Quotes About Transformation

I cannot bear this world a moment longer. Then, child, make another.

Odysseus drew the world to him," she said. "Telegonus runs after, shaping as he goes, like a river carving a channel.

named me Hawk, Circe, for my yellow eyes, and the strange, thin sound of my crying.

The beach ebbed and flowed, its curves changing with every winter season. Even the cliffs were different, carved by the rain and wind, by the claws of countless scrabbling lizards, by the seeds that stuck and sprouted in their cracks. Everything was united by the steady rise and fall of nature's breath. Everything except for me.

Witchcraft transforms the world. He wanted only to join it.

I thought: I cannot bear this world a moment longer. Then, child, make another.

They gave her to a mortal, trying to shackle the child's power. Dilute him with humanity, diminish him.

Day upon patient day, you must throw out your errors and begin again. So why did I not mind? [...] For a hundred generations, I had walked the world drowsy and dull, idle and at my ease. I left no prints, I did no deeds. Even those who had loved me a little did not care to stay. Then I learned that I could bend the world to my will, as a bow is bent for an arrow.

With every step I felt lighter. An emotion was swelling in my throat. It took me a long time to recognize what it was. I had been old and stern for so long, carved with regrets and years like a monolith. But that was only a shape I had been poured into. I did not have to keep it.

I lay on the dirt, weeping. Those flowers had made him his true being, which was blue, and finned, and not mine. I thought I would die of such pain, which was not like the sinking numbness Aeëtes had left behind, but sharp and fierce as a blade through my chest. But of course I could not die. I would live on, through each scalding moment to the next. This is the grief that makes our kind choose to be stones and trees rather than flesh.

I looked down at my body, bare in the fire's light, and tried to imagine it written over with its history: my palm with its lightning streak, my hand missing its fingers, the thousand cuts from my witch-work, the gristled furrows of my father's fire, the skin of my face like some half-melted taper. And those were only the things that had left marks. […] I was a golden witch, who had no past at all.

Tear down, I thought. Tear down and build again.

I brought a withered flower back to life. I banished flies from my house. I made the cherries blossom out of season and turned the fire vivid green. If Aeetes had been there, he would have choked on his beard to see such kitchen tricks. Yet because I knew nothing, nothing was beneath me.

You have been tame your whole life, and now you will be sorry. Yes Father, yes Father—see what it gets you.

I saw then how I had changed. I did not mind anymore that I lost when we raced and I lost when we swam out to the rocks and I lost when we tossed spears or skipped stones. For who can be ashamed to lose to such beauty?

Would I be skimmed milk or a harpy? A foolish gull or a villainous monster?

No wonder I had been so slow, I thought. All this while I had been a weaver without wool, a ship without sea. Yet look where I sail.

you can use a spear as a walking stick, but that will not change its nature. ~ Odysseus

Come, make us into magic.

I turned all my firewood to cedar so that its scent would fill my halls each night.

I had been dreaming myself a fish, silvered by sun as it leaped from the sea.

There I discovered at last the limits of my power. However potent the mixture, however well woven the spell, the toad kept trying to fly, and the mouse to sting. Transformation touched only bodies, not minds.

In the old days I would have rushed forth with a brimming cup of answers, to give him all he wanted. But I was not the same as I had been.

I am only a nymph after all, for nothing is more common among us than this.