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3871c5a
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You aren't sick & unhappy only alive & stuck with it.
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Margaret Atwood |
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051b0f7
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Last year I abstained this year I devour without guilt which is also an art
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Margaret Atwood |
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9b23184
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In my dreams of this city I am always lost.
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lost
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Margaret Atwood |
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3076bde
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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.
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fatigue
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Margaret Atwood |
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2ee86c9
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By now you know: I come from another planet. But I will never say to you, "Take me to your leaders." Even I--unused to your ways though I am--would never make that mistake. We ourselves have such beings among us, made of cogs, pieces of paper, small disks of shiny metal, scraps of coloured cloth. I do not need to encounter more of them. Instead I will say, "Take me to your trees. Take me to your breakfasts, your sunsets, your bad dreams, yo..
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Margaret Atwood |
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68a7dc8
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This has been her problem all her life: picturing other people's responses. She's too good at it. She can picture the response of anyone--other people's reactions, their emotions, their criticisms, their demands--but somehow they don't reciprocate. Maybe they can't. Maybe they lack the gift, if it is one.
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Margaret Atwood |
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9aded11
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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.
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Margaret Atwood |
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b2e38a4
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You can't buy it, but it has a price," said Oryx. "Everything has a price."
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Margaret Atwood |
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9815f17
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The truth is seldom welcome, especially at dinner.
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Margaret Atwood |
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946115b
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They seemed to be able to choose. We seemed to be able to choose, then. We were a society dying of too much choice.
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Margaret Atwood |
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45b7b0f
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we must be a beacon of hope, because if you tell people there's nothing they can do, they will do worse than nothing.
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Margaret Atwood |
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e76635d
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How furious she must be, now that she's been taken at her word.
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Margaret Atwood |
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82cde66
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Just because there's a silence it doesn't mean that nothing is going on.
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Margaret Atwood |
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0406875
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The small details of life often hide a great significance.
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Margaret Atwood |
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609a350
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He has to find more and better ways of occupying his time. His time, what a bankrupt idea, as if he's been given a box of time belonging to him alone, stuffed to the brim with hours and minutes that he can spend like money. Trouble is, the box has holes in it and the time is running out, no matter what he does with it.
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Margaret Atwood |
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d519e0f
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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 newspaper stories were like dreams to us, bad dreams dreamt ..
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Margaret Atwood |
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4181f31
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Men can imagine their own deaths, they can see them coming, and the mere though of impending death acts like an aphrodisiac. A dog or rabbit doesn't behave like that. Take birds -- in a lean season they cut down on the eggs, or they won't mate at all. They put their energy into staying alive themselves until times get better. But human beings hope they can stick their souls into someone else, some new version of themselves, and live on fore..
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Margaret Atwood |
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9e2c01b
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Every night when I go to bed I think, In the morning I will wake up in my own house and things will be back the way they were. It hasn't happened this morning, either.
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Margaret Atwood |
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048dcb1
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Perhaps its not the world that is soundless but we who are deaf.
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world
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Margaret Atwood |
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dbee4f1
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I am not my childhood,' Snowman says out loud.
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Margaret Atwood |
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0545257
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A prison does not only lock its inmates inside, it keeps all others out. Her strongest prison is of her own construction.
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Margaret Atwood |
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9dd91dd
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It was like being in an elevator cut loose at the top. Falling, falling, and not knowing when you will hit.
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Margaret Atwood |
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added62
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They are hypocrites, they think the Church is a cage to keep God in, so he will stay locked up there and not go wandering about the earth during the week, poking his nose into their business, and looking in the depths and darkness and doubleness of their hearts, and their lack of true charity; and they believed they need only be bothered about him on Sundays when they have their best clothes on and their faces straight, and their hands wash..
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Margaret Atwood |
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8cb47e2
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Falling in love, although it resulted in altered body chemistry and was therefore real, was a hormonally induced delusional state, according to him. In addition it was humiliating, because it put you at a disadvantage, it gave the love object too much power. As for sex per se, it lacked both challenge and novelty, and was on the whole a deeply imperfect solution to the problem of intergenerational genetic transfer.
