How we cite our quotes: (Preface if applicable, Paragraph)
Quote #1
I was amazed to see a small and pretty doorway with a Gothic arch in the middle of the wall, for I could not make up my mind whether this doorway had always been there or whether it had just been made. (8)
The first physical transformation in the novel takes place not in a person, as most of them do, but in a piece of architecture. A door springs up out of nowhere, Alice in Wonderland-style, and Harry has to figure out what this transformation means.
Quote #2
Now with our Steppenwolf it was so that in his conscious life he lived now as a wolf, now as a man, as indeed the case is with all mixed beings. (34)
That would be pretty tiring! Harry is in a constant state of transformation, but it's only back and forth between two beings. His new pals will teach him to expand his repertoire.
Quote #3
Oh, yes, I had experienced all these changes and transmutations that fate reserves for her difficult children, her ticklish customers. (72)
It seems like transformation is a punishment for Harry in this statement. Why do you think he experiences it as such a negative, when in nature there are lots of beautiful transformations?
Quote #4
And, in fact, I was no longer certain it was he. (84)
Even before he starts taking Pablo's magical drugs Harry is having a hard time keeping a grip on reality. He thinks he recognizes someone, but then he isn't sure that it's them after all.
Quote #5
While he was teasing me with the charming, dangerous thing, he became quite old once more, very, very old, a thousand years old, with hair as white as snow, and his withered graybeard's face laughed a still and soundless laughter that shook him to the depths with abysmal old-man's humor. (181)
This transformation, which takes place in a dream, is key for what Harry will have to learn in the rest of his adventure. Goethe, his favorite poet, becomes a very, very, old laughing man. Flash forward to the end, and we find that Harry is supposed to learn how to laugh like the immortals.
Quote #6
For a moment it seemed she had turned into this Herman. (231)
When Hermine tells Harry to guess her name, she somehow makes herself transform into his boyhood friend. Do you think that it's Hermine doing it, or is it Harry's own perception?
Quote #7
The old Harry and the new lived at one moment in bitter strife, at the next in peace. (358)
Now instead of fights between the Steppenwolf and Harry, Harry's fighting with his old habits and the new person he is becoming. This is just the beginning of the division of his personality into lots of tiny parts.
Quote #8
There were moments when I felt with a glow that I had only to snatch up my scattered images and raise my life as Harry Haller and as the Steppenwolf to the unity of one picture, in order to enter myself into the world of imagination and be immortal. (381)
There is a bit of a paradox here, because in order to become one unified person Harry will have to smash his identity into millions of pieces. But the idea is that Harry has to let go of his personality and lose his identity in order to gain immortality.
Quote #9
It was Hermine, Herman no longer. (476)
Hermine changes back and forth from man to woman, and that sort of transformation is an example for Harry of all the sexual experiences he has missed because of his closed-mindedness.
Quote #10
And as he spoke and conjured up a cigarette from his waistcoat pocket and offered it to me, he was suddenly Mozart no longer. It was my friend Pablo looking warmly at me out of his dark exotic eyes and as like the man who had taught me to play chess with the little figures as a twin. (683)
Pablo holds the record for changing from one character to another, especially in the Magic Theater. Why do you think that he, whom Harry disliked and thought of as simple before, turns out to be the guru in the end?