Franz Wright Quotes

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

The phoenix must burn to emerge.

If Winter comes, can Spring be far behind?

What the caterpillar calls the end of the world the master calls a butterfly.

Birth is violent, and out of that violence is our only chance of rebirth.

Life does not accommodate you, it shatters you. It is meant to, and it couldn't do it better. Every seed destroys its container or else there would be no fruition.

Die and born again, die and born again. It's the story of my life.

Nothing ever quite dies, it just comes back in a different form.

Deep, unspeakable suffering may well be called a baptism, a regeneration, the initiation into a new state.

I think that any time of great pain is a time of transformation, a fertile time to plant new seeds.

We will burn the old grass and the new will grow.

It can be painful leaving parts of yourself behind. Change and shuffling off your previous skin is traumatic, but it can be done.

Everywhere we shine death and life burn into something new.

The old must always make way for the new, and one thing must be built out of the ruins of another. There is no murky pit of hell awaiting anyone.

The snake which cannot cast its skin has to die.

Die every day. Be reborn again every day.

I was reborn," she said, her hot breath brushing his ear. "You were reborn," Tengo said. "Because I died once." "You died once," Tengo repeated. "On a night when there was a cold rain falling," she said. "Why did you die?" "So I would be reborn like this." "You would be reborn," Tengo said. "More or less," she whispered quietly. "In all sorts of forms.

Setting is preliminary to brighter rising; decay is a process of advancement; death is the condition of higher and more fruitful life.

Life depends on change, and renewal.

He did not know that the new life would not be given him for nothing, that he would have to pay dearly for it, that it would cost him great striving, great suffering. But that is the beginning of a new story -- the story of the gradual renewal of a man, the story of his gradual regeneration, of his passing from one world into another, of his initiation into a new unknown life. That might be the subject of a new story, but our present story is ended.

The smallest sprout shows there is really no death.

As a tree, even though it has been cut down, is firm so long as its root is safe, and grows again, thus, unless the feeders of thirst are destroyed, the pain (of life) will return again and again.

Death is but an aspect of life, and the destruction of one material form is but a prelude to building up of another.

Today is not yesterday: we ourselves change; how can our works and thoughts, if they are always to be the fittest, continue always the same? Change, indeed is painful; yet ever needful; and if memory have its force and worth, so also has hope.