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sex
love
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Margaret Atwood |
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aba43be
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Madness is only an amplification of what you already are.
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madness
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Margaret Atwood |
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c90f459
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All observations of life are harsh, because life is. I lament that fact, but I cannot change it.
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Margaret Atwood |
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5d66b55
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Her glass wings are gone.
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Margaret Atwood |
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ddd543b
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I tell, therefore you are.
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Margaret Atwood |
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ceff338
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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.
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Margaret Atwood |
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e95589d
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Better not to invent her in her absence. Better to wait until she's actually here. Then he can make her up as she goes along.
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relationships
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Margaret Atwood |
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c27cb64
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He doesn't understand yet that guilt comes to you not from the things you've done, but from the things that others have done to you.
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Margaret Atwood |
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6475d5f
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Where do the words go when we have said them?
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words
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Margaret Atwood |
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ac8124c
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A wave of blood goes up to my head, my stomach shrinks together, as if something dangerous has just missed hitting me. It's as if I've been caught stealing, or telling a lie; or as if I've heard other people talking about me, saying bad things about me, behind my back. There's the same flush of shame, of guilt and terror, and of cold disgust with myself. But I don't know where these feelings have come from, what I've done.
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Margaret Atwood |
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c5caef3
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Kill what you can't save what you can't eat throw out what you can't throw out bury What you can't bury give away what you can't give away you must carry with you, it is always heavier than you thought.
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poetry
weight
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Margaret Atwood |
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be17228
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Jimmy, look at it realistically. You can't couple a minimum access to food with an expanding population indefinitely. Homo sapiens doesn't seem to be able to cut himself off at the supply end. He's one of the few species that doesn't limit reproduction in the face of dwindling resources. In other words - and up to a point, of course - the less we eat, the more we fuck." "How to do you account for that?" said Jimmy "Imagination," said Crake...
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Margaret Atwood |
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bce3afa
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By telling you anything at all I'm at least believing in you, 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. So I will go on. So I will myself to go on.
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Margaret Atwood |
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9ab1dde
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That is what you have to do before you kill, I thought. You have to create an it, where none was before.
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Margaret Atwood |
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dda43f2
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The moon is a stone and the sky is full of deadly hardware, but oh God, how beautiful anyway.
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Margaret Atwood |
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b98a98f
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Then we had the irises, rising beautiful and cool on their tall stalks, like blown glass, like pastel water momentarily frozen in a splash, light blue, light mauve, and the darker ones, velvet and purple, black cat's ears in the sun, indigo shadow, and the bleeding hearts, so female in shape it was a surprise they'd not long since been rooted out. There is something subversive about this garden of Serena's, a sense of buried things bursting..
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Margaret Atwood |
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769848a
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A man is just a woman's strategy for making other women. Not that your father wasn't a nice guy and all, but... there's something missing in them, even the nice ones. It's like they're permanently absent-minded, like they can't quite remember who they are. They look at the sky too much. They lose touch with their feet. They aren't a patch on a woman except they're better at fixing cars and playing football, just what we need for the improve..
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Margaret Atwood |
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fb861ed
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You don't look back along time but down through it, like water. Sometimes this comes to the surface, sometimes that, sometimes nothing. Nothing goes away.
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Margaret Atwood |
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f66b1a8
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While he writes, I feel as if he is drawing me; or not drawing me, drawing on me - drawing on my skin - not with the pencil he is using, but with an old-fashioned goose pen, and not with the quill end but with the feather end. As if hundreds of butterflies have settled all over my face, and are softly opening and closing their wings.
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Margaret Atwood |
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6ec6c52
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Every ending is arbitrary, because the end is where you write The end. A period, a dot of punctuation, a point of stasis. A pinprick in the paper: you could put your eye to it and see through, to the other side, to the beginning of something else. Or, as Tony says to her students, Time is not a solid, like wood, but a fluid, like water or the wind. It doesn't come neatly cut into even-sized length, into decades and centuries. Nevertheless, ..
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Margaret Atwood |
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b0ed653
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Freedom, like everything else, is relative.
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Margaret Atwood |