Quotes About Transformation

And now I found I couldn't stay small, my eyes stayed closed but my voice lifted, and kept lifting, I got louder and louder, I did not feel I had control of it, exactly, it was something I'd released that now rose up and away and escaped my reach.

You came in with a picky head, uneven and coarse, disguised underneath a baseball cap, and you left swiftly afterwards a new man, smelling sweetly of coconut oil and with a cut as sharp and clean as a swear word.

There's no woodland or forest-like aspect but it does feel like the middle of something, and wisdom finally arrives, even if only as an awareness that inside the adult flesh cages lurk the exact same children.

certainly don't write as a public service. But I am aware, at least as a reader, that remarkable acts of art-making—bold, perverse, unbeholden, free—have had the side effect of changing the weather in a country, in a people, at a certain historical moment, and finally in me, conferring freedoms for which I am now very grateful.

I said, See what you've done there is you've transformed an act of the perpetrator into a characteristic of the target. You've turned one person's action into another person's being. I said, You don't say to a witch: the reason they're dunking you is because you're a witch. You say, the reason they're dunking you is these motherfuckers believe in witchcraft! Their whole society is based on it!

can remember thinking, if they can do this to women? Do they have the power to reprogram their mothers? To make their mothers into the kinds of women their younger selves would not even recognize?

Strange inversions proliferate.

See what you've done there is you've transformed an act of the perpetrator into another person's being. I said, You don't say to a witch: the reason they're dunking you is because you're a witch. You say, the reason they're dunking you is these motherfuckers believe in witchcraft!

And you must forget what you are—were—I mean, and be happy. When you remember that old life you are bitter, and it hurts me.

Men rise on steppin'-stones of their dead selves to higher things!...

I could write a treatise on the sudden transformation of life into archaeology

I have been in Sorrow's kitchen and licked out all the pots. Then I have stood on the peaky mountain wrapped in rainbows, with a harp and a sword in my hands.

Her old thoughts were going to come in handy now, but new words would have to be made and said to fit them.

she began to stand around the gate and expect things. What things? She didn't know exactly. Her breath was gusty and short. She knew things that nobody ever told her. For instance, the words of the trees and the wind. .. She knew the world was a stallion rolling in the blue pasture of ether. She knew that God tore down the old world every evening and built a new one by sun-up. It was wonderful to see it take form with the sun and emerge from the gray dust of its making.

From barren brown stems to glistening leaf-buds; from the leaf-buds to snowy virginity of bloom…It was like a flute song forgotten in another existence and remembered again. What? How? Why? This singing she heard that had nothing to do with her ears. The rose of the world was breathing out smell. It followed her through all her waking moments and caressed her in her sleep.

She knew things that nobody had ever told her... She knew the world was a stallion rolling in the blue pastor of ether. She knew that God tore down the old world every evening and built a new one every sun-up. It was wonderful to see it take form with the sun and emerge from the gray dust of its making.

Janie's first dream was dead, so she became a woman.

Janie stood where he left her for unmeasured time and thought. She stood there until something fell off the shelf inside her. Then she went inside there to see what it was. It was her image of Jody tumbled down and shattered. But looking at it she saw that it never was the flesh and blood figure of her dreams. Just some thing she had grabbed up to drape her dreams over.

Once upon uh time, Ah never 'spected nothin', Tea Cake, but bein' dead from the standin' still and tryin' tuh laugh. But you come 'long and made somethin' outa me. So Ah'm thankful fuh anything we come through together." "Thanky, Ma'am.

It troubled him to get used to the world one way and then suddenly have it turn different.

Years ago, she had told her girl self to wait for her in the looking glass. It had been a long time since she had remembered. Perhaps she'd better go look. She went over to the dresser and looked hard at her skin and features. The young girl was gone, but a handsome woman had taken her place. She tore off the kerchief from her head and let down her plentiful hair. The weight, the length, the glory was there.

Janie knew that God tore down the old world every evening and built a new one by sun-up. It was wonderful to see it take form with the sun and emerge from the gray dust of its making.

The bed was no longer a daisy-field for her and Joe to play in. It was a place where she went and laid down when she was sleepy and tired.

Something fell off the shelf inside her