Shahzia Sikander Quotes

A writer's job is to destroy and then to build the thing back up again by a chosen means.

Each film I make changes me in some way. When I start the picture I'm one person and by the time I finish I'm another.

I've always been obsessed with the art of transformation.

New things had to be made out of fragments.

The process of transformation consists mostly of decay.

...though nothing is damaged, everything is changed.

Fire isn't always an element of destruction. Classical alchemical doctrine teaches that it also has dominion over another province: change.

Because you think an explosion has taken place and you're looking at the shards and you say, 'Well, can we put this back together?' And by God, maybe you can put it back together. And maybe it won't be the same, but maybe it will be different, and maybe it can even be better in a different way.

Everything possessed the power to transform itself, or else, and what meant more, to be transformed.

My intention is to tell of bodies changed into new forms.

There is a transformation, you see, when you just put four edges around it. That changes it. A new world is created.

Do you not realise that dance is the pure act of metamorphosis?

Transformations is the word. We can do the work of transformation only in the present moment

Like it takes so little not only to change something, but to make you forget the way it once was, as well.

Things that came apart could be put together again, but never exactly the same.

Our lives are about development, mutation and the possibility of change; that is almost a definition of what life is: change... If you disable change, if you effectively stop time, if you prevent the possibility of the alteration of an individual's circumstances — and that must include at least the possibility that they alter for the worse — then you don't have life after death; you just have death.

Everything changes, even stone.

There was a time when I thought a great deal about the axolotls. I went to see them at the aquarium at the Jardin des Plantes and stayed for hours watching them, observing their immobility; their faint movements. Now I am an axolotl.

We've taken a show about destruction and turned it into a show about construction.

Growth is not merely a harmonious increase in size, but a transformation.

Because there is something difficult and destructive involved, there must be something creative involved as well. Relating to that creative aspect is the point.

You'll never, eever, be the same, again!

I thought my song was beginning that day, but it was almost done.

Whenever anything changes and quits its proper limits, this change is at once the death of that which was before.