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734bfbf
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By now you must have guessed: I come from another planet. But I will never say to you, "Take me to your leaders." ... Instead I will say, "Take me to your trees. Take me to your breakfasts, your sunsets, your bad dreams, your shoes, your nouns. Take me to your fingers; take me to your deaths." These are worth it. These are what I have come for."
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Margaret Atwood |
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a16b1b5
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I want to keep on living, in any form. I resign my body freely, to the uses of others. They
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Margaret Atwood |
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924dad2
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The first egg is white. I move the eggcup a little, so it's now in the watery sunlight that comes through the window and falls, brightening, waning, brightening again, on the tray. The shell of the egg is smooth but also grained; small pebbles of calcium are defined by the sunlight, like craters on the moon. It's a barren landscape, yet perfect; it's the sort of desert the saints went into, so their minds would not be distracted by profusio..
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Margaret Atwood |
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a52bc08
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After a certain point, the ravages of experience reverse themselves; we put on innocence with advancing age, at least in the minds of others.
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Margaret Atwood |
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0f018f3
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Hope throws a smokescreen. Smoke gets in your eyes and so no one is prepared for it, but suddenly it;s there, like an out-of-control bonfire - like murder, only multiplied. It's in full spate.
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Margaret Atwood |
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8a12b37
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The war takes place in black and white. For those on the sidelines that is. For those who are actually in it there are many different colours, excessive colours, too bright, too red and orange, too liquid and incandescent, but for the others the war is like a newsreel- grainy, smeared, with bursts of staccato noise and large numbers of grey-skinned people rushing or plodding or falling down, everything elsewhere.
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Margaret Atwood |
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712a562
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But not, surely, for the first time in human history. How many others have stood in this place? Left behind, with all gone, all swept away. The dead bodies evaporating like slow smoke; their loved and carefully tended homes crumbling away like deserted anthills. Their bones reverting to calcium; night predators
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Margaret Atwood |
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cd5d5f3
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The combination of presence and anonymity - confession without penance, truth without consequences - it has its attractions. Getting the blood off your hands, one way or another.
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Margaret Atwood |
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e707fea
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I did believe, at first, that I wanted only justice. I thought my heart was pure. We do like to have such good opinions of our motives when we're about to do something harmful, to someone else. But as Mr. Erskine also pointed out, Eros with his bow and arrows is not the only blind god. Justitia is the other one. Clumsy blind gods with edged weapons: Justitia totes a sword, which, coupled with her blindfold, is a pretty good recipe for cutti..
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Margaret Atwood |
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0247ffa
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The picture is of happiness, the story not. Happiness is a garden walled with glass: there's no way in or out. In Paradise there are no stories, because there are no journeys. It's loss and regret and misery and yearning that drive the story forward, along its twisted road.
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Margaret Atwood |
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d0444e7
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I try not to think too much. Like other things now, thought must be rationed. There's a lot that doesn't bear thinking about.
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Margaret Atwood |
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b88d37a
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they were awful without being believable. They were too melodramatic, they had a dimension that was not the dimension of our lives.
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Margaret Atwood |
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f6b4f04
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Some of the best things are done by those with nowhere to turn, by those who don't have time, by those who truly understand the word helpless. They dispense with the calculation of risk and profit, they take no thought for the future, they're forced at spearpoint into the present tense. Thrown over a precipice, you fall or else you fly; you clutch at any hope, however unlikely; however - if I may use such an overworked word - miraculous. Wh..
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Margaret Atwood |
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9bac847
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She's taken to renaming him according to her own analysis of his mood of the day, or his mood of the hour, or his mood of the minute: according to her, he's moody. Each mood is personified and given an honorific, so he's Mr. Grumpy, Mr. Sleepy, Dr. Ironic, Sir Sardonic, and sometimes, when she's being sarcastic or possibly nostalgic, Mr. Romantic.
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Margaret Atwood |
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e836459
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Have I been conditioned to believe that if I am not solicitous, if I am not forthcoming, if I am not a never-ending cornicopia of entertaining delights, they will take their collections of milk-bottle tops and their mangy one-eared teddy bears and go away into the woods by themselves to play snipers? Probably. What my mother things was merely cute may have been lethal.
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solicitous
well-behaved-women
entertaining
mothers
mothering
mothers-and-daughters
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Margaret Atwood |
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c852602
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Why were the bad people doing that? Because of Money. Money was invisible, like Fuck. They thought that Money was their helper; they thought he was a better helper than Fuck. But they were wrong about that. Money was not their helper. Money goes away just when you need it. But Fuck is very loyal.
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Margaret Atwood |
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3459223
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She's on some mission or other - feeding the Third World poor, soothing the dying; expiating the sins of the rest of us. A fruitless task - our sins are a bottomless pit, and there's lots more there they came from. But that's God's point, she'd doubtless argue - the fruitlessness. He's always liked futility. He thinks it's noble. She takes after Laura in that respect: the same tendency towards absolutism, the same refusal to compromise, the..
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Margaret Atwood |
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d51db1a
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I consider these things idly. Each one of them seems the same size as all the others. Not one seems preferable. Fatigue is here, in my body, in my legs and eyes. That is what gets you in the end. Faith is only a word, embroidered. I look out at the dusk and think about its being winter. The snow falling, gently, effortlessly, covering everything in soft crystal, the mist of moonlight before a rain, blurring the outlines, obliterating colo..
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Margaret Atwood |
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359cdd4
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I've heard the long sigh go up, from around me, the sigh like air coming out of an air mattress, I've seen Aunt Lydia place her hand over the mike, to stifle the other sounds coming from behind her, I've leaned forward to touch the rope in front of me, in time with the others, both hands on it, the rope hairy, sticky with tar in the hot sun, then placed my hand on my heart to show my unity with the Salvagers and my consent, and my complicit..
