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77c2459
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I was shut up inside that doll of myself and my true voice could not get out.
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Margaret Atwood |
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39ec48b
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What is believed in society is not always the equivalent of what is true; but as regards to a woman's reputation, it amounts to the same thing.
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women
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Margaret Atwood |
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8fa2c26
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He said, I won't have one of those things in the house. It gives a young girl a false notion of beauty, not to mention anatomy. If a real woman was built like that she'd fall on her face. She said, If we don't let her have one like all the other girls she'll feel singled out. It'll become an issue. She'll long for one and she'll long to turn into one. Repression breeds sublimation. You know that. He said, It's not just the pointy plastic t..
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women
beauty
humor
role-models
feminine
girls
gender-roles
femininity
gender-stereotypes
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Margaret Atwood |
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8b6f3ac
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I sit at the little table, eating creamed corn with a fork. I have a fork and a spoon, but never a knife. When there's meat they cut it up for me ahead of time, as if I'm lacking manual skills or teeth. I have both, however. That's why I'm not allowed a knife.
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Margaret Atwood |
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0dfe9b7
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If I was a princess, with silver and gold, And loved by a hero, I'd never grow old: Oh, if a young hero came a-marrying me, I'd always be beautiful, happy, and free! Then sail, my fine lady, on the billowing wave - The water below is as dark as the grave, And maybe you'll sink in your little blue boat - It's hope, and hope only, that keeps us afloat.
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Margaret Atwood |
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b673483
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Women can't add, he once said, jokingly. When I asked him what he meant, he said, For them, one and one and one and one don't make four. What do they make? I said, expecting five or three. Just one and one and one and one, he said.
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Margaret Atwood |
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b2a352e
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I can tell you're admiring my febrility. I know it's appealing, I practice at it; every woman loves an invalid. But be careful. You might do something destructive: hunger is more basic than love. Florence Nightingale was a cannibal you know.
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Margaret Atwood |
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b3a2545
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Those who have been in trouble themselves are alert to it in others
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Margaret Atwood |
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febb532
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and the evening was so beautiful, that it made a pain in my heart, as when you cannot tell wether you are happy or sad; and I thought that if I could have a wish, it would be that nothing would ever change, and we would stay that way forever.
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beauty
atwood
evening
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Margaret Atwood |
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309c380
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Looking back on his life, he sees himself spread out on the earth like a giant covered in tiny threads that have held him down. Tiny threads of petty cares and small concerns, and fears he took seriously at the time. Debts, timetables, the need for money, the longing for comfort; the earworm of sex, repeating itself over and over like a neural feedback loop. He's been the puppet of his own constricted desires.
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Margaret Atwood |
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9aceb3a
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Glenn used to say the reason you can't really imagine yourself being dead was that as soon as you say, "I'll be dead," you've said the word I, and so you're still alive inside the sentence. And that's how people got the idea of immortality of the soul - it was a consequence of grammar. And so was God, because as soon as there's a past tense, there has to be a past before the past, and you keep going back in time until you get to I don't kno..
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religion
the-year-of-the-flood
scifi
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Margaret Atwood |
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1a244ba
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It's impossible to say a thing exactly the way it was, because what you say can never be exact, you always have to leave something out, there are too many parts, sides, crosscurrents, nuances; too many gestures, which could mean this or that, too many shapes which can never be fully described, too many flavors, in the air or on the tongue, half-colors, too many. But if you happen to be a man, sometime in the future, and you've made it this ..
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Margaret Atwood |
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cac2bfc
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In their dreams they touch, they intertwine, it's more like a collision, and that is the end of flying. They fall to earth, fouled parachutists, botched and cindery angels, love streaming out behind them like torn silk. Enemy groundfire comes up to meet them.
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Margaret Atwood |
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49af6d6
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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.
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morning-in-the-burned-house
margaret-atwood
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Margaret Atwood |
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5f44cf5
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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...
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night
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Margaret Atwood |
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b86b728
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They wouldn't know mad when they saw it in any case, because a good portion of the women in the Asylum were no madder than the Queen of England. Many were sane enough when sober, as their madness came out of a bottle, which is a kind I knew very well. One of them was in there to get away from her husband, who beat her black and blue, he was the mad one but nobody would lock him up;
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Margaret Atwood |
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25ee1e1
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And sometimes it happened, for a time. That kind of love comes and goes and is hard to remember afterwards, like pain. You would look at the man one day and you would think, I loved you, and the tense would be past, and you would be filled with a sense of wonder, because it was such an amazing and precarious and dumb thing to have done; and you would know too why your friends had been evasive about it, at the time. There is a good deal of c..
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Margaret Atwood |
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8747add
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He was twisted as a pretzel, he was a tinfoil-halo shitnosed frogstomping king rat asshole, but he wasn't stupid.
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Margaret Atwood |
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fea8ba8
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Tell what is yours to tell. Let others tell what is theirs.
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Margaret Atwood |
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8840fb2
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She must have heard the door opening and closing in the middle of the night; she produces a smile, warm, conspiratorial, and I know what circuits are closing in her head: by screwing Joe she's brought us back together. Saving the world, everyone wants to; men think they can do it with guns, women with their bodies, love conquers all, conquerors love all, mirages raised by words.
