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cfe8380
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They were both in their own ways earnest; they both wanted to achieve some worthy end or other, change the world for the better. Such alluring, such perilous ideals!
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earnest
ideals
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Margaret Atwood |
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46d4193
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For these dances the boys send corsages, which I keep afterward and keep in my bureau drawer; squashed carnations and brown-edged rosebuds, wads of dead vegetation, like a collection of floral shrunken heads.
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Margaret Atwood |
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a211c23
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She would be invisible, of course. No one would hear her. And nothing has happened, really, that hasn't happened before.
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Margaret Atwood |
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af8f483
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Now maybe I wouldn't do it, but I was a child then," said Oryx more softly. "Why are you so angry?" "I don't buy it," said Jimmy. Where was her rage, how far down was it buried, what did he have to do to dig it up? "You don't buy what?" "Your whole fucking story. All this sweetness and acceptance and crap." "If you don't want to buy that, Jimmy," said Oryx, looking at him tenderly, "what is it that you would like to buy instead?" (167)"
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Margaret Atwood |
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46c5cf1
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The only way you can write the truth is to assume that what you set down will never be read. Not by any other person, and not even by yourself at some later date. Otherwise you begin excusing yourself. You must see the writing as emerging like a long scroll of ink from the index finger of your right hand; you must see your left hand erasing it. Impossible, of course.
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Margaret Atwood |
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6956973
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I had now been a servant for three years, and could act the part well enough by that time. But Nancy was very changeable, two-faced you might call her, and it wasn't easy to tell what she wanted from one hour to the next. One minute she would be up on her high horse and ordering me about and finding fault, and the next minute she would be my best friend, or pretend to be, and would put her arm through mine, and say I looked tired, and shoul..
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Margaret Atwood |
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a2398ed
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The lock splits. The iron gate swings open. She emerges, raises her arms towards the suddenly chilled moon. The world changes.
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Margaret Atwood |
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9071175
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The genres, it is thought, have other designs on us. They want to entertain, as opposed to rubbing our noses in the daily grit produced by the daily grind. Unhappily for realistic novelists, the larger reading public likes being entertained.
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reading
genre-snobbery
nonfiction
popularity
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Margaret Atwood |
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c2748f8
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Love is not a profession genteel or otherwise sex is not dentistry the slick filling of aches and cavities you are not my doctor you are not my cure,
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Margaret Atwood |
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7f3edcc
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He's coming to hate the gratitude of women. It is like being fawned on by rabbits, or like being covered with syrup: you can't get it off.
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Margaret Atwood |
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57e2c8a
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The question about the page is: what is beneath it? It seems to have only two dimensions, you can pick it up and turn it over and the back is the same as the front. Nothing, you say, disappointed. But you were looking in the wrong place, you were looking instead of . is another story. Beneath the page is a story. Beneath the page is everything that has ever happened, most of which you would rather not hear about. The page is not a pool..
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Margaret Atwood |
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9aea074
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If the stock market exists, so must previous lives.
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past-lives
stock-market
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Margaret Atwood |
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8dee41e
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bye-bye love, as in songs. All alone now. It was so sad. Why did such things have to disintegrate like that? Why did longing and desire, and friendliness and goodwill too, have to shatter into pieces? Why did they have to be so thoroughfully over? I could make myself cry even more by repeating the key word: love,alone, sad, over. I did it on purpose.
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Margaret Atwood |
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d6864ad
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Death makes me hungry. Maybe it's because I've been emptied; or maybe it's the body's way of seeing to it that I remain alive.
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Margaret Atwood |
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1d883ce
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The air is saturated with the stink of perfumes at war. There are video screens on which flawless complexions turn, preen, sigh through their parted lips, are caressed. On other screens are close-ups of skin pores, before and after, details of regimes for everything, your hands, your neck, your thighs. Your elbows, especially your elbows: aging begins at the elbows and metastasizes. This is religion. Voodoo and spells. I want to believe in..
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Margaret Atwood |
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7a027dc
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What has having a baby got to do with getting a job at an art gallery? You're always thinking in terms of either/or. The thing is wholeness.
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Margaret Atwood |
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eb8c0a8
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Too friendly, too eager to be on message, man is obsolete, dooming ourselves to extinction, restore the balance of nature and babble babble, he overdid it so much that he sounded preposterous, and in an outfit like Bearlift, with its full quota of preposterous green-hued furfuckers, that took some effort.
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Margaret Atwood |
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39b31f0
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I was nervous. How was I to know he loved me? It might be just an affair. Why did we ever say just? Though at that time men and women tried each other on, casually, like suits, rejecting whatever did not fit.
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Margaret Atwood |
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54935d0
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The male frog, in mating season," said Crake, "makes as much noise as it can. The females are attracted to the male frog with the biggest, deepest voice because it suggests a more powerful frog, one with superior genes. Small male frogs - it's been documented - discover that if they position themselves in empty drainpipes, the pipe acts as a voice amplifier, and the small frog appears much larger than it really is." "So?" "So that's what ar..
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evolution
humor
biology
attraction
humans
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Margaret Atwood |
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973207b
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There's time to spare. This is one of the things I wasn't prepared for - the amount of unfilled time, the long parentheses of nothing. Time as white sound.
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Margaret Atwood |
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dc9f5a4
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In this country you can say what you like because no one will listen to you anyway
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Margaret Atwood |
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9f502ec
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Feathers," he says. They ask this question at least once a week. He gives the same answer. Even over such a short time -- two months, three? He's lost count -- they've accumulated a stock of lore, of conjecture about him: Snowman was once a bird but he's forgotten how to fly and the rest of his feathers fell out, and so he is cold and he needs a second skin, and he has to wrap himself up. No: he's cold because he eats fish, and fish are col..
