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d51d919
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There's nothing like a shovelful of dirt to encourage literacy.
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Margaret Atwood |
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3e1e3c7
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Maybe they'll just take her someplace else, like an island, with the other people on it who are like her. People who don't fit in, but not criminal elements. Surely that's what they'll do.
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Margaret Atwood |
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45376f2
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Then the Alumni Association man cleared his throat and gave out with a pious spiel about Winifred Griffen Prior, saint on earth. How everyone fibs when it's a question of money! I suppose the old bitch pictured the whole thing when she made her bequest, stingy as it is. She knew my presence would be requested; she wanted me writhing in the town's harsh gaze while her own munificence was lauded.
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Margaret Atwood |
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c90b61f
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Where there are wars, there will be crows, the carrion-fanciers. And ravens too, the warbirds, the eyeball gourmands. And vultures, the holy birds of yore, old connoisseurs of rot.
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Margaret Atwood |
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a1a4349
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She doesn't have to stay locked into place, into this mournful, drawn-out, low-grade misery. She has all kinds of choices and possibilities, and the only thing that's keeping her away from them is lack of willpower.
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Margaret Atwood |
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8a69778
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On one wall there was a recent watercolour -- Saint E.O. Wilson of Hymenoptera
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Margaret Atwood |
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fd8d64b
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You can't help what you feel, Moira once said, but you can help how you behave.
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Margaret Atwood |
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f414c7b
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I open the gallery door, walk in with that sinking feeling I always have in galleries. It's the carpets that do it to me, the hush, the sanctimoniousness of it all: galleries are too much like churches, there's too much reverence, you feel there should be some genuflecting going on. Also I don't like it that this is where paintings end up, on these neutral-toned walls with the track lighting, sterilized, rendered safe and acceptable. It's a..
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Margaret Atwood |
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96435aa
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Toast was a pointless invention from the Dark Ages. Toast was an implement of torture that caused all those subjected to it to regurgitate in verbal form the sins and crimes of their past lives. Toast was a ritual item devoured by fetishists in the belief that it would enhance their kinetic and sexual powers. Toast cannot be explained by any rational means.
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Margaret Atwood |
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6a99c45
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Art is what you can get away with, said somebody or other, which makes it sound like shoplifting or some other minor crime. And maybe that's all it ever was, or is: a kind of stealing. A hijacking of the visual.
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Margaret Atwood |
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79a036f
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Not that it isn't great to see you. But it's not so great for you. What'd you do wrong? Laugh at his dick?
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sex
humor
moira
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Margaret Atwood |
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78af7e7
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Then I find I'm not ashamed after all. I enjoy the power; power of a dog bone, passive but there.
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Margaret Atwood |
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18aee93
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Nothing wrecks your nails like a lethal pandemic plague,
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Margaret Atwood |
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06e36f4
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There was always an element of melancholy involved in sex. After his indiscriminate adolescence he'd preferred sad women, delicate and breakable, women who'd been messed up and who needed him.
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Margaret Atwood |
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3d6f517
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The future is in your hands, she resumed. She held her own hands out to us, the ancient gesture that was both an offering and an invitation, to come forward, into an embrace, an acceptance. In your hands, she said, looking down at her own hands as if they had given her the idea. But there was nothing in them. They were empty. It was our hands that were supposed to be full, full of the future; which could be held but not seen.
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Margaret Atwood |
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38e806b
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Can I be blamed for wanting a real body, to put my arms around? Without it I too am disembodied. I can listen to my own heartbeat against the bedsprings, I can stroke myself, under the dry white sheets, in the dark, but I too am dry and white, hard, granular; it's like running my hand over a plateful of dried rice; it's like snow. There's something dead about it, something deserted. I am like a room where things once happened and now nothin..
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Margaret Atwood |
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16357b2
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Is that all there is? they must be thinking. Shouldn't it be less ordinary, more sordid, more epic, more truly harrowing, this flesh wound of your? Tell us more! Couldn't we please crank up the pain?
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Margaret Atwood |
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591e893
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I'm dreaming that I am awake.
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Margaret Atwood |
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b7b8bc0
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O, lente, lente currite noctis equi!
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ovid
night
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Margaret Atwood |
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138998d
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Maybe the life I think I'm living is a paranoid delusion.
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Margaret Atwood |
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51c37ca
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With no orders to follow, she occupies her mind by painting her nails, which is a very soothing thing to do when you're anxious and keyed up. Some people like to throw objects, such as glasses of water or rocks, but nail painting is more positive. If more world leaders would take it up there would be less overall suffering, in her opinion. After
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Margaret Atwood |
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599995e
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It's strange to remember how we used to think, as if everything were available to us, as if there were no contingencies, no boundaries; as if we were free to shape and reshape forever the ever--expanding perimeters of our lives. I was like that too, I did that too.
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Margaret Atwood |
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d68c4af
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Well stuff it, Jimmy thought. If he wants to be an asshole it's a free country. Millions before him have made the same life choice. He was annoyed with himself for jabbering and capering, while Crake gave him brief, indifferent glances, and that one-sided demi-smile. Nevertheless there was something about Crake. That kind of cool slouchiness always impressed Jimmy, coming from another guy: it was the sense of energies being held back, held ..
