Ezra Pound Quotes

Fire isn't always an element of destruction. Classical alchemical doctrine teaches that it also has dominion over another province: change.

Tita knew through her own flesh how fire transforms the elements, how a lump of corn flour is changed into a tortilla, how a soul that hasn't been warmed by the fire of love is lifeless, like a useless ball of corn flour.

In nature, there is less death and destruction than death and transmutation.

Observe constantly that all things take place by change, and accustom thyself to consider that the nature of the Universe loves nothing so much as to change the things which are, and to make new things like them.

This process is alchemy: its founder is the smith Vulcan.

He is not Brown any longer. He is an angel of light.

There are as many worlds as there are kinds of days, and as an opal changes its colors and its fire to match the nature of a day, so do I.

I've always been obsessed with the art of transformation.

I like switching gears. I'm kind of a chameleon.

The process of transformation consists mostly of decay.

Think of a crucible as an occasion for real magic, the creation of something more valuable than an alchemist could possibly imagine. In it, the individual is transformed, changed, created anew. He or she grows in ways that change his or her definition of self.

So then I though I'd make some plans, but Fire thought she'd really rather be Water instead.

Change itself is what fascinates me. I am drawn, as a moth to the flame, by edge situations, by situations of metamorphosis.

No reality transforms itself.

Nathanial can show me how to better control the change, but even so, you never have to worry about me turning into a cat again. Didn't you know, I'm allergic to cats.

The changing of Bodies into Light, and Light into Bodies, is very conformable to the Course of Nature, which seems delighted with Transmutations.

Everything possessed the power to transform itself, or else, and what meant more, to be transformed.

The mind that thought of light, heavy, grey, yellow, still, swift, also conceived of magic that would make heavy things light and able to fly, turn grey lead into yellow gold, and the still rock into a swift water. If it could do the one, it could do the other; it inevitably did both. When we can take green from grass, blue from heaven, and red from blood, we have already an enchanter's power.

My intention is to tell of bodies changed into new forms.

The American Heritage Dictionary defines crucible as "a place, time, or situation characterized by the confluence of powerful intellectual, social, economic, or political forces; a severe test of patience or belief; a vessel for melting material at high temperatures." A crucible was the vessel in which medieval alchemists attempted to turn base metals into gold. That the alchemists inevitably failed in their audacious attempts doesn't denigrate the power of the crucible as a metaphor for the circumstances that cause an individual to be utterly transformed.

Transformations is the word. We can do the work of transformation only in the present moment

There was a time when I thought a great deal about the axolotls. I went to see them at the aquarium at the Jardin des Plantes and stayed for hours watching them, observing their immobility; their faint movements. Now I am an axolotl.

I'm interested in taking a form, breaking it apart, and then rebuilding it. It is about transformation for me...it is a very core notion that stabilizes my practice.

Growth is not merely a harmonious increase in size, but a transformation.

The universal nature out of the universal substance, as if it were wax, now molds a horse, and when it has broken this up, it uses the material for a tree, then for a man, then for something else.