|
06ce4e3
|
It was true, I took too much for granted; I trusted fate, back then.
|
|
|
Margaret Atwood |
|
517198e
|
I admired my mother in some ways, although things between us were never easy. She expected too much from me, I felt. She expected me to vindicate her life for her, and the choices she'd made. I didn't want to live my life on her terms. I didn't want to be the model offspring, the incarnation of her ideas. We used to fight about that. I am not your justification for existence, I said to her once.
|
|
|
Margaret Atwood |
|
4ca573f
|
Here and there are worms, evidence of the fertility of the soil, caught by the sun, half dead; flexible and pink, like lips.
|
|
|
Margaret Atwood |
|
baee945
|
But why bother about the end of the world? It's the end of the world every day, for someone. Time rises and rises, and when it reaches the level of your eyes you drown.
|
|
|
Margaret Atwood |
|
97a5594
|
What do you want me to do?" he whispers into the empty air. It's hard to know. From habit he lifts his watch; it shows him its blank face. Zero hour, Snowman thinks. Time to go."
|
|
|
Margaret Atwood |
|
aa08a85
|
Nothing like love to put blood back in the language, the difference between the beach and its discrete rocks and shards, a hard cuneiform, and the tender cursive of waves; bone and liquid fishegg, desert and saltmarsh, a green push out of death. The vowels plump again like lips or soaked fingers, and the fingers themselves move around these softening pebbles as around skin. The sky's not vacant and over there but close against your eyes, ..
|
|
|
Margaret Atwood |
|
5b97562
|
Looking down, she became aware of the water, which was covered with a film of calcinous hard-water particles of dirt and soap, and of the body that was sitting in it, somehow no longer quite her own. All at once she was afraid that she was dissolving, coming apart layer by layer like a piece of cardboard in a gutter puddle.
|
|
body-dysmorphic-disorder
anorexia-nervosa
dysphoria
|
Margaret Atwood |
|
7f3b429
|
My life had a tendency to spread, get flabby, to scroll and festoon like the frame of a baroque mirror, which came from following the line of least resistance. I wanted my death, by contrast, to be neat and simple, understated, even a little severe, like a Quaker church or the basic black dress with a single strand of pearls...
|
|
|
Margaret Atwood |
|
b44babd
|
But a chair, sunlight, flowers: these are not to be dismissed. I am alive, I live, I breathe, I put my hand out, unfolded, into the sunlight.
|
|
|
Margaret Atwood |
|
7fd57b5
|
She liked to keep only the bright side of herself turned towards him. She liked to shine.
|
|
|
Margaret Atwood |
|
4b92898
|
Below me, in the foundations of the house, I could hear the clothes I'd buried there growing themselves a body.
|
|
|
Margaret Atwood |
|
947b259
|
Was every Heathcliff a Linton in disguise?
|
|
|
Margaret Atwood |
|
dfa8d4e
|
It's somewhat daunting to reflect that Hell is -- possibly -- the place where you are stuck in your own personal narrative for ever, and Heaven is -- possibly -- the place where you can ditch it, and take up wisdom instead.
|
|
|
Margaret Atwood |
|
47eda6b
|
We can see through all your disguises: the paths of day, the paths of darkness, whichever paths you take - we're right behind you, following you like a trail of smoke, like a long tail, a tail made of girls, heavy as memory, light as air: twelve accusations, toes skimming the ground, hands tied behind our backs, tongues sticking out, eyes bulging, songs choked in our throats.
|
|
|
Margaret Atwood |
|
fd91126
|
I wait, for the household to assemble. Household: that is what we are. The Commander is the head of the household. The house is what he holds. To have and to hold, till death do us part. The hold of a ship. Hollow.
|
|
|
Margaret Atwood |
|
44ff264
|
If someone wants to suck your toes, those toes should be worth sucking.
|
|
toes
erotic
body
erotica
suck
feet
|
Margaret Atwood |
|
c9f0cc9
|
From this distance it does resemble fun. Fun is not knowing how it will end.
|
|
|
Margaret Atwood |
|
290b664
|
Why do we want other people to like us, even if we don't really care about them all that much?
|
|
self-worth
|
Margaret Atwood |
|
8d3b53d
|
What else can I do? Once you've gone this far you aren't fit for anything else. Something happens to your mind. You're overqualified, overspecialized, and everybody knows it.
|
|
education
|
Margaret Atwood |
|
9412ae0
|
otherwise, one of you, most likely the man, would go wandering off on a trajectory of his own, 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. Everything that went on in your life was thought to be due to some positive or negative power emanating from inside your head.
|
|
perspective
|
Margaret Atwood |
|
6999bbc
|
I think that this is what God must look like: an egg. The life of the moon may not be on the surface, but inside.
|
|
|
Margaret Atwood |
|
c20ef04
|
You'll have to forgive me. I'm a refugee from the past, and like other refugees I go over the customs and habits of being I've left or been forced to leave behind me, and it all seems just as quaint, from here, and I am just as obsessive about it. Like a White Russian drinking tea in Paris, marooned in the twentieth century, I wander back, try to regain those distant pathways; I become too maudlin, lose myself. Weep. Weeping is what it is, ..
