|
46a61fe
|
Don't let the bastards grind you down.
|
|
inspirational
|
Margaret Atwood |
|
6722497
|
Another belief of mine: that everyone else my age is an adult, whereas I am merely in disguise.
|
|
|
Margaret Atwood |
|
36cf450
|
In the spring, at the end of the day, you should smell like dirt.
|
|
spring
|
Margaret Atwood |
|
d2d5a27
|
Love blurs your vision; but after it recedes, you can see more clearly than ever. It's like the tide going out, revealing whatever's been thrown away and sunk: broken bottles, old gloves, rusting pop cans, nibbled fishbodies, bones. This is the kind of thing you see if you sit in the darkness with open eyes, not knowing the future.
|
|
|
Margaret Atwood |
|
14535e9
|
Ignoring isn't the same as ignorance, you have to work at it.
|
|
|
Margaret Atwood |
|
ec7aed7
|
I don't want to see anyone. I lie in the bedroom with the curtains drawn and nothingness washing over me like a sluggish wave. Whatever is happening to me is my own fault. I have done something wrong, something so huge I can't even see it, something that's drowning me. I am inadequate and stupid, without worth. I might as well be dead.
|
|
self-worth
|
Margaret Atwood |
|
e51cb45
|
Nolite te bastardes carborundorum. Don't let the bastards grind you down.
|
|
|
Margaret Atwood |
|
900bdef
|
But who can remember pain, once it's over? All that remains of it is a shadow, not in the mind even, in the flesh. Pain marks you, but too deep to see. Out of sight, out of mind.
|
|
pain
|
Margaret Atwood |
|
c17b903
|
If you knew what was going to happen, if you knew everything that was going to happen next--if you knew in advance the consequences of your own actions--you'd be doomed. You'd be ruined as God. You'd be a stone. You'd never eat or drink or laugh or get out of bed in the morning. You'd never love anyone, ever again. You'd never dare to.
|
|
women
knowledge
|
Margaret Atwood |
|
145f6fb
|
Better never means better for everyone... It always means worse, for some.
|
|
|
Margaret Atwood |
|
e192140
|
We were the people who were not in the papers. We lived in the blank white spaces at the edges of print. It gave us more freedom. We lived in the gaps between the stories.
|
|
stories
|
Margaret Atwood |
|
e3b7a4e
|
The only way you can write the truth is to assume that what you set down will never be read. Not by any other person, and not even by yourself at some later date. Otherwise you begin excusing yourself. You must see the writing as emerging like a long scroll of ink from the index finger of your right hand; you must see your left hand erasing it.
|
|
writing
|
Margaret Atwood |
|
039eecd
|
Water does not resist. Water flows. When you plunge your hand into it, all you feel is a caress. Water is not a solid wall, it will not stop you. But water always goes where it wants to go, and nothing in the end can stand against it. Water is patient. Dripping water wears away a stone. Remember that, my child. Remember you are half water. If you can't go through an obstacle, go around it. Water does.
|
|
patient
water
|
Margaret Atwood |
|
6c89746
|
When we think of the past it's the beautiful things we pick out. We want to believe it was all like that.
|
|
the-past
remembrance
|
Margaret Atwood |
|
593ebf1
|
Stupidity is the same as evil if you judge by the results.
|
|
stupidity
|
Margaret Atwood |
|
d96b824
|
Falling in love, we said; I fell for him. We were falling women. We believed in it, this downward motion: so lovely, like flying, and yet at the same time so dire, so extreme, so unlikely. God is love, they once said, but we reversed that, and love, like heaven, was always just around the corner. The more difficult it was to love the particular man beside us, the more we believed in Love, abstract and total. We were waiting, always, for the..
|
|
|
Margaret Atwood |
|
3ff6d10
|
When you're young, you think everything you do is disposable. You move from now to now, crumpling time up in your hands, tossing it away. You're your own speeding car. You think you can get rid of things, and people too--leave them behind. You don't yet know about the habit they have, of coming back. Time in dreams is frozen. You can never get away from where you've been.
|
|
youth
the-past
|
Margaret Atwood |
|
3147be7
|
Male fantasies, male fantasies, is everything run by male fantasies? Up on a pedestal or down on your knees, it's all a male fantasy: that you're strong enough to take what they dish out, or else too weak to do anything about it. Even pretending you aren't catering to male fantasies is a male fantasy: pretending you're unseen, pretending you have a life of your own, that you can wash your feet and comb your hair unconscious of the ever-pres..
|
|
|
Margaret Atwood |
|
e45c898
|
A rat in a maze is free to go anywhere, as long as it stays inside the maze.
|
|
|
Margaret Atwood |
|
50be3fc
|
You can only be jealous of someone who has something you think you ought to have yourself.
|
|
|
Margaret Atwood |
|
7892dcb
|
Nolite te bastardes carborundorum.
