Quotes About Transformation

In the end, we'll all become stories. Or else we'll become entities. Maybe it's the same.

As we know from the study of history, no new system can impose itself upon a previous one without incorporating many of the elements to be found in the latter...

All Creatures know that some must die That all the rest may take and eat; Sooner or later, all transform Their blood to wine, their flesh to meat. But Man alone seeks Vengefulness, And writes his abstract Laws on stone; For this false Justice he has made, He tortures limb and crushes bone. Is this the image of a god? My tooth for yours, your eye for mine? Oh, if Revenge did move the stars Instead of Love, they would not shine.

People change, though, especially after they are dead.

I, too, was once like you: fatally hooked on life.

I tried to visualize my jealousy as a yellowy-brown cloud boiling around inside me, then going out through my nose like smoke and turning into a stone and falling down into the ground. That did work a little. But in my visualization a plant covered with poison berries would grow out of the stone, whether I wanted it to or not.

Women are hard to keep track of, most of them. They slip into other names, and sink without a trace.

I'm working on my own life story. I don't mean I'm putting it together; no, I'm taking it apart. If you'd wanted the narrative line you should have asked earlier, when I still knew everything and was more than willing to tell. That was before I discovered the virtues of scissors, the virtues of matches.

When you alter yourself, the alterations become the truth...

We were revisionists; what we revised was ourselves.

We slept in what had once been the gymnasium.

The reason they invented coffins, to lock the dead in, preserve them, they put makeup on them; they didn't want them spreading or changing into anything else. The stone with the name and date was on them to weight them down.

Amazing how quickly the past becomes idyllic.

Looking down, she became aware of the water, which was covered with a film of calcinous hard-water particles of dirt and soap, and of the body that was sitting in it, somehow no longer quite her own. All at once she was afraid that she was dissolving, coming apart layer by layer like a piece of cardboard in a gutter puddle.

But something had shifted, some balance. I felt shrunken, so that when he put his arms around me, gathering me up, I was as small as a doll. I felt love going forward without me.

Toast is me. I am toast.

Now I only need to look out at them through my sky-blue eyes. They see their own ill will staring them in the forehead and turn tail. Before, I was not a witch. But now I am one.

And consider: it is loss to which everything flows, absence in which everything flowers

Now the flesh arranges itself differently. I'm a cloud, congealed around a center object, the shape of a pear, which is hard and more real than I am and glows red within its translucent wrapping. Inside it is a space, huge as the sky at night and dark and curved like that, though black-red rather than black. Pinpoints of light swell, sparkle, burst and shrivel within it, countless as stars. Every month there is a moon, gigantic, round, heavy, an omen.

The tulips along the border are redder than ever, opening, no longer wine cups but chalices; thrusting themselves up, to what end? They are, after all, empty. When they are old they turn themselves inside out, explode slowly, the petals thrown like shards.

Me, it's the heart: that's the part lacking. I used to want one: a dainty cushion of red silk dangling from a blood ribbon, fit for sticking pins in. But I've changed my mind. Hearts hurt. — Margaret Atwood, from "The Tin Woodwoman Gets a Massage ," Dearly: New Poems (Ecco, 2020)

Time has not stood still. It has washed over me, washed me away, as if I'm nothing more than a woman of sand, left by a careless child too near the water.

A road is a process, not a location.

Below me, in the foundations of the house, I could hear the clothes I'd buried there growing themselves a body.