178 Quotes About Alchemy

To work in the dark, you must be able to hold your own light, and still be intimate with the darkness.

What I write about comes to me - before or after my writing. What is this? Is it some kind of alchemy?

Change happens for youthe moment you want somethingmore than you fear it.

Air is the element most needed by fire. This is why you need open spaces, the wind, and to fly. Because you have fire in you. This is why you look into the sky, why you make wishes, why you tread lightly. You, too, are the air, because inside you there is fire. Why do you think we breathe? Because we are kindling our fires.

He thought that it was all over, finished, done with. Andrew had never yet had reason to observe the first tiny bubble of fermenting yeast, in which was contained an inevitable, alchemical transformation.

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

Death is the midwife of very great things.... It brings about the birth and rebirth of forms a thousand times improved. This is the highest mystery of God.

They had spent whole summers collecting other ingredients from the forest— micah, chalk, the resin of a pine tree, lichen, some wax, and a drop of dew. After a long and belabored search, Penelope had even discovered some locust wings in the piles of dust beneath her father’s unkempt desk. She had been mixing strange scientific and alchemical potions with her father for as long as she could remember.

Outside the store, beauty and mystery struggled to come together. Inside, they held hands, giggled to one another, and whispered secret messages.