|
e6d45ea
|
He has been trying to sing Love into existence again And he has failed.
|
|
|
Margaret Atwood |
|
3ae0a9e
|
His mother said that all children were arsonists at heart, and if not for the lighter he'd have used matches.
|
|
|
Margaret Atwood |
|
bfda7a2
|
All Souls' Eve, when the spirits of the dead will come back to the living, dressed as ballerinas and Coke bottles and spacemen and Mickey Mice, and the living will give them candy to keep them from turning vicious. I can still taste that festival: the tart air, caramel in the mouth, the hope at the door, the belief in something for nothing all children take for granted. They won't get homemade popcorn balls any more, though, or apples: rumo..
|
|
|
Margaret Atwood |
|
89a58b8
|
I have failed once again to fulfill the expectations of others, which have become my own.
|
|
|
Margaret Atwood |
|
7bb2bae
|
She'd love to go over him with a fine-toothed comb. Rummage around in him. Turn him upside down. Empty him out.
|
|
|
Margaret Atwood |
|
ee34906
|
Betty's now have a patio garden, where the tourists can sit in the sun and fry to a crisp; it's in the back, that little square of cracked cement where they used to keep the garbage cans. They offer tortellini and cappuccino, boldly proclaimed in the window as if everyone in town just naturally knows what they are. Well, they do by now; they've had a try, if only to acquire sneering rights.
|
|
|
Margaret Atwood |
|
b6f9fad
|
How long were you supposed to mourn, and what did they say? Make your life a tribute to the loved one.
|
|
|
Margaret Atwood |
|
4cd188b
|
It was Colonel Parkman who upped stakes, crossed the border, and named our town, thus perversely commemorating a battle in which he'd lost. (Though perhaps that's not so unusual: many people take a curatorial interest in their own scars.) He's shown astride his horse, waving a sword and about to gallop into the nearby petunia bed: a craggy man with seasoned eyes and pointed beard, every sculptor's idea of every cavalry leader. No one knows ..
|
|
war
truth
reality-check
wit
|
Margaret Atwood |
|
52fa073
|
Of late the three of them wouldn't even let him dry the dishes because he'd dropped too many of them on the floor. He'd done that on purpose, since it was useful to be considered inept when it came to chore division,
|
|
|
Margaret Atwood |
|
a0666b0
|
I didn't want to identify the body, or see it at all. If you don't see the body, it's easier to believe nobody's dead.
|
|
|
Margaret Atwood |
|
90d3db6
|
It was as if they could read each other's minds. No, not minds: each other's mindlessness.
|
|
|
Margaret Atwood |
|
4ddbdd8
|
The people in the chaos cannot learn. They cannot understand what they are doing to the sea and the sky and the plants and the animals. They cannot understand that they are killing them, and that they will end by killing themselves. And there are so many of them, and each one of them is doing part of the killing, whether they know it or not. And when you tell them to stop, they don't hear you.
|
|
|
Margaret Atwood |
|
a21f3c3
|
She had loved him, uselessly.
|
|
|
Margaret Atwood |
|
9bde65b
|
nobody dies from lack of sex. It's lack of love we die from. There's nobody here I can love, all the people I could love are dead or elsewhere. Who knows where they are or what their names are now? They might as well be nowhere, as I am for them. I too am a missing person.
|
|
|
Margaret Atwood |
|
86f0198
|
gazing up at the stars through the gently moving leaves. They seem close, the stars, but they're far away. Their light is millions, billions of years out of date. Messages with no sender.
|
|
|
Margaret Atwood |
|
595bc4b
|
I don't want her to be like me. Give in, go along, save her skin. That is what it comes down to. I want gallantry from her, swashbuckling, heroism, single-handed combat. Something I lack.
|
|
|
Margaret Atwood |
|
0e75339
|
You cynical shit," he told himself. Then he started to weep. "Don't be so fucking sentimental," Crake used to tell him. But why not? Why shouldn't he be sentimental? It wasn't as if there was anyone around to question his taste. Once in a while he considered killing himself-it seemed mandatory-but somehow he didn't have the required energy. Anyway, killing yourself was something you did for an audience, as on nitee-nitee.com. Under the ci..
|
|
suicide
sentimental
|
Margaret Atwood |
|
08c9983
|
Human society, they claimed, was a sort of monster, its main by-products being corpses and rubble.
|
|
|
Margaret Atwood |
|
89e5f5c
|
I can't believe in my own sadness, I can't take it seriously. I watch myself crying in the mirror, intrigued by the sight of tears.
|
|
|
Margaret Atwood |
|
0b1797f
|
What I have always assumed in him to be bravery may be merely an ignorance of consequences. He thinks he is safe, because he is what he says he is. But he's out in the open, and surrounded by strangers.
|
|
|
Margaret Atwood |
|
666d962
|
There's nothing more for me to see. The bridge is only a bridge, the river a river, the sky is a sky. This landscape is empty now, a place for Sunday runners. Or not empty: filled with whatever it is by itself, when I'm not looking.
|
|
|
Margaret Atwood |
|
39a24ba
|
So that made me happy but the part that really made me happy was that you wanted me to be happy. That's what Thank you means.
