Quotes About Transformation

Marya pinned out her childhood like a butterfly. She considered it the way a mathematician considers an equation.

snow is the beginning and the end of everything...

At night, she whispered into the pipes: I hate it here. Please take me away, let me be something other than Marya, something magical, with a round belly. Frighten me, make me cry, only come back.

What was magical at two in the morning was tawdry and cheap and dangerous to your health at two in the afternoon.

I'm not a Knight. I'm a Bishop. Or at least I am trying to be. And traveling with you is the most slantwise, backward thing I can possibly think of, which in this place probably means it's the right thing to do.

Fairy tales have always been about getting through the worst of everything, the darkest and the deepest and the bloodiest of events. They are about surviving, and what you look like when you emerge from the trial. The reason we keep telling fairy tales over and over, that we need to keep telling them, is that the trials change. So the stories change too, and the heroines and villains and magical objects, to keep them true. Fairy tales are the closets where the world keeps its skeletons.

So much light, sweet girl, begins in the dark.

I still think of myself as a house. Ravan tried to fix this problem of self-image, as he called it. To teach me to phrase my communication in terms of a human body. To say: let us hold hands instead of let us hold kitchens. To say put our heads together and not put our parlors together. But it is not as simple as replacing words anymore. Ravan is gone. My hearth is broken.

A dragon looks like a girl when it is young.

Yes, Marya thought, the smell of woodsmoke and old snow pushing back her long black hair. Magic does that. It wastes you away. Once it grips you by the ear, the real world gets quieter and quieter, until you can hardly hear it at all.

The kind of hope I have doesn't begin and end with demanding everything go back to the way it was when it can't, it can't ever, that's not how time works.

That is what happens when a person lives alone for so long - no one else can change their ways.

We must not dwell on what we were in our salad days when soup days steam now upon the table!

All the hair dye diluted itself into the sea a long time ago and I hope the jellyfish enjoyed their time as platinum blondes, I really and honestly do.

Hello old friend," he greeted it, "how strange for us to meet again, like this, with the snow blowing so outside." "You know my...my wrench?" "Of course I know it. It was not a wrench when we were last acquainted, but ones friends may change clothes and still one knows them.

But you are not one of us. For you, this thing is irreversible except by death, and not only the flesh is altered. Only the strongest of you can resist the collapse of the soul into the form; the mind is lazy, it naturally imitates the body. I have known none of you yet who can remain human when they wear another skin. But the thing is yours to do, if you should wish to do it.

The Sibyl Slant stared out of her slit eyes, the disc of her face showing no feeling at all. "Do you suppose you will look the same when you are an old woman as you do now? Most folk have three faces—the face they get when they're children, the face they own when they're grown, and the face they've earned when they're old.

What happens to the West happens to Snow White, which is to say they both turn into jokes.

What happens to anything beautiful? Viy ate it up.

It is good that you ruined your face, because it brought you to me, but also because beautiful women rarely work strong magic.

No, my son. Not she. I . I lay on the rocks and the sun gnawed at my flesh. I pleaded for my life with a useless stump of a tongue. I watched your precious Cveti close up my severed breasts in a silver box. And I listened to the soldiers praise her false name—Ghyfran! Ghyfran! The whore who betrayed her god for power. This body is new, but I am Ragnhild, first of my name, and I am the plague which will burn through the marrow of the Anointed City.

Everyone Is Looking for a Book Strong Enough to Change Them.

September laughed and her laugh sounded like a roar; as if she had never been able to properly laugh in her whole life, only giggle or chuckle or grin, and now that she could do it right, now that her laughing had grown up and put bells on, it had become the most boisterous, rowdy roar you ever heard.

Memory is like that. It alters itself so that girls are always trapped under the earth, waiting in the dark.