla had always just been there. In my life. I wasn't sure who said, 'hi,' first, or maybe who smiled at who first - all I really remembered was staring at her, and her staring back at me, neither of us looking away. Both of us standing frozen, and life falling into the background with a distant hum. As if the world had stopped spinning. Just for us.
I remembered not caring if it had. She'd seemed so familiar, and even as a little kid, I'd known she was special. Like something bigger than me, older than me, had taken over my emotions in a way I didn't understand. She just felt like ... home.
I could have gazed into her eyes forever. Happy to stand in that powerless state for the rest of my life ~ Laney McMann

And I have to admit that there is something undeniably fulfilling about hunting with Rosie. Somehow, it makes me feel as if the long list of differences between us doesn't exist. We're dressed the same, we fight the same enemy, we win together ... It's as though for that moment I get to be her, the one who isn't covered in thick scars, and she gets to understand what it is to be me. It's different than hunting with Silas
he and I are partners, not part of the same heart. ~ Jackson Pearce

I stood there silently, under the cold embrace of that rain,
and watched myself drown,
as all of that sadness soaked itself onto me,
It did not wash away my sorrows,
nor did it comfort me,
it just gave in to me, like a falling leaf gives in to the ground,
filling my chest with all the sorrows, of both tomorrow and yesterday,
it broke something in me, something i once cherished,
and without that torn self, i often ask myself, i wonder,
what's worse ??
To lose one's own self? or to lose one's own reason to live .... ~ Syed Murtaza Haroon

The spiritual life is about becoming more at home in your own skin. ~ Parker J. Palmer