How we cite our quotes: (Chapter.Paragraph)
Quote #4
He had never been fat, but he had been slightly heavy with a little extra weight just above his belt at the sides.
This was completely gone and his stomach had caved in to the hunger and the sun had cooked him past burning so he was tanning, and with the smoke from the fire his face was starting to look like leather. But perhaps more than his body was the change in his mind, or in the way he was—was becoming. (11.7-8)
The changes in Brian's body are a direct result of all the "doing-without" he's gone through in the woods. He's shed extra pounds, and even his skin has become tougher—in nature, anything extra or unnecessary gets left behind. Note: we don't recommend this for your next diet.
Quote #5
I am not the same, he thought. I see, I hear differently. He did not know when the change started, but it was there; when a sound came to him now he didn't just hear it but would know the sound. He would swing and look at it—a breaking twig, a movement of air—and know the sound as if he somehow could move his mind back down the wave of sound to the source.
He could know what the sound was before he quite realized he had heard it. And when he saw something—a bird moving a wing inside a bush or a ripple on the water—he would truly see that thing, not just notice it as he used to notice things in the city. He would see all parts of; see the whole wing, the feathers, see the color of the feathers, see the bush, and the size and shape and color of its leaves. He would see the way the light moved with the ripples on the water and see that the wind made the ripples and which way that wind had to blow to make the ripples move in that certain way. (11.9-10)
Check it out: Brian is totally tuned in to everything around him. It's almost as though he's one great big sensory input machine. He's traveled quite a ways from what he was like when we first met him. Back then, it seemed like he barely saw anything, even if it was right in front of him.
Quote #6
He was not the same now—the Brian that stood and watched the wolves move away and nodded to them was completely changed. Time had come, time that he measured but didn't care about; time had come into his life and moved out and left him different.
In measured time forty-seven days had passed since the crash. Forty-two days, he thought, since he had died and been born as the new Brian. (13.10-11)
The "new Brian." How's that for transformation? It's like he's a totally different person.