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6a1fecc
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What am I living for and what am I dying for are the same question.
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Margaret Atwood |
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e887bc8
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Potential has a shelf life.
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potential
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Margaret Atwood |
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d6e65d6
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A home filled with nothing but yourself. It's heavy, that lightness. It's crushing, that emptiness.
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life
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Margaret Atwood |
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356a1a8
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Forgiving men is so much easier than forgiving women.
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men
women
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Margaret Atwood |
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e7c7681
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How could I have been so ignorant? she thinks. So stupid, so unseeing, so given over to carelessness. But without such ignorance, such carelessness, how could we live? 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 as ruined as God. You'd be a stone. You'd never eat or drink or laugh or get out of bed in the mo..
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loneliness
sorrow
love
wisdom
ignorance
despair
insight
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Margaret Atwood |
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795bc66
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You think I'm not a goddess? Try me.
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Margaret Atwood |
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1b24539
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If it's a story I'm telling, then I have control over the ending... But if it's a story, even in my head, I must be telling it to someone. You don't tell a story only to yourself. There's always someone else. Even when there is no one.
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Margaret Atwood |
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84f5b20
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I feel like the word shatter.
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Margaret Atwood |
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b42bcef
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It's impossible to say a thing exactly the way it was, because of 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.
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writing
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Margaret Atwood |
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16bf616
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When you are in the middle of a story it isn't a story at all, but only a confusion; a dark roaring, a blindness, a wreckage of shattered glass and splintered wood; like a house in a whirlwind, or else a boat crushed by the icebergs or swept over the rapids, and all aboard powerless to stop it. It's only afterwards that it becomes anything like a story at all. When you are telling it, to yourself or to someone else.
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Margaret Atwood |
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266d03b
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There were a lot of gods. Gods always come in handy, they justify almost anything.
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religion
god
inhumanity
extremism
justification
fanaticism
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Margaret Atwood |
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113439a
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I knew what love was supposed to be: obsession with undertones of nausea.
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Margaret Atwood |
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c0123ce
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Truly amazing, what people can get used to, as long as there are a few compensations.
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social-commentary
human-nature
psychology
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Margaret Atwood |
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f39d693
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Happiness is a garden walled with glass: there's no way in or out. In Paradise there are no stories, because there are no journeys. It's loss and regret and misery and yearning that drive the story forward, along its twisted road.
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unhappiness
story
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Margaret Atwood |
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825c0b0
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All you have to do, I tell myself, is keep your mouth shut and look stupid. It shouldn't be that hard.
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humor
|
Margaret Atwood |
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a4e376c
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We yearned for the future. How did we learn it, that talent for insatiability?
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hope
insatiability
|
Margaret Atwood |
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865de3d
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I lie on the floor, washed by nothing and hanging on. I cry at night. I am afraid of hearing voices, or a voice. I have come to the edge, of the land. I could get pushed over.
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sanity
fear
voices
insanity
|
Margaret Atwood |
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daef113
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When I am lonely for boys it's their bodies I miss. I study their hands lifting the cigarettes in the darkness of the movie theaters, the slope of a shoulder, the angle of a hip. Looking at them sideways, I examine them in different lights. My love for them is visual: that is the part of them I would like to possess. Don't move, I think. Stay like that, let me have that.
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Margaret Atwood |
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f14189e
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Maybe the life I think I'm living is a paranoid delusion...Sanity is a valuable possession; I hoard it the way people once hoarded money. I save it, so I will have enough, when the time comes.
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Margaret Atwood |
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bc7d2fe
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You can't help what you feel, but you can help how you behave
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Margaret Atwood |
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d5bd65d
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This is how the girl who couldn't speak and the man who couldn't see fell in love.
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love
see
speak
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Margaret Atwood |
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1ae7acd
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I wonder which is preferable, to walk around all your life swollen up with your own secrets until you burst from the pressure of them, or to have them sucked out of you, every paragraph, every sentence, every word of them, so at the end you're depleted of all that was once as precious to you as hoarded gold, as close to you as your skin - everything that was of the deepest importance to you, everything that made you cringe and wish to conce..