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Margaret Atwood |
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8db5604
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Fake it, I scream at myself inside my head. You must remember how. Let's get this over with or you'll be here all night. Bestir yourself. Move your flesh around, breathe audibly. It's the least you can do.
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Margaret Atwood |
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521cedd
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Reenie never went in much for God. There was mutual respect, and if you were in trouble naturally you'd call on him, as with lawyers; but as with lawyers, it would have to be bad trouble. Otherwise it didn't pay to get too mixed up with him.
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Margaret Atwood |
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4092867
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I listened humbly, resentfully. I knew I did not have charm. Neither Laura nor I had it. We were too secretive for charm, or else too blunt. We'd never learned it, because Reenie had spoiled us. She felt that who we were ought to be enough for anybody. We shouldn't have to lay ourselves out for people, court them with coaxings and wheedlings and eye-batting displays.
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Margaret Atwood |
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9df748e
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I did not yet know that my lack of enjoyment - my distaste, my suffering even - would be considered normal and even desirable by my husband. He was one of those men who felt that if a woman did not experience sexual pleasure this was all to the good, because then she would not be liable to wander off seeking it elsewhere.
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Margaret Atwood |
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8a6ed49
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Money isn't the only thing that must flow and circulate in order to have good value: good turns and gifts must flow and circulate . . . for any social system to remain in balance.
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Margaret Atwood |
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f3bc0e8
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By telling you anything at all I'm at least believing in you, I believe you're there, I believe you into being. Because I'm telling you this story I will your existence. I tell, therefore you are.
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faith
believe
power
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Margaret Atwood |
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9244f9c
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China does not exist. Nevertheless, she longs to be there.
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Margaret Atwood |
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ffaebcd
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He feels the need to hear a human voice--a fully human voice like his own. Sometimes he laughs like a hyena or roars like a lion--his idea of a hyena his idea of a lion.
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psychology
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Margaret Atwood |
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5b57023
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Messy love is better than none, I guess. I'm no authority on sane living. Which is all true and no hep at all, because this form of love is like the pain of childbirth: so intense it's hard to remember afterwards, or what kind of screams and grimaces it pushed you into.
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Margaret Atwood |
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7d244b6
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I shouldn't have taken a vow of silence, I told myself. What did I want? Nothing much. Just a memorial. But what is a memorial, when you come right down to it, but a commemoration of wounds endured? Endured, and resented. Without memory, there can be no revenge.
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revenge
vow-of-silence
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Margaret Atwood |
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91feece
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He told me that everyone had a hidden door, which was the way into the heart, and that it was a point of honour with him to be able to find the handles to those doors. For the heart was both key and lock, and he who could master the hearts of men and learn their secrets was well on the way to mastering the Fates and controlling the thread of his own destiny. Not, he hastened to add, that any man can really do that. Not even the gods, he sai..
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Margaret Atwood |
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f98a7bc
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Ger says that Kat has a tendency to push things to extremes, to go over the edge, merely from a juvenile desire to shock, which is hardly a substitute for wit. One of these days, he says, she will go way too far. Too far for him, is what he means.
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strong-women
extremes
strong-woman
shock
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Margaret Atwood |
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0a1c2e7
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I was unfair to him, of course, but where would I have been without unfairness? In thrall, in harness. Young women need unfairness, it's one of their few defenses. They need their callousness, they need their ignorance. They walk in the dark, along the edges of high cliffs, humming to themselves, thinking themselves invulnerable.
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Margaret Atwood |
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78a2c31
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She longs for tonight, she longs to skip the day that's just begun and plunge headlong into the night as if into a pool; a pool with the moon reflected in it. She longs to swim in liquid moonlight.
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Margaret Atwood |
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2de3b1c
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She wasn't stupid. She just didn't want to put her neuron power into long sentences.
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ommunication
simplicity
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Margaret Atwood |
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b8d9cf5
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There are several diseases of the memory. Forgetfulness of nouns, for instance, or of numbers. Or there are more complex amnesias. With one, you can lose your entire past; you start afresh, learning how to tie your shoelaces, how to eat with a fork, how to read and sing. You are introduced to your relatives, your oldest friends, as if you've never met them before; you get a second chance with them, better than forgiveness because you can be..
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Margaret Atwood |
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f8a5906
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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.
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Margaret Atwood |
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5c6cdf0
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I and the girl in the picture have ceased to be the same person. I am her outcome, the result of the life she once lived headlong; whereas she, if she can be said to exist at all, is composed only of what I remember. I have the better view - I can see her clearly, most of the time. But even if she knew enough to look, she can't see me at all.
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time
youth
past
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Margaret Atwood |
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82405bf
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Up You wake up filled with dread There seems no reason for it. Morning light sifts through the window, there is birdsong, you can't get out of bed. It's something about the crumpled sheets hanging over the edge like jungle foliage, the terry slippers gaping their dark pink mouths for your feet, the unseen breakfast-some of it in the refrigerator you do not dare to open-you do not dare to eat. What prevents you? The future. The future ..
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Margaret Atwood |
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66bc917
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But if it's a story, even in my head, I must be telling it to someone. You don't tell a story only to yourself. There's always someone else. Even when there is no one.
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Margaret Atwood |
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2b860f3
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she doesn't want to begin, she wants to continue. No: she wants to go back.
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Margaret Atwood |
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85c4ae6
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There were signs and I missed them. For instance, Crake said once, "Would you kill someone you loved to spare them pain?" "You mean, commit euthanasia?" said Jimmy. "Like putting down your pet turtle?" "Just tell me," said Crake. "I don't know. What kind of love, what kind of pain?"
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Margaret Atwood |