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784bb68
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It's fun to be different, but not too different!
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Margaret Atwood |
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12480de
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Confronted by too much emptiness, said Adam One, the brain invents. Loneliness creates company as thirst creates water. How many sailors have been wrecked in pursuit of islands that were merely a shimmering?
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loneliness
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Margaret Atwood |
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ce1a897
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On the eastern horizon there's a greyish haze, lit now with a rosy, deadly glow. Strange how that colour still seems tender. He gazes at it with rapture; there is no other word for it. Rapture. The heart seized, carried away, as if by some large bird of prey. 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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8531f18
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Lighting a fire is an act of renewal, of beginning, and 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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b0992c1
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I would like to believe this is a story I'm telling. I need to believe it. I must believe it. Those who can believe that such stories are only stories have a better chance. If it's a story I'm telling, then I have control over the ending. Then there will be an ending, to the story, and real life will come after it. I can pick up where I left off. It isn't a story I'm telling. It's also a story I'm telling, in my head, as I go along. Tel..
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Margaret Atwood |
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11325e7
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It's lack of love we die from.
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Margaret Atwood |
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725bcba
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I was shut up inside that doll of myself, and my true voice could not get out.
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Margaret Atwood |
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4600a59
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We were the people who were not in the papers. We lived in the blank white spaces on the edges of print.
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women
oppression
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Margaret Atwood |
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77681eb
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So few people understand about anything.
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margaret-atwood
the-robber-bride
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Margaret Atwood |
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3032905
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At night, Toby breathed herself in. Her new self. Her skin smelled like honey and salt. And earth
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Margaret Atwood |
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5eb796b
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Why do men want to kill the bodies of other men? Women don't want to kill the bodies of other women.
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Margaret Atwood |
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b5807e3
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But the waves kept moving, with the white wake of the ship traced in them for an instant, and then smoothed over by the water. And it was as if my own footsteps were being erased behind me, the footsteps I'd made as a child on the beaches and pathways of the land I'd left, and the footsteps I'd made on this side of the ocean, since coming here; all the traces of me, smoothed over and rubbed away as if they had never been, like polishing the..
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Margaret Atwood |
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df872ad
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There is indeed something delightful about being able to combine obedience and disobedience in the same act.
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Margaret Atwood |
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a767444
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But then it came to me that who I really am is a person who doesn't need to know who he really is, in the usual sense. What does it mean, anyway - family background and so forth? People use it mostly as an excuse for their own snobbery, or else their failings. I'm free of the temptation, that's all. I'm free of the strings. Nothing ties me down.
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Margaret Atwood |
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e00065f
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It is spring, and the night wind is moist with the smell of turned loam and the early flowers; the moon pours out its beauty which you see as beauty finally, warm and offering everything. You have only to take.
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Margaret Atwood |
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d8317ea
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Thus on Predator Day we meditate on the Alpha Predator aspects of God. The suddenness and ferocity with which an apprehension of the Divine may appear to us; our smallness and fearfulness-may I say, our Mouselikeness-in the face of such Power; our feelings of individual annihilation in the brightness of that splendid Light. God walks in the tender dawn Gardens of the mind, but He also prowls in its night Forests. He is not a tame Being, my ..
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Margaret Atwood |
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e9ab912
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on the Street of Dreams it was dream eat dream.
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Margaret Atwood |
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8fb1e44
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It would be nice to believe that love should be dished out in a fair way so that everyone got some. But that wasn't how it was going to be for me.
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Margaret Atwood |
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b2ddfcb
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You can't make an omelette without breaking eggs, is what he says. We thought we could do better. Better? I say, in a small voice. How can he think this is better? Better never means better for everyone, he says. It always mean worse, for some.
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Margaret Atwood |
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acde2f8
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You always do good ones. We trust you, Mr. Duke," Says Dylan. Foolish lads, thinks Felix: never trust a professional ham." --
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humorous
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Margaret Atwood |
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d1d67ef
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I began to forget myself in the middle of sentences.
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Margaret Atwood |
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2b27b06
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The living bird is not its labeled bones.
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Margaret Atwood |
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7319c48
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Help is what they offer but gratitude is what they want, they roll around in it like cats in the catnip.
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Margaret Atwood |
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53019c7
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It's simple,' Kat told them. 'You bombard them with images of what they ought to be, and you make them feel grotty for being the way they are. You're working with the gap between reality and perception. That's why you have to hit them with something new, something they've never seen before, something they aren't. Nothing sells like anxiety.
