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c5186da
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Why does the mind do such things? Turn on us, rend us, dig the claws in. If you get hungry enough, they say, you start eating your own heart. Maybe it's much the same.
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Margaret Atwood |
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3701ad5
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This is what I miss, Cordelia: not something that's gone, but something that will never happen. Two old women giggling over their tea.
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women
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Margaret Atwood |
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3520d61
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After everything that's happened, how can the world still be so beautiful? Because it is.
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Margaret Atwood |
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00ccd90
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They wore blouses with buttons down the front that suggested the possibilities of the word . These women could be undone; or not. They seemed to be able to choose.
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Margaret Atwood |
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c1b77b5
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As all historians know, the past is a great darkness, and filled with echoes.
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Margaret Atwood |
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9565071
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Murderess is a strong word to have attached to you. It has a smell to it, that word - musky and oppressive, like dead flowers in a vase. Sometimes at night I whisper it over to myself: . It rustles, like a taffeta skirt across the floor.
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Margaret Atwood |
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4d8ac9b
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I feel like cotton candy: sugar and air. Squeeze me and I'd turn into a small sickly damp wad of weeping pinky-red.
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Margaret Atwood |
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675a2d4
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All it takes," said Crake, "is the elimination of one generation. One generation of anything. Beetles, trees, microbes, scientists, speakers of French, whatever. Break the link in time between one generation and the next, and it's game over forever."
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Margaret Atwood |
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ca0ce87
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My name isn't Offred, I have another name, which nobody uses now because it's forbidden. I tell myself it doesn't matter, your name is like your telephone number, useful only to others; but what I tell myself is wrong, it does matter. I keep the knowledge of this name like something hidden, some treasure I'll come back to dig up, one day. I think of this name as buried. This name has an aura around it, like an amulet, some charm that's surv..
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Margaret Atwood |
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b26a83a
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Modesty is invisibility...Never forget it. To be seen--to be --is to be...penetrated. What you must be girls, is impenetrable.
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dystopia
fear
modesty
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Margaret Atwood |
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c5e89bd
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I was sand, I was snow--written on, rewritten, smoothed over.
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Margaret Atwood |
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b9a8ce3
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Cleverness is a quality a man likes to have in his wife as long as she is some distance away from him. Up close, he'll take kindness any day of the week, if there's nothing more alluring to be had.
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Margaret Atwood |
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4330365
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We lived, as usual by ignoring. Ignoring isn't the same as ignorance, you have to work at it.
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Margaret Atwood |
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2bd9f84
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Siren Song This is the one song everyone would like to learn: the song that is irresistible: the song that forces men to leap overboard in squadrons even though they see beached skulls the song nobody knows because anyone who had heard it is dead, and the others can't remember. Shall I tell you the secret and if I do, will you get me out of this bird suit? I don't enjoy it here squatting on this island looking picturesque and mythical with ..
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Margaret Atwood |
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8da2932
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The world is being run by people my age, men my age, with falling-out hair and health worries, and it frightens me. When the leaders were older than me I could believe in their wisdom, I could believe they had transcended rage and malice and the need to be loved. Now I know better. I look at the faces in newspapers, in magazines, and wonder: what greeds, what furies drive them on?
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Margaret Atwood |
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acb733f
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One and one and one and one doesn't equal four. Each one remains unique, there is no way of joining them together. They cannot be exchanged, one for the other. They cannot replace each other.
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Margaret Atwood |
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233d6e4
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She knows herself to be at the mercy of events, and she knows by now that events have no mercy.
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events
mercy
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Margaret Atwood |
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5b7a515
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Time folds you in its arms and gives you one last kiss, and then it flattens you out and folds you up and tucks you away until it's time for you to become someone else's past time, and then time folds again.
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time
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Margaret Atwood |
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c4cf586
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You can wet the rim of a glass and run your finger around the rim and it will make a sound. This is what I feel like: this sound of glass. I feel like the word shatter. I want to be with someone.
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Margaret Atwood |
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a90de5b
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We understand more than we know.
