Dana Gioia Quotes

Death in various forms is sometimes comforting, while resurrection and new life can be demanding and threatening. If I lived as if resurrection were real, and allowed myself to die for the sake of a new life, what might I be called upon to do?

Nothing is lost. . .Everything is transformed.

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

One thing is certain. The old Piper Laurie is no more.

My characters who come back from death are worse for wear. In some ways, they're not even the same characters anymore. The body may be moving, but some aspect of the spirit is changed or transformed, and they've lost something.

Death makes angels of us all and gives us wings where we had shoulders smooth as ravens claws.

The symbolic language of the crucifixion is the death of the old paradigm; resurrection is a leap into a whole new way of thinking.

Death is the condition of higher and more fruitful life.

Only where there are graves are there resurrections.

How he lies in his rights of a man! Death has done all death can. And absorbed in the new life he leads, He recks not, he heeds Nor his wrong nor my vengeance; both strike On his senses alike, And are lost in the solemn and strange Surprise of the change.

I did two things on my seventy-fifth birthday. I visited my wife's grave. Then I joined the army.

All things change, nothing perishes.

What is our death but a night's sleep? For as through sleep all weariness and faintness pass away and cease, and the powers of the spirit come back again, so that in the morning we arise fresh and strong and joyous; so at the Last Day we shall rise again as if we had only slept a night, and shall be fresh and strong.

We seek not rest but transformation. We are dancing through each other as doorways.

Nothing of him that doth fade But doth suffer a sea-change Into something rich and strange

Don't grieve. Anything you lose comes round in another form.

Change alone is eternal, perpetual, immortal.

Loss is nothing else but change, and change is Nature's delight.

Is it sin, which makes the worm a chrysalis, and the chrysalis a butterfly, and the butterfly dust?

He not busy being born is busy dying.

We die daily. Happy those who daily come to life as well.

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

Men do change, and change comes like a little wind that ruffles the curtains at dawn, and it comes like the stealthy perfume of wildflowers hidden in the grass. Change may be announced by a small ache, so that you think you're catching cold. Or you may feel a faint disgust for something you loved yesterday. It may even take the form of a hunger that peanuts won't satisfy. Isn't overeating said to be one of the strongest symptoms of discontent. And isn't discontent the lever of change?

The dead can't change, but you can.

Death is not extinguishing the light; it is only putting out the lamp because the dawn has come.