Quotes About Transformation

Once the body has known death, it never lives the same again.

Stories have to repair the damage that illness has done to the ill person's sense of where she is in life, and where she may be going. Stories are a way of redrawing maps and finding new destinations.

It was a time when the unthinkable became the thinkable and the impossible really happened

Little events, ordinary things, smashed and reconstituted. Suddenly, they become the bleached bones of a story.

Either way, change will come. It could be bloody, or it could be beautiful. It depends on us.

As she watched him she understood the quality of his beauty. How his labor had shaped him. How the wood he fashioned had fashioned him. Each plank he planed, each nail he drove, each thing he made molded him. Had left its stamp on him. Had given him his strength, his supple grace.

When she looked at him now, she couldn't help thinking that the man he had become bore so little resemblance to the boy he had been. His smile was the only piece of baggage he had carried with him from boyhood into manhood.

Another world is not only possible, she is on her way. Maybe many of us won't be here to greet her, but on a quiet day, if I listen very carefully, I can hear her breathing.

Anyway, now she thinks of Estha and Rahel as Them, because, separately, the two of them are no longer what They were or ever thought They would be. Ever. Their lives have a size and a shape now. Estha has his and Rahel hers. Edges, Borders, Boundaries, Brinks and Limits have appeared like a team of trolls on their separate horizons. Short creatures with long shadows, patrolling the Blurry End. Gentle half-moons have gathered under their eyes and they are as old as Ammu was when she died.

Dear Doctor, If you like you can change every inch of me. I'm just a story.

And on Ammu's road (to Age and Death) a small, sunny meadow appeared. Copper grass spangled with blue butterflies. Beyond it, an abyss.

I soon learned that Dandakaranya, the forest I was about to enter, was full of people who had many names and fluid identities. It was like balm to me, that idea. How lovely not to be stuck with yourself, to become someone else for a while.

An Urdu couplet by one of his favorite poets, Mir Taqi Mir: Jis sar ko ghurur aaj hai yaan taj-vari ka Kal uss pe yahin shor hai phir nauhagari ka The head which today proudly flaunts a crown Will tomorrow, right here, in lamentation drown.

Historically, pandemics have forced humans to break with the past and imagine their world anew. This one is no different. It is a portal, a gateway between one world and the next. We can choose to walk through it, dragging the carcasses of our prejudice and hatred, our avarice, our data banks and dead ideas, our dead rivers and smoky skies behind us. Or we can walk through lightly, with little luggage, ready to imagine another world. And ready to fight for it.

Crashing through the world like a falling stone. It is his color and his light. It is the vessel into which he pours.

It could be argued that it began long before Christianity arrived in a boat and seeped into Kerala like tea from a teabag.

The time has come, the Walrus said. Perhaps things will become worse and then better. Perhaps there's a small god up in heaven readying herself for us. Another world is not only possible, she's on her way. Maybe many of us won't be here to greet her, but on a quiet day, if I listen very carefully, I can hear her breathing.

Slowly, over the years, Estha withdrew from the world. He grew accustomed to the uneasy octopus that lived inside him and squirted its inky tranquilizer on his past. Gradually the reason for his silence was hidden away, entombed somewhere deep in the soothing folds of the fact of it.

White-walled once. Red-roofed. But painted in weather-colors now. With brushes dipped in nature's palette. Mossgreen. Earth-brown. Crumbleblack

And so, in these ways, in order to please Zainab, Anjum began to rewrite a simpler, happier life for herself. The rewriting in turn began to make Anjum a simpler, happier person.

We need an updated insurance plan against our won basic natures

A new world is not only possible

Childhood tiptoed out. Silence slid in like a bolt.

Levantó la mirada. Y vio que Chacko había desaparecido y en su lugar había un monstruo.