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science
understanding
wisdom
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Margaret Atwood |
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9eb6111
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Immortality,' said Crake, ' is a concept. If you take 'mortality' as being, not death, but the foreknowledge of it and the fear of it, then 'immortality' is the absence of such fear. Babies are immortal. Edit out the fear, and you'll be...
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Margaret Atwood |
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19bd5dc
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Glenn used to say the reason you can't really imagine yourself being dead was that as soon as you say, 'I'll be dead,' you've said the word I, and so you're still alive inside the sentence. And that's how people got the idea of the immortality of the soul - it was a consequence of grammar.
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grammar
immortality
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Margaret Atwood |
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1b89dd8
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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.
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Margaret Atwood |
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dcd5d21
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I'm not senile," I snapped. "If I burn the house down it will be on purpose."
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old-age
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Margaret Atwood |
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a03d18b
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Maybe that's what love is, I thought: it's being pissed off.
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Margaret Atwood |
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9144269
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Faith is only a word, embroidered.
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Margaret Atwood |
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5c4a7c0
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Most mothers worry when their daughters reach adolescence but I was the opposite. I relaxed, I sighed with relief. Little girls are cute and small only to adults. To one another they are not cute. They are life sized.
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Margaret Atwood |
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a88196c
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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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6ce4539
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Which of us can resist the temptation of being thought indispensable?
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temptation
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Margaret Atwood |
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fe79191
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When any civilization is dust and ashes," he said, "art is all that's left over. Images, words, music. Imaginative structures. Meaning--human meaning, that is--is defined by them. You have to admit that."
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meaning
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Margaret Atwood |
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31fd310
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The young habitually mistake lust for love, they're infested with idealism of all kinds.
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lust
young-love
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Margaret Atwood |
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09e0ddd
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There's the story, then there's the real story, then there's the story of how the story came to be told. Then there's what you leave out of the story. Which is part of the story too.
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Margaret Atwood |
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0dc06db
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There's something to be said for hunger: at least it lets you know you're still alive.
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Margaret Atwood |
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2d207b9
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Maybe none of this is about control. Maybe it really isn't about who can own whom, who can do what to whom and get away with it, even as far as death. Maybe it isn't about who can sit and who has to kneel or stand or lie down, legs spread open. Maybe it's about who can do what to whom and be forgiven for it. Never tell me it amounts to the same thing.
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Margaret Atwood |
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6d16e3c
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You can forget who you are if you're alone too much.
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Margaret Atwood |
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f96f31c
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I would like to watch you sleeping, which may not happen. I would like to watch you, sleeping. I would like to sleep with you, to enter your sleep as its smooth dark wave slides over my head. and walk with you through that lucent wavering forest of bluegreen leaves with its watery sun & three moons towards the cave where you must descend, towards your worst fear I would like to give you the silver branch, the small white flower, the one wor..
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love
poetry
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Margaret Atwood |
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8e9ac4a
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You're sad because you're sad. It's psychic. It's the age. It's chemical. Go see a shrink or take a pill, or hug your sadness like an eyeless doll you need to sleep. Well, all children are sad but some get over it. Count your blessings. Better than that,
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Margaret Atwood |
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30e4130
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How easy it is to invent a humanity, for anyone at all.
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humanity
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Margaret Atwood |
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6f759bb
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These things sneak up on him for no reason, these flashes of irrational happiness. It's probably a vitamin deficiency.
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Margaret Atwood |
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13bd6f7
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Sometimes she would cry. I was so lonely, she'd say. You have no idea how lonely I was. And I had friends, I was a lucky one, but I was lonely anyway. 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 ..
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Margaret Atwood |
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ffafa7d
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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 too badly by one another, we did as well as most.
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parents-and-children
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Margaret Atwood |
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f49092c
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I wish this story were different. I wish it were more civilized. I wish it showed me in a better light, if not happier, than at least more active, less hesitant, less distracted by trivia. I wish it had more shape. I wish t 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 caught in ..
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Margaret Atwood |
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acecdcc
|
Our heaven is their hell, said God. I like a balanced universe.
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god
heaven
hell
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Margaret Atwood |
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b937c6c
|
Sanity is a valuable possesion; 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 |