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Margaret Atwood |
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c66bbd8
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the reason you can't really imagine yourself being dead was that as soon as you say, "I'll be dead," you've said the word I, and so you're still alive inside the sentence. And that's how people got the idea of the immortality of the soul -- it was a consequence of grammar."
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Margaret Atwood |
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239b79b
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For present purposes he's shortened the name. He's only Snowman. He's kept the abominable to himself, his own secret hair shirt.
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Margaret Atwood |
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4a7918b
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You can't lead if no one will follow.
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Margaret Atwood |
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f29e43e
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We lived, as usual, by ignoring. Ignoring isn't the same as ignorance, you have to work at it. Nothing
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Margaret Atwood |
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d69083e
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We do like to have such good opinions of our own 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: Justicia totes a sword, which, coupled with her blindfold, is a pretty good recipe for cutting yourself.
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blindfold
bow-and-arrows
justicia
clumsy
eros
weapons
motives
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Margaret Atwood |
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e49528a
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one of them had been limited to nouns, verbs, and roaring.
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Margaret Atwood |
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f4f0365
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He loved her so much when he made her unhappy, or else when she made him unhappy: at these moments he scarcely knew which was which. He would pat her, standing well back as with strange dogs, stretching out his hand, saying, "I'm sorry, I'm sorry." And he was sorry, but there was more to it: he was also gloating, congratulating himself, because he'd managed to create such an effect."
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Margaret Atwood |
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9942841
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It was a wicked game. "Homer," says Snowman, making his way through the dripping-wet vegetation. "The Divine Comedy. Greek statuary. Aqueducts. Paradise Lost. Mozart's music. Shakespeare, complete works. The Brontes. Tolstoy. The Pearl Mosque. Chartres Cathedral. Bach. Rembrandt. Verdi. Joyce. Penicillin. Keats. Turner. Heart transplants. Polio vaccine. Berlioz. Baudelaire. Bartok. Yeats. Woolf."
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Margaret Atwood |
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898736e
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You know I love you. You're the only one." She isn't the first woman he's ever said that to. He shouldn't have used it up so much earlier in his life, he shouldn't have treated it like a tool, a wedge, a key to open women. By the time he got around to meaning it, the words had sounded fraudulent to him and he'd been ashamed to pronounce them."
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Margaret Atwood |
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5c3f52c
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Vancouver is the suicide capital of the country. You keep going west until you run out. You come to the edge. Then you fall off.
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Margaret Atwood |
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0cb5ef1
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I admired her lack of compunction, the courage of her bad manners, the energy of simple rage. Throwing a bag of spaghetti had a simplicity to it, a recklessness, a careless grandeur. It got things over with. I was a long way, then, from being able to do anything like it myself.
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Margaret Atwood |
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e81e1dd
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Jon smashes things, and glues the shards into place in the pattern of breakage. I can see the appeal.
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Margaret Atwood |
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078c226
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Alone is how she feels, alone is how she'll always be. You're used to solitude, she tells herself. Be a stoic. Then she's enfolded. She'd waited so long, she'd given up waiting. She'd longed for this, and denied it was possible. But now how easy it is, like coming home must have been once, for those who'd had homes. Walking through the doorway into the familiar, the place that knows you, opens to you, allows you in. Tells you the stories yo..
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Margaret Atwood |
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6aabaef
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I've got nothing against telepathy, said Jane; but the telephone is so much more dependable.
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Margaret Atwood |
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d2605ed
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The perennial adolescent riposte. I cared, of course. I cared what people thought. I always did care. Unlike Laura, I have never had the courage of my convictions.
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courage
cared
who-cares
convictions
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Margaret Atwood |
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fc8de06
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She takes after Laura in that respect: the same tendency towards absolutism, the same refusal to compromise, the same scorn for the grosser human failings. To get away with that, you have to be beautiful. Otherwise it seems mere peevishness.
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peevishness
takes-after
refusal
scorn
failings
compromise
tendency
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Margaret Atwood |
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d3f28df
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There was also, as it turned out, the dismay of my parents to be reckoned with: their tolerance about caterpillars and beetles and other non-human life forms did not quite extend to artists.
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Margaret Atwood |
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35d1ba2
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This is perhaps why Dante chooses the poet Virgil to be his guide in the Inferno; in visiting a strange location, it's always best to go with someone who's been there before, and - most important of all on a sightseeing tour of Hell - who might also know how to get you out again.
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Margaret Atwood |
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890de07
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Sex and violence, he thinks now. A lot of the songs were about that. We didn't even notice. We thought it was art.
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Margaret Atwood |
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08e2f86
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at this distance you're a mirage, a glossy image fixed in the posture of the last time I saw you. Turn you over, there's a place for the address. Wish you were here.
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Margaret Atwood |
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5d81710
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They'd like to see through me, but nothing is more opaque than absolute transparency.
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Margaret Atwood |