|
|
|
Margaret Atwood |
|
7e35def
|
A truth should exist, it should not be used
|
|
poetry
truth
|
Margaret Atwood |
|
3e48aca
|
You fit into me like a hook into an eye
|
|
relationships
|
Margaret Atwood |
|
18f12e2
|
Knowing too much about other people puts you in their power, they have a claim on you, you are forced to understand their reasons for doing things and then you are weakened.
|
|
|
Margaret Atwood |
|
6a02024
|
There is more than one kind of freedom," said Aunt Lydia. "Freedom to and freedom from. In the days of anarchy, it was freedom to. Now you are being given freedom from. Don't underrate it."
|
|
|
Margaret Atwood |
|
f8a885d
|
Love blurs your vision; but after it recedes, you can see more clearly than ever. It's like the tide going out, revealing whatever's been thrown away and sunk: broken bottles, old gloves, rusting pop cans, nibbled fishbodies, bones. This is the kind of thing you see if you sit in the darkness with open eyes, not knowing the future. The ruin you've made.
|
|
|
Margaret Atwood |
|
86ff0dc
|
Touch comes before sight, before speech. It is the first language and the last, and it always tells the truth.
|
|
senses
|
Margaret Atwood |
|
1c25ff6
|
Farewells can be shattering, but returns are surely worse. Solid flesh can never live up to the bright shadow cast by its absence. Time and distance blur the edges; then suddenly the beloved has arrived, and it's noon with its merciless light, and every spot and pore and wrinkle and bristle stands clear.
|
|
reality
return
|
Margaret Atwood |
|
7fc6b5d
|
The best way of keeping a secret is to pretend there isn't one.
|
|
|
Margaret Atwood |
|
63ae9c8
|
If we were all on trial for our thoughts, we would all be hanged.
|
|
|
Margaret Atwood |
|
b272022
|
What I need is perspective. The illusion of depth, created by a frame, the arrangement of shapes on a flat surface. Perspective is necessary. Otherwise there are only two dimensions. Otherwise you live with your face squashed up against a wall, everything a huge foreground, of details, close-ups, hairs, the weave of the bedsheet, the molecules of the face. Your own skin like a map, a diagram of futility, criscrossed with tiny roads that lea..
|
|
|
Margaret Atwood |
|
4eeb926
|
Women have curious ways of hurting someone else. They hurt themselves instead; or else they do it so the guy doesn't even know he's been hurt until much later. Then he finds out. Then his dick falls off.
|
|
|
Margaret Atwood |
|
2ac6f5c
|
The moment of betrayal is the worst, the moment when you know beyond any doubt that you've been betrayed: that some other human being has wished you that much evil
|
|
|
Margaret Atwood |
|
e9211f5
|
How could I be sleeping with this particular man.... Surely only true love could justify my lack of taste.
|
|
relationships
love
|
Margaret Atwood |
|
0b01d5a
|
We thought we had such problems. How were we to know we were happy?
|
|
|
Margaret Atwood |
|
b8b42ab
|
is what they say, and sometimes , as if mad is a different direction, like west; as if mad is a different house you could step into, or a separate country entirely. But when you go mad you don't go any other place, you stay where you are. And somebody else comes in.
|
|
|
Margaret Atwood |
|
d06bf00
|
Hatred would have been easier. With hatred, I would have known what to do. Hatred is clear, metallic, one-handed, unwavering; unlike love.
|
|
love
|
Margaret Atwood |
|
b760b6b
|
Night falls. Or has fallen. Why is it that night falls, instead of rising, like the dawn? Yet if you look east, at sunset, you can see night rising, not falling; darkness lifting into the sky, up from the horizon, like a black sun behind cloud cover. Like smoke from an unseen fire, a line of fire just below the horizon, brushfire or a burning city. Maybe night falls because it's heavy, a thick curtain pulled up over the eyes. Wool blanket.
|
|
|
Margaret Atwood |
|
f5ffe24
|
There's an epigram tacked to my office bulletin board, pinched from a magazine -- "Wanting to meet an author because you like his work is like wanting to meet a duck because you like pate."
|
|
epigrams
fandom
similes
on-writing
disappointment
writers
|
Margaret Atwood |
|
83dd988
|
I am not your justification for existence.
|
|
|
Margaret Atwood |
|
8277043
|
You can think clearly only with your clothes on.
|
|
|
Margaret Atwood |
|
a9daff4
|
All stories are about wolves. All worth repeating, that is. Anything else is sentimental drivel.
|
|
writing
|
Margaret Atwood |
|
672631a
|
She imagines him imagining her. This is her salvation. In spirit she walks the city, traces its labyrinths, its dingy mazes: each assignation, each rendezvous, each door and stair and bed. What he said, what she said, what they did, what they did then. Even the times they argued, fought, parted, agonized, rejoined. How they'd loved to cut themselves on each other, taste their own blood. We were ruinous together, she thinks. But how else can..
|
|
lovers
loss
love
|
Margaret Atwood |
|
9b78a8e
|
If he wants to be an asshole, it's a free country. Millions before him have made the same life choice.
|
|
|
Margaret Atwood |