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Margaret Atwood |
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1135332
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I try to conjure, to raise my own spirits, from wherever they are. I need to remember what they look like. I try to hold them still behind my eyes, their faces, like pictures in an album. But they won't stay still for me, they move, there's a smile and it's gone, their features curl and bend as if the paper's burning, blackness eats them. A glimpse, a pale shimmer on the air; a glow, aurora, dance of electrons, then a face again, faces. But..
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Margaret Atwood |
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5496a6f
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Winter is not so dangerous. I need hardness, cold, rigidity; not this heaviness, as if I'm a melon on a stem, this liquid ripeness. The
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Margaret Atwood |
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3b8893c
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She's wearing her hair in a bun, like a ballerina's. Buns are so sexy. They used to be a treat to take apart: it was like opening a gift. Heads with the hair pulled back into buns are so elegant and confined, so maidenish; then the undoing, the dishevelment, the wildness of the freed hair, spilling down the shoulders, over the breasts, over the pillow. He enumerates in his head: Buns I have known.
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Margaret Atwood |
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5b25e29
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But the body had its own cultural forms. It had its own art. Executions were its tragedies, pornography was its romance.
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Margaret Atwood |
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a4ce64f
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Part of what impelled him was stubbornness; resentment, even. The system had filed him among the rejects, and what he was studying was considered--at the decision-making levels, the levels of real power--an archaic waste of time. Well then, he would pursue the superfluous as an end in itself. He would be its champion, its defender and preserver. Who was it who'd said that all art was completely useless? Jimmy couldn't recall, but hooray for..
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Margaret Atwood |
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bcb2c94
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I wait. I compose myself. My self is a thing I must now compose, as one composes a speech. What I must present is a made thing, not something born.
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Margaret Atwood |
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4258109
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But despite everything, we didn't do badly by one another, we did as well as most. I wish she were here, so I could tell her I finally know this.
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Margaret Atwood |
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946ff95
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Some cheap do-it-yourself enlightenment handbook, Nirvana for halfwits.
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Margaret Atwood |
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a72634a
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Malum quidem nullum esse sine aliquo bono, Tin noted in the journal he was sporadically keeping then. Every cloud has a silver lining.
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Margaret Atwood |
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7bb5dff
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He put his arms around me. We were both feeling miserable. How were we to know we were happy, even then? Because we at least had that: arms, around.
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sad
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Margaret Atwood |
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786ceb1
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While I read, the Commander sits and watches me doing it, without speaking but also without taking his eyes off me. This watching is a curiously sexual act, and I feel undressed while he does it.
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Margaret Atwood |
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ad963df
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Caught in the act, sinfully Scrabbling. Quick, eat those words.
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Margaret Atwood |
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91aeaab
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buttons were made from wood and bone, and the fancier ones from cow horns. These last two materials could be obtained for next to nothing from the several abattoirs in the vicinity, and as for the wood, it lay all round about, clogging up the land, and
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Margaret Atwood |
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06ce9d1
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Night falls. Or has fallen. Why is it that night falls, instead of rising, like the dawn?
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Margaret Atwood |
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820b2f2
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He has tried imagining her as a prostitute--he often plays this private mental game with various women he encounters--but he can't picture any man actually paying for her services. It would be like paying to be run over by a wagon, and would be, like that experience, a distinct threat to the health.
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Margaret Atwood |
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9ae0f2f
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There was a pot of boiling rage on a private stove behind their closed curtains:
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Margaret Atwood |
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1a2cebf
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I never do such things, however. I only consider them. If I did them, they would be sure I had gone mad again. Gone mad is what they say, and sometimes Run mad, as if mad is a direction, like west; as if mad is a different house you could step into, or a separate country entirely. But when you go mad you don't go any other place, you stay where you are. And somebody else comes in.
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Margaret Atwood |
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f274b03
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God works in mysterious ways his wonders to perform, as Reenie used to say. Could it be that Myra is my designated guardian angel? Or is she instead a foretaste of Purgatory? And how do you tell the difference?
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good-vs-evil
purgatory
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Margaret Atwood |
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ae05bda
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Last week they shot a woman, right about here. She was a Martha. She was fumbling in her robe, for her pass, and they thought she was hunting for a bomb. They thought she was a man in disguise. There have been such incidents. Rita and Cora knew the woman. I heard them talking about it, in the kitchen. Doing their job, said Cora. Keeping us safe.
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Margaret Atwood |
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1575c13
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She was so pliable. He could do anything with her, arrange her as he pleased, and she would say yes. Not just yes. Oh yes!
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Margaret Atwood |
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a891e29
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You shouldn't have forged my handwriting," I said to Laura privately. "I couldn't forge Richard's. It's too different from ours. Yours was a lot easier." "Handwriting is a personal thing. It's like stealing."
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Margaret Atwood |
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356e776
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A rebuke, a palpable rebuke! How dare she? He was already middle-aged when she was born! He could have been her father! He could have been her child molester!
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Margaret Atwood |
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fa3fbb6
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I expect he did it awkwardly, but awkwardness in men was a sign of sincerity then.
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Margaret Atwood |
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ea03e0d
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Calling a piece of short fiction a "tale" removes it at least slightly from the realm of mundane works and days, as it evokes the world of the folk tale, the wonder tale, and the long-ago teller of tales."
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Margaret Atwood |
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3116031
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After the wolvogs have gone he lies on his back on the platform, 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.
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Margaret Atwood |