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0f7f1b8
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There will never be another caterpillar just like this one. there will never be another such moment of time, another such conjunction. These things sneak up on him for no reason, flashes of irrational happiness. It's probably a vitamin deficiency.
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Margaret Atwood |
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4a73caa
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Suddenly revenge is so close he can actually taste it. It tastes like steak, rare.
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Margaret Atwood |
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afc3ea2
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It's strange to remember how we used to think, as if everything were available to us, as if there were no contingencies, no boundaries; as if we were free to shape and reshape forever the everexpanding perimeters of our lives.
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Margaret Atwood |
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8fc42f7
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She's been a distraction for him, but not a necessity of life. More like a super-strong mint: intense while it lasted, but quickly finished.
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Margaret Atwood |
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269ebab
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Fear is a powerful stimulant.
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motivation
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Margaret Atwood |
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897a0a7
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We are containers, it's only the insides of our bodies that are important.
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Margaret Atwood |
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bfb0193
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At this dim season of the year we hunger for such tales. Winter's tales, they are. We want to huddle round them, as if around a small but cheerful fire... It was the right thing to do on the darkest day of the year.
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Margaret Atwood |
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aa88cc0
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Pain marks you, but too deep to see.
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Margaret Atwood |
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001864c
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The young ones are often the most dangerous, the most fanatical, the jumpiest with their guns. They haven't yet learned about existence through time.
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Margaret Atwood |
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1f49bdc
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all she ever wanted was to be protected by layer upon layer of kind, soft, insulating money,
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Margaret Atwood |
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a49db22
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He'd wanted us to be more like boys, and now we were. You don't teach boys to be charming. It makes people think they are devious.
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Margaret Atwood |
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24b3ea2
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And the one on the pigeons, trained to peck a button that made a grain of corn appear. Three groups of them: the first got one grain per peck, the second one grain every other peck, the third was random. When the man in charge cut off the grain, the first group gave up quite soon, the second group a little later. The third group never gave up. They'd peck themselves to death, rather than quit. Who knew what worked?
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Margaret Atwood |
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2301465
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They have a certain gaiety to them, a power of invention, they don't care what people think. They have escaped, though what it is they've escaped from isn't clear to us. We think that their bizarre costumes, their verbal tics, are chosen, and that when the time comes we also will be free to choose. "That's what I'm going to be like,"
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teenage-girls
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Margaret Atwood |
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2c42f82
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The possibility of injury or death was a strong attraction: as the online world became more and more pre-edited and slicked up, and as even its so-called reality sites raised questions about authenticity in the minds of the viewers, the rough, unpolished physical world was taking on a mystic allure.
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reality
truth
physicality
web
danger
internet
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Margaret Atwood |
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451f6e6
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Yes, good, kind Crake. Please stop singing or I can't go on with the story.
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Margaret Atwood |
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3ee7d7c
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So by the time the morning came, Odysseus and I were indeed friends, as Odysseus had promised we would be. Or let me put it another way: I myself had developed friendly feelings towards him - more than that, loving and passionate ones - and he behaved as if he reciprocated them. Which is not quite the same thing.
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love
mythology
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Margaret Atwood |
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65da3ab
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When I saw that, the evidence left by two people, of love or something like it, desire at least, at least touch, between two people now perhaps old or dead, I covered the bed again and lay down on it. I looked up at the blind plaster eye in the ceiling. I wanted to feel Luke lying beside me. I have them, these attacks of the past, like faintness, a wave sweeping over my head. Sometimes it can hardly be borne. What is to be done, what is to ..
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Margaret Atwood |
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49d422c
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You don't understand much, he says. Why do you think I was lost in the impenetrable forest in the first place?
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Margaret Atwood |
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73b22e3
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The pile of stones thus marks both an act of deliberate remembrance, and an act of deliberate forgetting. They're fond of paradox in that region.
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paradox
remembrance
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Margaret Atwood |
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ae5ce19
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I'm beginning to feel that I've discovered something worth knowing. There's a way out of places you want to leave, but can't. Fainting is like stepping sideways, out of your own body, out of time or into another time. When you wake up it's later. Time has gone on without you.
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Margaret Atwood |
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eda6de1
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Now I wanted to be acknowledged, but I feared it.
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Margaret Atwood |
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3b058dd
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His time, what a bankrupt idea, as if he's been given a box of time belonging to him alone, stuffed to the brim with hours and minutes that he can spend like money. Trouble is, the box has holes in it and the time is running out, no matter what he does with it.
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Margaret Atwood |
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4b68f7f
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And I said that Crozier did not need to call Fuck right now because we were not in trouble and did not need his help. And Toby said, That's right, he doesn't like to be summoned on trivial matters. And Zeb coughed.
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Margaret Atwood |
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ac8128b
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Some of these stories, it is understood, are not to be passed on to my father, because they would upset him. It is well known that women can deal with this sort of thing better than men can. Men are not to be told anything they might find too painful; the secret depths of human nature, the sordid physicalities, might overwhelm or damage them. For instance, men often faint at the sight of their own blood, to which they are not accustomed. Fo..
