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4b43df5
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Time comes in waves here, a sickness, one day after the other rolling on; I move up, it's called awake, then down into the uneasy nights but never forward.
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Margaret Atwood |
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6847129
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Charis disapproves of crass words like shit. Roz has offered , but Charis rejected it as too babyish. Her alimentary canal products? Tony has suggested. No, that sounds too coldly intellectual, said Charis. Her Gifts to the Earth.
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Margaret Atwood |
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75b9eb9
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And the vampires. You used to know where you stood with them - smelly, evil, undead - but now there are virtuous vampires and disreputable vampires, and sexy vampires and glittery vampires, and none of the old rules about them are true any more. Once you could depend on garlic, and on the rising sun, and on crucifixes. You could get rid of the vampires once and for all. But not any more.
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Margaret Atwood |
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d34b13d
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At the outset Verna had not intended to kill anyone.
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Margaret Atwood |
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0f3621e
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Guess it's the climate change," says Sam. That's what people say, the way they used to say, We've angered God."
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Margaret Atwood |
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580465b
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He feels like saying that of course there's lint on Mr. Wiggly, or dust at any rate, or maybe rust; what does she expect, because as she is well aware Mr. Wiggly has been on the shelf for some time.
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Margaret Atwood |
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f9a4918
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She rents herself a large, empty apartment on the top floor of a house. She has no long-term plans. At night she listens to the radio and cooks subsistence meals, and cries onto her plate.
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Margaret Atwood |
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7759b42
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The moment of betrayal is the worst, the moment when you know beyond any doubt that you've been betrayed: that some other human being has wished you that much evil. It was like being in an elevator cut loose at the top. Falling, falling, and not knowing when you will hit.
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Margaret Atwood |
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ba30403
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I pray where I am, sitting by the window, looking out through the curtain at the empty garden. I don't even close my eyes. Out there or inside my head, it's an equal darkness. Or light. My God. Who Art in the Kingdom of Heaven, which is within. I wish you would tell me Your Name, the real one I mean. But You will do as well as anything. I wish I knew what You were up to. But whatever it is, help me to get through it, please. Though maybe it..
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Margaret Atwood |
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61e5723
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the gods often mumble
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inspiration
religion
revelation
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Margaret Atwood |
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7107add
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His generation believed that if there was trouble all you'd have to do was shoot someone and then it would be okay.
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Margaret Atwood |
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ccff593
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She'd stepped out of sex as if out of a loose dress. Now she was brisk, decisive, no nonsense.
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Margaret Atwood |
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a641c8f
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Female artists are biologically confused," said Crake."
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Margaret Atwood |
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30c6822
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This bug is something new though. We've got the bioprint.
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Margaret Atwood |
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7874324
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There is so much beautiful in the world if you look around. You are looking only at the dirt under your feet, Jimmy. It's not good for you.
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Margaret Atwood |
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0e4ed7e
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The Human Words of God speak of the Creation in terms that could be understood by the men of old. There is no talk of galaxies or genes, for such terms would have confused them greatly! But must we therefore take as scientific fact the story that the world was created in six days, thus making a nonsense of observable data?
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Margaret Atwood |
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2c2e58b
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But remember that forgiveness too is a power. To beg for it is a power, and to withhold or bestow it is a power, perhaps the greatest. Maybe
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Margaret Atwood |
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859bb04
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The answer can only be that God has given Adam free will, and therefore Adam may do things that God Himself cannot anticipate in advance.
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Margaret Atwood |
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c227684
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She writes like an angel, it says of Laura on the back of one of the editions of The Blind Assassin. An American edition, as I recall, with gold scrollwork on the cover: they set a lot of store by angels in those parts. In point of fact angels don't write much. They record sins and the names of the dammed and the saved, or they appear as disembodied hands and scribble warnings on walls. Or they deliver messages, few of which are good news: ..
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angels
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Margaret Atwood |
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643dbed
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You can't live with such fears and keep on whistling. The waiting builds up in you like a tide. You start wanting it to be done with. You find yourself saying to the sky, Just do it. Do your worst. Get it over with.
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fear
strength
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Margaret Atwood |
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155a9ca
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One day, he said that what you had to do in any adversarial situation was to kill the king, as in chess. I said people didn't have kings any more. He said he meant the centre of power, but today it wouldn't be a single person, it would be the technological connections.
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Margaret Atwood |
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ac4e6c8
|
You create your own world by your inner attitude, the Gardeners used to say.