|
|
|
Margaret Atwood |
|
cac5f66
|
I am alive, I live, I breathe, I put my hand out, unfolded, into the sunlight. Where I am is not a prison but a privilege...
|
|
|
Margaret Atwood |
|
5655893
|
He loved her; in some ways he was devoted to her. But he couldn't reach her, and it was the same on her side. It was as if they'd drunk some fatal potion that would keep them forever apart, even though they lived in the same house, ate at the same table, slept in the same bed.
|
|
love
love-hurts
separation
longing
|
Margaret Atwood |
|
b07ffd4
|
She doesn't think it's a good idea to know the future, because you can hardly ever change it, so why suffer twice?
|
|
unchangeable
margaret-atwood
the-robber-bride
the-future
foresight
fortune-telling
prophecy
suffer
inevitable
|
Margaret Atwood |
|
11824d7
|
Love was merely a tool, smiles were another tool, they were both just tools for accomplishing certain ends. No magic, merely chemicals. I felt I'd never really loved anyone, not Paul, not Chuck the Royal Porcupine, not even Arthur. I'd polished them with my love and expected them to shine, brightly enough to return my own reflection, enhanced and sparkling.
|
|
|
Margaret Atwood |
|
5d37b16
|
And I wondered what would become of me, and comforted myself that in a hundred years I would be dead and at peace, and in my grave; and I thought it might be less trouble altogether, to be in it a good deal sooner than that.
|
|
|
Margaret Atwood |
|
aadfe85
|
My audience is God, because who the hell else could understand me?
|
|
|
Margaret Atwood |
|
56cb65d
|
For it is not always the one that strikes the blow that is the actual murderer; and Mary was done to death by that unknown gentleman, as surely as if he'd taken the knife and plunged it into her body himself.
|
|
|
Margaret Atwood |
|
30d1a6a
|
The tulips along the border are redder than ever, opening, no longer wine cups but chalices; thrusting themselves up, to what end? They are, after all, empty. When they are old they turn themselves inside out, explode slowly, the petals thrown like shards.
|
|
|
Margaret Atwood |
|
f20757e
|
Behind the studied blankness of her gaze, revolt must have been simmering. I recognized that surliness, that stubbornness, that captive-princess indignation, which must be kept hidden until enough weapons have been collected.
|
|
|
Margaret Atwood |
|
eadbf51
|
Staring at the magazine, as he dangled it before me like fish bait, I wanted it. I wanted it with a force that made the ends of my fingers ache. At the same time I saw this longing of mine as trivial and absurd, because I'd taken such magazines lightly enough once. I'd read them in dentists' offices, and sometimes on planes; I'd bought them to take to hotel rooms, a device to fill in empty time while I was waiting for Luke. After I'd leafed..
|
|
|
Margaret Atwood |
|
8e00467
|
How strange to remember typewriters, with their jammed keys and snarled ribbons and the smudgy carbon paper for copies.
|
|
|
Margaret Atwood |
|
4b626ec
|
So many crucial events take place behind people's backs, when they aren't in a position to watch: birth and death, for instance.
|
|
|
Margaret Atwood |
|
f450561
|
the values ascribed to the Indian will depend on what the white writer feels about Nature, and America has always had mixed feelings about that. At one end of the spectrum is Thoreau, wishing to immerse himself in swamps for the positive vibrations; at the other end is Benjamin Franklin, who didn't like Nature. [p.91]
|
|
nature
native-americans
|
Margaret Atwood |
|
50ea973
|
No mother is ever, completely, a child's idea of what a mother should be, and I suppose it works the other way around as well.
|
|
|
Margaret Atwood |
|
f280234
|
No more photos. Surely there are enough. No more shadows of myself thrown by light onto pieces of paper, onto squares of plastic.
|
|
|
Margaret Atwood |
|
d669634
|
How potent was that word. With.
|
|
|
Margaret Atwood |
|
8b68df1
|
Sometimes in the dusk he runs up and down on the sand, flinging stones at the ocean and screaming, Shit, shit, shit, shit, shit! He feels better afterwards.
|
|
|
Margaret Atwood |
|
62beb27
|
I didn't know I was about to be left with her idea of me; with her idea of my goodness pinned onto me like a badge and no chance to throw it back at her (as would have been the normal course of affairs with a mother and a daughter--if she'd lived, as I'd grown older).
|
|
|
Margaret Atwood |
|
5e31cc7
|
In Heaven, there are no debts - all have been paid, one way or another - but in Hell there's nothing but debts, and a great deal of payment is exacted, though you can't ever get all paid up. You have to pay, and pay, and keep on paying. So Hell is like an infernal maxed-out credit card that multiplies the charges endlessly.
|
|
|
Margaret Atwood |
|
bc07235
|
How dare she be anything he was annoyed with her for not being?
|
|
|
Margaret Atwood |
|
b3bf33a
|
Your legacy from him is the realm of infinite speculation. You're free to reinvent yourself at will.
|
|
|
Margaret Atwood |
|
0e70e1c
|
Of course you have always been an idealist, and filled with your optimistic dreams; but reality must at some time obtrude, and you are now turned thirty.
|
|
|
Margaret Atwood |