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men
women
sandboxes
useful-belief
female-body
capabilities
misandry
gender
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Margaret Atwood |
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1b8db66
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A puff of air--whuff!--hits his ears, blows out the candle. He can't be bothered relighting it, because the bourbon is taking over. He'd rather stay in the dark. He can sense Oryx drifting towards him on her soft feathery wings. Any moment now she'll be with him. He sits crouched in the chair with his head down on the desk and his eyes closed, in a state of misery and peace.
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Margaret Atwood |
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dea395a
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But if you happen to be a man, sometime in the future, and you've made it this far, please remember: you will never be subjected to the temptation of feeling you must forgive, a man, as a woman.
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Margaret Atwood |
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1c9cda0
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Nobody wanted to be sexless, but nobody wanted to be nothing but sex.
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sex
objectification
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Margaret Atwood |
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48ca275
|
What is it about winter that causes people to drive as if their hands are feet?
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Margaret Atwood |
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4d9901d
|
Second-hand American was spreading over him in patches, like mange or lichen. He was infested, garbled, and I couldn't help him: it would take such time to heal, unearth him, scrape down to where he was true.
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infested
unearth
heal
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Margaret Atwood |
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1ce64a0
|
I guess that's how they were able to do it, in the way they did, all at once, without anyone knowing beforehand. If there had still been portable money, it would have been more difficult. "It was after the catastrophe, when they shot the president and machine-gunned the Congress and the army declared a state of emergency. They blamed it on the Islamic fanatics, at the time. "Keep calm, they said on television. Everything is under control...
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feminism
future
reproduction
culture
media
newspapers
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Margaret Atwood |
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2c4a5c1
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This is what I miss... not something that's gone, but something that will never happen.
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Margaret Atwood |
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69a8790
|
Are there stars? he asks her. She nods.
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Margaret Atwood |
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fd29d87
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Just what the doctor ordered, he says. A bottle of lemonade, a hard-boiled egg, and Thou.
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love
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Margaret Atwood |
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7f10633
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thinks Stan. She knows about the chickens.
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Margaret Atwood |
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effcd5f
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what is 'belief' but a willingness to suspend the negatives?
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Margaret Atwood |
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45da671
|
When the water's moving faster than the boat, you can't control a thing.
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Margaret Atwood |
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7acefef
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All stories are about wolves. All worth repeating, that is. Anything else is sentimental drivel. All of them? Sure, he says. Think about it. There's escaping from the wolves, fighting the wolves, capturing the wolves, taming the wolves. Being thrown to the wolves, or throwing others to the wolves so the wolves will eat them instead of you. Running with the wolf pack. Turning into a wolf. Best of all, turning into the head wolf. No other dec..
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Margaret Atwood |
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5803479
|
Grace's will is of the negative female variety - she can deny and reject much more easily than she can affirm or accept. Somewhere within herself - he's seen it, if only for a moment, that conscious, even cunning look in the corner of her eye - she know she's concealing something from him. As she stitches away at her sewing, outwardly calm as a marble Madonna, she is all the while exerting her passive stubborn strength against him. A prison..
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Margaret Atwood |
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ca21ed7
|
Within each of these categories, the principle was the same: rarity and beauty increased value.
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Margaret Atwood |
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9ed7cfd
|
What she read was a series of short connected lyrics, "Isis in Darkness." The Egyptian Queen of Heaven and Earth was wandering in the Underworld, gathering up pieces of the murdered and dismembered body of her lover Osiris. At the same time, it was her own body she was putting back together; and it was also the physical universe. She was creating the universe by an act of love."
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Margaret Atwood |
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ddc625b
|
the argument for the perfectibility of humankind rests on a logical fallacy. Thus: man is by definition imperfect, say those who would perfect him. But those who would perfect him are themselves, by their own definition, imperfect.
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Margaret Atwood |
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b564086
|
The prospect of his future life stretched before him like a sentence; not a prison sentence, but a long-winded sentence with a lot of unnecessary subordinate clauses,
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Margaret Atwood |
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737e349
|
I leafed through all the men I had known to see whether or not I hated them. But then I realized it wasn't the men I hated, it was the Americans, the human beings, men and women both. They'd had their chance but they had turned against the gods, and it was time for me to choose sides. I wanted there to be a machine that could make them vanish, a button I could press that would evaporate them without disturbing anything else, that way there ..
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Margaret Atwood |
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cd44a84
|
Northrop] Frye was concerned mostly with literary criticism, and myths interested him as structural elements in works of literature. He used the word myth to mean story, without attaching any connotation of truth or falsehood to it; but a myth is a story of a certain kind. The myths of a culture are those stories it takes seriously--the ones that are thought to be a key to its identity.
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myth
|
Margaret Atwood |