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00f74d2
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I remember walking in art galleries, through the nineteenth century: the obsession they had then with harems. Dozens of paintings of harems, fat women lolling on divans, turbans on their heads or velvet caps, being fanned with peacock tails, a eunuch in the background standing guard. Studies of sedentary flesh, painted by men who'd never been there. These pictures were supposed to be erotic, and I thought they were, at the time; but I see n..
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Margaret Atwood |
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7b2338a
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No empire imposed by force or otherwise has ever been without this feature: control of the indigenous by members of their own group. In the case of Gilead, there were many women willing to serve as Aunts, either because of a genuine belief in what they called "traditional values", or for the benefits they might thereby acquire. When power is scarce, a little of it is tempting."
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Margaret Atwood |
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9d764a2
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As with all knowledge, once you knew it, you couldn't imagine how it was that you hadn't known it before. 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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50c1e15
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To pronounce the name of the dead is to make them live again.
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egyptian-mythology
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Margaret Atwood |
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a09f20e
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He needed to exist only in the present, without guilt, without expectation.
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Margaret Atwood |
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d8ddd60
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It isn't the sort of thing you ask questions about, because the answers are not usually answers you want to know.
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Margaret Atwood |
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61d3c1d
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You could tell a lot about a person from their fridge magnets, not that he'd thought much about them at the time.
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Margaret Atwood |
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730dafc
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Things written down can cause a great deal of harm. All too often, people don't consider that.
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Margaret Atwood |
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df3dc85
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As it says in the Bible, For now we through a glass, darkly; but then face to face. If it is face to face, there must be two looking.
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Margaret Atwood |
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21cd90e
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She stubs out her cigarette in the brown glass ashtray, then settles herself against him, ear to his chest. She likes to hear his voice this way, as if it begins not in his throat but in his body, like a hum or a growl, or like a voice speaking from deep underground. Like the blood moving through her own heart: a word, a word, a word.
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the-blind-assassin
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Margaret Atwood |
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233bac2
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It's always encouraging to be told that it is intellectually acceptable to read the sorts of things that you like to read anyway.
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Margaret Atwood |
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aacb1de
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It is shocking how many crimes the Bible contains. The Governor's wife should cut them all out and paste them into her scrapbook.
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scrapbook
crime
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Margaret Atwood |
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cd21f4c
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I'm fine," said Pilar, "for the moment. And the moment is the only time we can be fine in." --
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Margaret Atwood |
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641c1de
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The beauty is an illusion, and also a warning: there's a dark side to beauty, as with poisonous butterflies.
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Margaret Atwood |
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4af5927
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Because you are never here but always there, I forget not you but what you look like You drift down the street in the rain, your face dissolving, changing shape, the colours running together My walls absorb you, breathe you forth again, you resume yourself, I do not recognize you You rest on the bed watching me watching you, we will never know each other any better than we do now
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Margaret Atwood |
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84ed79d
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The heart of Jesus glowed, because it was holy. Holy things glowed in general.
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Margaret Atwood |
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b9ed520
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The Adams and the Eves used to say, We are what we eat, but I prefer to say, we are what we wish. Because if you can't wish, why bother?
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Margaret Atwood |
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5fea1a2
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What could he have done or said differently? What change would have altered the course of events? In the big picture, nothing. In the small picture, so much.
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Margaret Atwood |
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2ed1236
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If they want a monster so badly they ought to be provided by one.
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Margaret Atwood |
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20d24c9
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In pictures like these there are always empty shoes. It's the shoes that get to me. Sad, that innocent daily task - putting your shoes on your feet, in the firm belief that you'll be going somewhere.
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Margaret Atwood |
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715d481
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But how can you have a sense of wonder if you're prepared for everything?
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Margaret Atwood |
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57cddf9
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It's better to hope than mope!
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Margaret Atwood |
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f1b991e
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How shrunk, how dwindled, in our times Creation's mighty seed -
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maddaddam-trilogy
when-adam-first
the-year-of-the-flood
ren
margaret-atwood
toby
fellowship
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Margaret Atwood |
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c7c4d57
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Religious people of any serious kind made her nervous: they were like men in raincoats who might or might not be flashers.