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fashion-industry
magazines
fashion
consumerism
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Margaret Atwood |
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e40c2f6
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The human mind was the last thing to be commercialized but they're doing a good job of it now;
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Margaret Atwood |
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d80da34
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We offered her flowers and signalled to her with our penises, but she did not respond with joy.' 'The men with the extra skins didn't look happy. They looked angry.' 'We went towards them to greet them, but they ran away.' Snowman can imagine. The sight of these preternaturally calm, well-muscled men advancing en masse, singing their unusual music, green eyes glowing, blue penises waving in unison, both hands outstretched like extras in a z..
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humour
mating
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Margaret Atwood |
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a322762
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Why should the other ones in this play get a second chance at life, but not him? Why's he have to suffer so much for being what he is? It's like he's, you know, black or Native or something. Five strikes against him from Day One. He never asked to get born.
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Margaret Atwood |
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978d649
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There's just one thing I want you to remember. You know those chemicals women have in them, when they've got PMS? Well, men have the very same chemicals in them all the time.
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humor
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Margaret Atwood |
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c127d65
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The theory was that while in a Fallow state you were gathering and conserving strength, nourishing yourself through meditation, sending invisible rootlets out into the universe.
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Margaret Atwood |
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2a60c65
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But all doors used regularly are doors to the afterlife.
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Margaret Atwood |
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3d6a117
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As his editor put it, "Yeah, it's a piece of shit, but it's good shit."
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Margaret Atwood |
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522ae92
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Young love, thinks Felix wistfully. So good for the complexion.
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Margaret Atwood |
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771a429
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Human society, they claimed, was a sort of monster, its main by-products being corpses and rubble. It never learned, it made the same cretinous mistakes over and over, trading short-term gain for long-term pain. It was like a giant slug eating its way relentlessly through all the other bioforms on the planet, grinding up life on earth and shitting it out the backside in the form of pieces of manufactured and soon-to-be-obsolete plastic junk..
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Margaret Atwood |
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3ff2eef
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Fool, he tells himself. She's not here. She was never here. It was imagination and wishful thinking, nothing but that. Resign yourself. He can't resign himself.
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Margaret Atwood |
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eb862db
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But we own nothing they want, so we don't qualify as terrorists.
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Margaret Atwood |
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8711425
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I don't give a glance to what's still on the walls, I hate those neo-expressionist dirty greens and putrid oranges, post this, post that. Everything is post these days, as if we're all just a footnote to something earlier that was real enough to have a name of its own.
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Margaret Atwood |
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07eae7e
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By the time she was sixteen, Jane had heard enough about this to last her several lifetimes. In her mother's account of the way things were, you were young briefly and then you fell. You plummeted downwards like an overripe apple and hit the ground with a squash; you fell, and everything about you fell too. You got fallen arches and a fallen womb, and your hair and teeth fell out. That's what having a baby did to you. It subjected you to th..
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Margaret Atwood |
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701a02e
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Virginia Woolf said that writing a novel is like walking through a dark room, holding a lantern which lights up what is already in the room anyway.
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Margaret Atwood |
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7d61fca
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The written word is so much like evidence -- like something that can be used against you later.
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Margaret Atwood |
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01873f5
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It's the forties look," she says to George, hand on her hip, doing a pirouette. "Rosie the Riveter. From the war. Remember her?" George, whose name is not really George, does not remember. He spent the forties rooting through garbage bag heaps and begging, and doing other things unsuitable for a child. He has a dim memory of some film star posed on a calendar tattering on a latrine wall. Maybe this is the one Prue means. He remembers for an..
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Margaret Atwood |
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fcb90b8
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Nothing changes instantaneously: in a gradually heating bathtub you'd be boiled to death before you knew it. There were stories in the newspapers, of course, corpses in ditches or the woods, bludgeoned to death or mutilated, interfered with, as they used to say, but they were about other women, and the men who did such things were other men. None of them were the men we knew. The news paper stories were like dreams to us, bad dreams dreamt ..
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Margaret Atwood |
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be6816b
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At first the solution was to build more prisons and cram more people into them, but that soon became prohibitively expensive. (Here Ed flicks through a few more slides.) Not only that, it resulted in platoons of prison graduates with professional-grade criminal skills they were more than willing to exercise once they were back in the outside world.
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Margaret Atwood |
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d874849
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Alcohol's a depressant, it will let me down later.
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Margaret Atwood |
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d477120
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All hearts float in their own deep oceans of no light, wetblack and glimmering, their four mouths gulping like fish. Hearts are said to pound: this is to be expected, the heart's regular struggle against being drowned.
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Margaret Atwood |