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b392666
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I walk away from her, guilt on my hands, absolving myself: I'm a good person. She could have been dying. No one else stopped. I'm a fool, to confuse this with goodness. I am not good. I know too much to be good. I know myself. I know myself to be vengeful, greedy, secretive and sly
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Margaret Atwood |
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ad1a4bc
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God be with you is not an unmixed blessing.
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Margaret Atwood |
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13e4f2d
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I bet it's your mouldy socks," said Jimmy. "All the perfumes of Arabia will not sweeten these little socks."
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socks
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Margaret Atwood |
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c76a333
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We dangle by a flimsy thread, Our little lives are grains of sand: The Cosmos is a tiny sphere Held in the hollow of God's hand. Give up your anger and your spite, And imitate the Deer, the Tree; In sweet Forgiveness find your joy, For it alone can set you free.
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Margaret Atwood |
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b36ec51
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I know more about my father than I used to know: I know he wanted to be a pilot in the war but could not, because the work he did was considered essential to the war effort... I know he grew up on a farm in the backwoods of Nova Scotia, where they didn't have running water or electricity. This is why he can build things and chop things... He did his high school courses by correspondence, sitting at the kitchen table and studying by the ligh..
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family
growing-up
parents
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Margaret Atwood |
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deaa384
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Perhaps he was merely being friendly. Perhaps he saw the look on my face and mistook it for something else. Really what I wanted was the cigarette.
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Margaret Atwood |
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712fc6d
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he was the kind of boy for whom cleverness was female.
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margaret-atwood
cleverness
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Margaret Atwood |
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01a28c2
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to fix and make plausible, the nebulous emotions of my costumed heroins, like diamonds on a sea of dough.
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Margaret Atwood |
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5dd0ebe
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I feel angry. I'm not proud of myself for this, or for any of it. But then, that's the point.
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Margaret Atwood |
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6426b35
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But they had a money value: they represented a cash profit to others. They must have sensed that--sensed that they were worth something.
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Margaret Atwood |
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d601e36
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I see what he's after. He is a collector. He thinks all he has to do is give me an apple, and then he can collect me.
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Margaret Atwood |
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7608d06
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Where I am is not a prison but a privilege, as Aunt Lydia said, who is in love with either/or.
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Margaret Atwood |
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f8bf840
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In ten years, you'll be on a stamp / where anyone at all can lick you.
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success
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Margaret Atwood |
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e73e1ed
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It is very odd to be standing in a locked room in the Penitentiary, speaking with a strange man about France and Italy and Germany. A travelling man. He must be a wanderer, like Jeremiah the peddler. But Jeremiah travelled to earn his bread, and these other sorts of men are rich enough already. They go on voyages because they are curious. They amble around the world and stare at things, they sail across the oceans as if there's nothing to i..
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traveling
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Margaret Atwood |
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08a3a8e
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Today I speak to my bones as I would speak to a dog. I want to go up the stairs, I tell them. Up, up, up, with one leg dragging. Is the ache deep in the bones, this elusive pain? Does that mean it will rain? Good bones, bones, I coax, wondering how to reward them; if they will sit up for me, beg, roll over, do one more trick, once more. There. We're at the top. bones! Good ! Keep on going.
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bones
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Margaret Atwood |
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e3e701c
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How much longer can I be so fucking cute?
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Margaret Atwood |
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9d3c908
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a few brown leaves are stuck to the outside of the glass like leather tongues.
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Margaret Atwood |
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18ccfb6
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her body feels different, no longer taut and sinewy but sponge-like fluid. Saturated. It has a different energy, a deep orangy-like pink, like the inside of a hibiscus.
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Margaret Atwood |
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ce029bb
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You're not my real parents, every child has thought. I'm not your real child. But with orphans, it's true. What freedom, to thumb your nose authentically!
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Margaret Atwood |
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5e09584
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Roz added sheep to Heaven. They would be outside the window, naturally.
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Margaret Atwood |
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e703409
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To nero den antisteketai. To nero reei. Otan buthizeis to kheri sou mesa tou, to mono pou niotheis ein' ena khadi. To nero den einai stereos toikhos kai den se stamataei. Omos pegainei opou thelei na paei kai tipota sto telos den mporei na tou antistathei. To nero einai upomonetiko. To nero pou stazei mporei na skapsei ena brakho. Na to thumasai auto, kore mou. Na thumasai pos eisai e mise phtiagmene apo nero. An den mporeis na upernikeseis..
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Margaret Atwood |
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0272610
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Per il Paradiso abbiamo bisogno di Te. L'Inferno ce lo possiamo fare da soli.
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Margaret Atwood |
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03f6457
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Her face might be kindly if she would smile. But the frown isn't personal: it's the red dress she disapproves of, and what it stands for. She thinks I may be catching, like a disease or any form of bad luck.