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Margaret Atwood |
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b200332
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Here is a handful of shadow I have brought back to you: this decay, this hope, this mouth- ful of dirt, this poetry.
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Margaret Atwood |
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2605662
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I have them, these attacks of the past, like faintness, a wave sweeping over my head.
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Margaret Atwood |
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b76100c
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Sleeping in your clothes makes you tired. The clothes are crumpled, and also your body underneath them. I feel as if I've been rolled into a bundle and thrown on the floor.
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Margaret Atwood |
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df40c80
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It has thrown off its disguise as a meal and has revealed itself to me for what it is, a large dead bird. I'm eating a wing. It's the wing of a tame turkey, the stupidest bird in the world, so stupid it can't even fly any more. I am eating lost flight.
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Margaret Atwood |
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4fbe047
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We immortals aren't misers - we don't hoard! Such things are pointless.
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Margaret Atwood |
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74fa761
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All of this was understood, and if not condoned, at least pardoned.
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Margaret Atwood |
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ee65faf
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Another friend of mine used to maintain that airplanes stayed up in the air only because people believed--against reason--that they could fly: without that collective delusion sustaining them, they would instantly plummet to earth.
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Margaret Atwood |
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90c60f6
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All observations of life are harsh, because life is.
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Margaret Atwood |
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3d5526b
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Books and characters in books, pictures and elements in pictures--they all have families and ancestors, just like people.
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Margaret Atwood |
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e3e403e
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You young people don't appreciate things, she'd say. You don't know what we had to go through, just to get you where you are. Look at him, slicing up the carrots. Don't you know how many women's lives, how many women's bodies, the tanks had to roll over just to get that far?
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Margaret Atwood |
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ac22919
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I guess you get all my money, I said. And I'm not even dead. I was trying for a joke, but it came out sounding macabre. Hush, he said. He was still kneeling on the floor. You know I'll always take care of you. I thought, already he's starting to patronize me. Then I thought, already you're starting to get paranoid.
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Margaret Atwood |
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1c5a67a
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Forgive us our trespasses, as we forgive those who trespass against us. I refuse to say this. If it means I will have to forgive Mrs. Smeath or else go to Hell when I die, I'm ready to go. Jesus must have known how hard it is to forgive, that was why he put this in. He was always putting in things that were impossible to do really, such as giving away all your money.
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Margaret Atwood |
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e53e7fe
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There I am, in the Grade Six class picture, smiling broadly. , is what my mother says for happy. I am happy as a clam: hardshelled, firmly closed.
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Margaret Atwood |
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5554b53
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I stand holding the apple in both hands. It feels precious, like a heavy treasure. I lift it up and smell it. It has such an odour of outdoors on it I want to cry.
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outdoors
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Margaret Atwood |
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eef6f37
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It was Crake preserving his dignity, because the alternative would have been losing it.
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Margaret Atwood |
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27557f5
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The moon. Even though we know it's coming. Every time we see it, it makes us pause, and hush.
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Margaret Atwood |
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081b6b4
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It is remarkable, I have since thought, how once a man has a few coins, no matter how he came by them, he thinks right away that he is entitled to them, and to whatever they can buy, and fancies himself cock of the walk.
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Margaret Atwood |
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275556d
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I remember adapt," says Toby. "It was another way of saying tough luck. To people you weren't going to help out."
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Margaret Atwood |
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9a98652
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If you worked out enough, maybe the man would too. Maybe you would be able to work it out together, as if the two of you were a puzzle that could be solved; otherwise, one of you, most likely the man, taking his addictive body with him and leaving you with bad withdrawal, which you could counteract by exercise. If you didn't work it out it was because one of you had the wrong attitude.
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Margaret Atwood |
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53b67cf
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I must admit it's a surprise to find myself still here, still talking to you. I prefer to think of it as talking, although of course it isn't: I'm saying nothing, you're hearing nothing. The only thing between us is this black line: a thread thrown onto the empty page, into the empty air.
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Margaret Atwood |
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3700497
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CELL Now look objectively. You have to admit the cancer cell is beautiful. If it were a flower, you'd say, with its mauve centre and pink petals of if a cover for a pulpy thirties sci-fi magazine. as an alien, a success, all purple eye and jelly tentacles and spines, or are they gills, creeping around on granular Martian dirt red as the inside of the body, while its tender walls expand and burst, its spores scatter elsewhere, take root, l..
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poetry
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Margaret Atwood |
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565939a
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The past is a great darkness, and filled with echos. Voices may reach us from it; but what they say to us is imbued with the obscurity of the matrix out of which they come; and, try as we may, we cannot always decipher them precisely in the clearer light of our own day.
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Margaret Atwood |
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6a11667
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I grew sodden with light; my skin on the inside glowed a dull red.
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Margaret Atwood |
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8fe0990
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Life Stories: Why hunger for these? One, it fits a hunger. Maybe it is more like bossiness. Maybe we just want to be in charge of the life, no matter who lived it...
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Margaret Atwood |