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metaphor
simile
the-blind-assassin
secrets
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Margaret Atwood |
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66b4f88
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I believe in the resistance as I believe there can be no light without shadow; or rather, no shadow unless there is also light.
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Margaret Atwood |
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5490de3
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Nothing changes instantaneously: in a gradually heating bathtub you'd be boiled to death before you knew it.
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Margaret Atwood |
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a483bc6
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I want everything back, the way it was. But there is no point to it, this wanting.
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want
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Margaret Atwood |
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335e113
|
Beginnings are sudden, but also insidious. They creep up on you sideways, they keep to the shadows, they lurk unrecognized. Then, later, they spring.
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Margaret Atwood |
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3f3a631
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Never pray for justice, because you might get some.
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prayer
|
Margaret Atwood |
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3561151
|
What is it the I'll want from you? Not love: that would be too much to ask. Not forgiveness, which isn't yours to bestow. Only a listener, perhaps; only someone who will see me. Don't prettify me though, whatever else you do: I have no wish to be a decorated skull. But I leave myself in your hands. What choice do I have? By the time you read this last page, that- if anywhere- is the only place I will be.
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love
last-page
the-threshold
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Margaret Atwood |
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b6d6776
|
He doesn't know which is worse, a past he can't regain or a present that will destroy him if he looks at it too clearly. Then there's the future. Sheer vertigo.
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Margaret Atwood |
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5707dcc
|
If I love you, is that a fact or a weapon?
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Margaret Atwood |
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053ccc1
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Vanity is becoming a nuisance, I can see why women give it up, eventually. But I'm not ready for that yet.
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women
|
Margaret Atwood |
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fc1df14
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is a futile word. It's about what didn't happen. It belongs in a parallel universe. It belongs in another dimension of space.
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should
|
Margaret Atwood |
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6ff4fda
|
To want is to have a weakness.
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Margaret Atwood |
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c812ddf
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And yet it disturbs me to learn I have hurt someone unintentionally. I want all my hurts to be intentional.
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Margaret Atwood |
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9ff76b9
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It isn't running away they're afraid of. We wouldn't get far. It's those other escapes, the ones you can open in yourself, given a cutting edge.
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Margaret Atwood |
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15f9743
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That was when they suspended the Constitution. They said it would be temporary. There wasn't even any rioting in the streets. People stayed home at night, watching television, looking for some direction. There wasn't even an enemy you could put your finger on.
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dystopia
enemy
government
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Margaret Atwood |
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4a4cda7
|
They spent the first three years of school getting you to pretend stuff and then the rest of it marking you down if you did the same thing.
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imagination
pretend
school
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Margaret Atwood |
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398988c
|
Old lovers go the way of old photographs, bleaching out gradually as in a slow bath of acid: first the moles and pimples, then the shadings. Then the faces themselves, until nothing remains but the general outlines.
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Margaret Atwood |
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f7a2c1b
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What fabrications they are, mothers. Scarecrows, wax dolls for us to stick pins into, crude diagrams. We deny them an existence of their own, we make them up to suit ourselves -- our own hungers, our own wishes, our own deficiencies.
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motherhood
projection
childhood
psychology
|
Margaret Atwood |
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072d25e
|
Home is where the heart is, I thought now, gathering myself together in Betty's Luncheonette. I had no heart any more, it had been broken; or not broken, it simply wasn't there any more. It had been scooped neatly out of me like the yolk from a hard-boiled egg, leaving the rest of me bloodless and congealed and hollow. I'm heartless, I thought. Therefore I'm homeless.
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Margaret Atwood |
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f50c221
|
Why is it we want so badly to memorialize ourselves? Even while we're still alive. We wish to assert our existence, like dogs peeing on fire hydrants.
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immortality
|
Margaret Atwood |
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6498073
|
In the end, we'll all become stories.
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Margaret Atwood |
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d70d57d
|
Nature is to zoos as God is to churches.
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Margaret Atwood |
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b0ad277
|
Happy as a clam, is what my mother says for happy. I am happy as a clam: hard-shelled, firmly closed.
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Margaret Atwood |