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Margaret Atwood |
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48fe861
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Like a White Russian drinking tea in Paris, marooned in the twentieth century, I wander back, try to regain hose distant pathways; I become too maudlin, lose myself. Weep...I sit in the chair and ooze like a sponge.
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Margaret Atwood |
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a3ac35d
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What thumbsuckers we all are...when it comes to mothers.
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margaret-atwood
mothers
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Margaret Atwood |
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191c7ec
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The difference between and . Lay is always passive. Even men used to say, I'd like to get laid. Though sometimes they said, I'd like to lay her. All this is pure speculation. I don't really know what men used to say. I had only their words for it.
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Margaret Atwood |
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90e4cfa
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Here's a health to our Captain, so gallant and free Whether stuck on a rock or asleep 'neath a tree Or rolled in the arms of some nymph of the sea Which is where we would all like to be, man!
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Margaret Atwood |
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476f35f
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A space-time, between here and now and there and then, puncuated by dinner
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Margaret Atwood |
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405971d
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They are boiling with the pressured energy of explosive forces confined in a small space, and with the fervor of all religious movements in their early, purist stages. It is not enough to give lip service and to believe in equal pay: there has to be a conversion, from the heart. Or so they imply.
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passion
women
fervor
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Margaret Atwood |
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a936152
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Anything that doesn't fit this mode has been shoved into an area of lesser solemnity called 'genre fiction,' and it is here that the spy thriller and the crime story and the adventure story and the supernatural tale and the science fiction, however excellently written, must reside, sent to their rooms, as it were, for the misdemeanor of being enjoyable in what is considered a meretricious way. They invent, and we all know they invent, at le..
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literary-snobbery
nonfiction
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Margaret Atwood |
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13c8f5b
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Debt . . . . that peculiar nexus where money, narrative or story, and religious belief intersect, often with explosive force.
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story
debt
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Margaret Atwood |
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f1fffee
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My red skirt is hitched up to my waist, though no higher. Below it the Commander is fucking. What he is fucking is the lower part of my body.
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Margaret Atwood |
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07b9f42
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Without a word she swivels, as if she's voice activated, as if she's on little oiled wheels, as if she's on top of a music box. I resent this grace of hers. I resent her meek head, bowed as if into a heavy wind. But there is no wind.
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Margaret Atwood |
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12df069
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I reproached them all for not having told me of my son's departure, and for not stopping him, until that interfering old biddy Eurycleia confessed that she alone had aided and abetted him.
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Margaret Atwood |
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bc6ef3a
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The ochre-yellow linoleum floor hasn't been scrubbed for some time; splotches of dirt bloom on it like grey pressed flowers.
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Margaret Atwood |
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993008c
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Or he'd watch the news: more plagues, more famines, more floods, more insect or microbe or small-mammal outbreaks, more droughts, more chickenshit boy-soldier wars in distant countries. Why was everything so much like itself?
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Margaret Atwood |
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bd21c85
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Time is not a line but a dimension, like the dimensions of space. If you can bend space you can bend time also, and if you knew enough and could move faster than light you could travel backward in time and exist in two places at once.
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Margaret Atwood |
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bf259e7
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The only way you can write the truth is to assume that what you set down will never be read.
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Margaret Atwood |
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8bf43c4
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Inside John, she thinks, is another John, who is much nicer. This other John will emerge like a butterfly from a cocoon, a Jack from a box, a pit from a prune, if the first John is only squeezed enough.
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Margaret Atwood |
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434d332
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I knelt to examine the floor, and there it was, in tiny writing, quite fresh it seemed, scratched with a pin or maybe just a fingernail, in the corner where the darkest shadow fell: Nolite te bastardes carborundorum.
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Margaret Atwood |
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ef1dc83
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Falling in love, although it resulted in altered body chemistry and was therefore real, was a hormonally induced delusional state.
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Margaret Atwood |
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70bf4d7
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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, fo..
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Margaret Atwood |
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0624ee5
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Boys by nature require these silences; they must not be startled by too many words, spoken too quickly. What they actually say is not that important. The important parts exist in the silences between the words. I know what we're both looking for, which is escape. They want to escape from adults and other boys, I want to escape from adults and other girls. We're looking for desert islands, momentary, unreal, but there.
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Margaret Atwood |
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6ebe9c3
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Once she wasn't supposed to like it. To have her in a position she didn't like, that was power. Even if she liked it she had to pretend she didn't. Then she was supposed to like it. To make her do something she didn't like and then make her like it, that was greater power. The greatest power of all is when she doesn't really like it but she's supposed to like it, so she has to pretend.
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power
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Margaret Atwood |