Quotes About Transformation

You're looking at it the wrong way." His grip tightens. "You're broken. I'm broken. We don't throw the pieces away. We fit them together until they make something new

I was in an excellent mood when I got to work. Morning sex contributed to that, of course. Also the sight of Gideon getting dressed for the day, watching him transform from the private man I knew and loved into the dark and dangerous global magnate. The day only got better when I exited on the twentieth floor and saw Megumi sitting at her desk.

The iceman thawed a bit for you.

I act and react, and suddenly I wonder, 'Where is the girl that I was last year? Two years ago? What would she think of me now?

Piece by piece, I fed my wardrobe to the night wind, and flutteringly, like a loved one's ashes, the gray scraps were ferried off, to settle here, there, exactly where I would never know, in the dark heart of New York.

Ash, ash —- You poke and stir. Flesh, bone, there is nothing there—— A cake of soap, A wedding ring, A gold filling. Herr God, Herr Lucifer Beware Beware. Out of the ash I rise with my red hair And I eat men like air. --from Lady Lazarus, written 23-29 October 1962

How many different deaths I can die?

A dispassionate white sun shone at the summit of the sky. I wanted to hone myself on it till I grew saintly and thin and essential as the blade of a knife.

Not easy to state the change you made. If I'm alive now, I was dead, Though, like a stone, unbothered by it.

They had to call and call And pick the worms off me like sticky pearls. --From the poem Lady Lazarus, written 23-29 October 1962

Oh what a poet I will flay myself into.

The frost makes a flower, the dew makes a star --from Death & Co.

How can I tell Bob that my happiness streams from having wrenched a piece out of my life, a piece of hurt and beauty, and transformed it to typewritten words on paper? How can he know I am justifying my life, my keen emotions, my feeling, by turning it into print?

I must bridge the gap between adolescent glitter and mature glow

In the month of red leaves I climb to a bed of fire.

Doreen is dissolving, Lenny Shepherd is dissolving, Frankie is dissolving, New York is dissolving, they are all dissolving away and none of them matter anymore.I don't know them. I have never known them and I am very pure.

I lay in that tub on the seventeenth floor of this hotel for-women-only, high up over the jazz and push of New York, for near unto an hour, and I felt myself growing pure again. I don't believe in baptism or the waters of Jordan or anything like that, but I guess I feel about a hot bath the way those religious people feel about holy water.

And I, stepping from this skin Of old bandages, boredoms, old faces Step to you from the black car of Lethe, Pure as a baby.

She has folded Them back into her body as petals Of a rose close when the garden Stiffens and odours bleed From the sweet, deep throats of the night flower. The moon has nothing to be sad about, Staring from her hood of bone.

I love you because you are me ... my writing, my desire to be many lives. I will be a little god in my small way. My happiness streams from having wrenched a piece out of my life, a piece of hurt and beauty, and transformed it to typewritten words on paper. I am justifying my life, my keen emotion, my feeling, by turning it into print.

I've been wondering. . . I mean, I thought you might be able to tell me something. Buddy met my eyes and I saw, for the first time, how he had changed. Instead of the old, sure smile that flashed on easily and frequently as a photographer's bulb, his face was grave, even tentative -- the face of a man who often does not get what he wants.

This month is fit for little. The dead ripen in the grapeleaves. A red tongue is among us. Mother, keep out of my barnyard, I am becoming another. Dog-head, devourer: Feed me the berries of dark. The lids won't shut. Time Unwinds from the great umbilicus of the sun its endless glitter. I must swallow it all. Lady, who are those others in the moons' vat- Sleepdrunk, their limbs at odds? In this light the blood is black. Tell me my name.

You are still on your own; be stoic; don't panic; get through this hell to the generous sweet overflowing GIVING love of spring... dawn came, black and white gray into a frozen hell. I lived: that once. And must shoulder the bundle, the burden of my dead selves until I, again, live.

There ought, I thought, to be a ritual for being born twice—patched, retreaded and approved for the road, I was trying to think of an appropriate one when Doctor Nolan appeared from nowhere and touched me on the shoulder. "All right, Esther.