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religion
religious
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Margaret Atwood |
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7277ce1
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I'm losing the appetite for strangers. Once I would have focused on the excitement, the hazard; now it's the mess, the bother. Getting your clothes off gracefully, always such an impossibility; thinking up what to say afterwards, without setting the echoes going in your head. Worse, the encounter with another set of particularities: the toenails, the ear-holes, the nosehairs. Perhaps at this age we return to the prudishness we had as childr..
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Margaret Atwood |
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3d626f6
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Love is giving, marriage is buying and selling. You can't put love into a contract.
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marriage
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Margaret Atwood |
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c360697
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So that's what art is, for the artist," said Crake. "An empty drainpipe. An amplifier. A stab at getting laid."
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Margaret Atwood |
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2999901
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In reduced circumstances the desire to live attaches itself to strange objects. I would like a pet: a bird, say, or a cat. A familiar. Anything at all familiar.
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Margaret Atwood |
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442bbe9
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Apart from all this, I do of course have a real life. I sometimes have trouble believing in it, because it doesn't seem like the kind of life I could ever get away with, or deserve. This goes along with another belief of mine: that everyone else my age is an adult, whereas I am merely in disguise.
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Margaret Atwood |
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89316d5
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Women are hard to keep track of, most of them. They slip into other names, and sink without a trace.
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Margaret Atwood |
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b907fca
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For an instant she felt them, their identities, almost their substance, pass over her head like a wave. At some time she would be -- or no, already she was like that too; she was one of them, her body the same, identical, merged with that other flesh that choked the air in the flowered room with its sweet organic scent; she felt suffocated by this thick sargasso-sea of femininity.
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Margaret Atwood |
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687a8ed
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We slept in what had once been the gymnasium.
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Margaret Atwood |
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997fe34
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I don't want to look at something that determines me so completely.
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Margaret Atwood |
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d09b00a
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In the desert there is no sign that says, Thou shalt not eat stones. -- Sufi proverb
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Margaret Atwood |
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deb5e4e
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Despite their cool poses they wear their cravings on the outside, like the suckers on a squid. They want it all.
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Margaret Atwood |
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4c895c2
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and nostalgia swept through Jimmy like a sudden hunger.
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Margaret Atwood |
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0180d08
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In front of us, to the right, is the store where we order dresses. Some people call them , a good word for them. Habits are hard to break.
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Margaret Atwood |
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c1a3151
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An old walrus-faced waiter attended to me; he had the knack of pouring the coffee and the hot milk from two jugs, held high in the air, and I found this entrancing, as if he were a child's magician. One day he said to me - he had some English - "Why are you sad?" "I'm not sad," I said, and began to cry. Sympathy from strangers can be ruinous. "You should not be sad," he said, gazing at me with his melancholy, leathery walrus eyes. "It must ..
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sadness
love
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Margaret Atwood |
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8f4d4e2
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A hot wind was blowing around my head, the strands of my hair lifting and swirling in it, like ink spilled in water.
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Margaret Atwood |
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1c7474e
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Axiom: you are a sea. Your eye- lids curve over chaos My hands where they touch you, create small inhabited islands soon you will be
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Margaret Atwood |
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378b7ab
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While in a vintage restaurant..."the past isn't quaint while you're in it. Only at a safe distance, later, when you see it as decor, not as the shape your life's been squeezed into."
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Margaret Atwood |
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b187318
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Those who live alone slide into the habit of vertical eating: why bother with the niceties when there's no one to share or censure? But laxity in one area may lead to derangement in all.
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Margaret Atwood |
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b83f6b5
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Though as he'd say, what is 'belief' but a willingness to suspend the negatives?
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hope
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Margaret Atwood |
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8e6da8d
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He could never get used to her, she was fresh every time, she was a casketful of secrets. Any moment now she would open herself up, reveal to him the essential thing, the hidden thing at the core of her life, or of her life, or of his life--the thing he was longing to know. The thing he'd always wanted.
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Margaret Atwood |