|
|
happiness
meanings
thanks
|
Margaret Atwood |
|
7b13517
|
Mouth to mouth I'm bringing you back to life. Why did you drown like that without telling? What numbed you? What rose over your head was gradual and only everybody's air, standard & killing. Your head floats on your hand, on water, you turn over, your heart returns unsteadily to its two strong notes. I'm bringing you back to life, it's mutual.
|
|
|
Margaret Atwood |
|
a146ede
|
I avoid looking down at my body, not so much because it's shameful or immodest but because I don't want to see it. I don't want to look at something that determines me so completely. I
|
|
|
Margaret Atwood |
|
1ea6a45
|
One boy had drawn a perfect isosceles triangle on every single page- meticulously, it was emphasized. Meticulously was a chilling touch: meticulousness, we knew, was just one step away from full-blown lunacy.
|
|
|
Margaret Atwood |
|
db1e3af
|
I wish this story were different. I wish it were more civilized. I wish it showed me in a better light, if not happier, then at least more active, less hesitant, less distracted by trivia. I wish it had more shape. I wish it were about love, or about sudden realizations important to one's life, or even about sunsets, birds, rainstorms, or snow. (...) I'm sorry there is so much pain in this story. I'm sorry it's in fragments, like a body cau..
|
|
|
Margaret Atwood |
|
9ba9ca8
|
My mother took the train to Halifax to see my father off. It was crammed with men en route to the Front; she could not get a sleeper, so she travelled sitting up. There were feet in the aisles, and bundles, and spittoons; coughing, snoring - drunken snoring, no doubt. As she looked at the boyish faces around her, the war became real to her, not as an idea but as a physical presence.
|
|
|
Margaret Atwood |
|
b47826b
|
As the architects of Gilead knew, to institute an effective totalitarian system or indeed any system at all you must offer some benefits and freedoms, at least to a privileged few, in return for those you remove.
|
|
|
Margaret Atwood |
|
8af74b5
|
But some people can't tell where it hurts. They can't calm down. They can't ever stop howling.
|
|
|
Margaret Atwood |
|
217c471
|
I'd wanted to leave home, but have it stay in place, waiting for me, unchanged, so I could step back into it at will.
|
|
|
Margaret Atwood |
|
a7bd5be
|
Maybe all women should be robots, he thinks with a tinge of acid: the flesh-and-blood ones are out of control.
|
|
|
Margaret Atwood |
|
12e1888
|
When I was younger, imagining age, I would think, Maybe you appreciate things more when you don't have much time left. I forgot to include the loss of energy. Some days I do appreciate things more, eggs, flowers, but then I decide I'm only having an attack of sentimentality, my brain going pastel Technicolor, like a beautiful-sunset greeting cards they used to make so many of in California. High-gloss hearts. The danger is grayout.
|
|
|
Margaret Atwood |
|
10e40fe
|
She's the kind of woman who wants what she doesn't have and gets what she wants and then despises what she gets.
|
|
the-robber-bride
|
Margaret Atwood |
|
dbc7899
|
This form of love is like the pain of childbirth: so intense it's hard to remember afterwards,
|
|
passion
love
intense
love-hurts
obsession
|
Margaret Atwood |
|
0b42ff7
|
It hasn't escaped me that the object that keeps me alive is the same one that will kill me. In this way it's like love, or a certain kind of it.
|
|
|
Margaret Atwood |
|
a3bb603
|
She had her reasons. Not that they were ever the same as anybody else's reasons. She was completely ruthless in that way.
|
|
|
Margaret Atwood |
|
9a47fcd
|
After having imposed itself on us like the egomaniac it is, clamouring about its own needs, foisting upon us its own sordid and perilous desires, the body's final trick is simply to absent itself. Just when you need it, just when you could use an arm or a leg, suddenly the body has other things to do. It falters, it buckles under you; it melts away as if made of snow, leaving nothing much. Two lumps of coal, an old hat, a grin made of pebbl..
|
|
body
old-age
|
Margaret Atwood |
|
4ed9830
|
You think you can get rid of things, and people too--leave them behind. You don't know yet about the habit they have, of coming back.
|
|
life
|
Margaret Atwood |
|
f5bd416
|
there's often more in silences than in what is actually said - in the lips pressed together, the head turned away, the quick sideways glance. The shoulders drawn up as if carrying a heavy weight.
|
|
|
Margaret Atwood |
|
ec5f08e
|
To institute an effective totalitarian system or indeed any system at all you must offer some benefits and freedoms, at least to a privileged few, in return for those you remove.
|
|
|
Margaret Atwood |
|
9b08e46
|
A story is like a letter. Dear You, I'll say. Just you, without a name. Attaching a name attaches you to the world of fact, which is riskier, more hazardous: who knows what the chances are out there, of survival, yours? I will say you, you, like an old love song. You can mean more than one. You can mean thousands. I'm not in any immediate danger, I'll say to you. I'll pretend you can hear me. But it's no good, because I know you can't.
|
|
|
Margaret Atwood |
|
60e458b
|
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. But despite everything, we didn't do badly by one another, we did as well as most.
|
|
|
Margaret Atwood |
|
1eadb90
|
And the Internet was such a jumble of false and true factoids that no one believed what was on it any more, or else they believed all of it, which amounted to the same thing.
|
|
|
Margaret Atwood |
|
b0cb014
|
Sucked into the well of knowledge, you could only plummet, learning more and more, but not getting any happier.
|
|
|
Margaret Atwood |