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Margaret Atwood |
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126add7
|
It's always an advantage to have something to do with your hands. That way, if someone makes an inappropriate remark, you can pretend you haven't heard it. Then you don't have to answer.
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Margaret Atwood |
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eb5ff63
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This thing I'm doing can hardly be called living. Instead I'm lying dormant, like a bacterium in a glacier. Getting time over with. That's all.
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time
living
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Margaret Atwood |
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cb7b5cd
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A wall that cannot be defended is no sooner built than ended.
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Margaret Atwood |
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d71412c
|
Like stage magic, knowledge before you knew it took place before your very eyes, but you were looking elsewhere.
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Margaret Atwood |
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be8bd96
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Homelessness is a nationality now.
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sad
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Margaret Atwood |
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c510c59
|
But all my love ever came to was a bad end. Red-hot shoes, barrels studded with nails. That's what it feels like, unrequited love.
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Margaret Atwood |
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89cd077
|
The worst of it was that those people out there-the fear, the suffering the wholesale death-did not really touch him. Crake used to say that was not hard-wired to individuate other people in numbers above two hundred, the size of a primal tribe, and Jimmy would reduce that number to two.
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humanity
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Margaret Atwood |
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f030c9b
|
Human society, they claimed, was a sort of monster, its main byproducts being corpses and rubble. It never learned, it made the same cretinous mistakes over and over, trading short-term gain for long-term pain.
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Margaret Atwood |
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50b9207
|
The poems that used to entrance me in the days of Miss Violence now struck me as overdone and sickly. --the archaic language of unrequited love. I was irritated with such words, which rendered the unhappy lovers--I could now see--faintly ridiculous, like poor moping Miss Violence herself. Soft-edged, blurry, soggy, like a bun fallen into the water. Nothing you'd want to touch,
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simile
poetry
the-blind-assassin
margaret-atwood
ridiculous
language
unrequited-love
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Margaret Atwood |
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7e1b094
|
Then she lent me her red flannel petticoat until I should get one of my own, and showed me how to fold and pin the cloths, and said hat some called it Eve's curse but she thought that was stupid, and the real curse of Eve was having to put up with the nonsense of Adam, who as soon as there was any trouble, blamed it all on her.
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Margaret Atwood |
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b05d514
|
It was only a dream. It was only a larval poem. --
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Margaret Atwood |
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8a73c56
|
Even guppies have their opacities.
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Margaret Atwood |
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4806741
|
Only fools, he said, were given to bragging about how much they could drink.
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Margaret Atwood |
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d6460dd
|
I don't sing like this often. It makes my throat hurt.
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sorrow
hurt
sing
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Margaret Atwood |
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69ea8ef
|
What he couldn't have in life he might still catch sight of through his art: just a glimpse, from the corner of his eye
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Margaret Atwood |
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807d77d
|
I remember a television program I once saw; a rerun, made years before. I must have been seven or eight, too young to understand it. It was the sort of thing my mother liked to watch: historical, educational. She tried to explain it to me afterwards, to tell me that the things in it had really happened, but to me it was only a story. I thought someone had made it up. I suppose all children think that, about any history before their own. If ..
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Margaret Atwood |
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f4dea9d
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I no longer think that anything can happen. I no longer want to think that way. Happen is what you wait for, not what you do; and anything is a large category.
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Margaret Atwood |
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884428a
|
When we think of the past it's the beautiful things we pick out. We want to believe it was all like that
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inspirational
|
Margaret Atwood |
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3caa0af
|
It took me a long time to figure out that the youngest in a family of dragons is still a dragon from the point of view of those who find dragons alarming.
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Margaret Atwood |
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2e13114
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I will never be that old, thinks Joanne. I will die before I'm thirty. She knows this absolutely. It's a tragic but satisfactory thought. If necessary, if some wasting disease refuses to carry her off, she'll do it herself, with pills. She is not at all unhappy but she intends to be, later. It seems required.
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Margaret Atwood |
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6bc368f
|
There's only so long you can feel sorry for a person before you come to feel that their affliction is an act of malice committed by them against you. At
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Margaret Atwood |
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a00bccf
|
Lilies used to be a movie theatre, before. Students went there a lot; every spring they had a Humphrey Bogart festival, with Lauren Bacall or Katherine Hepburn, women on their own, making up their minds. They wore blouses with buttons down the front that suggested the possibilities of the word 'undone'. These women could not be undone; or not. They seemed to be able to choose.
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women
empowering
handmaid-s-tale
undone
|
Margaret Atwood |