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| Link | Quote | Stars | Tags | Author |
| 0180d08 | 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. | Margaret Atwood | ||
| c1a3151 | 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 .. | sadness love | Margaret Atwood | |
| 8f4d4e2 | A hot wind was blowing around my head, the strands of my hair lifting and swirling in it, like ink spilled in water. | Margaret Atwood | ||
| 1c7474e | 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 | Margaret Atwood | ||
| 378b7ab | 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." | Margaret Atwood | ||
| b187318 | 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. | Margaret Atwood | ||
| b83f6b5 | Though as he'd say, what is 'belief' but a willingness to suspend the negatives? | hope | Margaret Atwood | |
| 8e6da8d | 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. | Margaret Atwood | ||
| 33eb66d | 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 will not dare to eat. What prevents you? The future. The future t.. | poetry future fear past life forgiveness | Margaret Atwood | |
| 133aebc | I learned about religion the way most children learned about sex, [in the schoolyard]. . . . They terrified me by telling me there was a dead man in the sky watching everything I did and I retaliated by explaining where babies came from. Some of their mothers phoned mine to complain, though I think I was more upset than they were: they didn't believe me but I believed them. | religion | Margaret Atwood | |
| a42e17c | I keep on going with this sad and hungry and sordid, this limping and mutilated story, because after all I want you to hear it....By telling you anything at all I'm at least believing in you....Because I'm telling you this story I will your existence. I tell, therefore you are. | writer writing storytelling | Margaret Atwood | |
| c5e1a3a | She is about to add, "I have scars, inside me," but she stops herself. What is a scar, Oh Toby? That would be the next question. Then she'd have to explain what a scar is. A scar is like writing on your body. It tells about something that once happened to you, such as a cut on your skin where blood came out." -- | Margaret Atwood | ||
| bdcf7a2 | Murderess, murderess, he whispers to himself. It has an allure, a scent almost. Hothouse gardenias. Lurid, but also furtive. He imagines himself breathing it as he draws Grace towards him, pressing his mouth against her. Murderess. He applies it to her throat like a brand. | Margaret Atwood | ||
| 3cef150 | How dare she show herself to be everything he was so annoyed with her for not being? | Margaret Atwood | ||
| 06a76e0 | Why is war so much like a practical joke? she thinks. Hiding behind bushes, leaping out, with not much difference between Boo! and Bang! except the blood. | Margaret Atwood | ||
| b5dd3fb | But reality has too much darkness in it. Too many crows | Margaret Atwood | ||
| cbe2e7f | No mother is ever, completely, a child's idea of what a mother should be, and I suppose it works the other way around as well. But despite everything, we didn't do badly by one another, we did as well as most. I wish she were here, so I could tell her I finally know this. | Margaret Atwood | ||
| 7bab957 | Art is long and life is brief and mortality looms. | mortality life margaret-atwood the-robber-bride life-is-short | Margaret Atwood | |
| f9bb0c2 | friendship was always contingent. | Margaret Atwood | ||
| 3af7257 | Nothing is more difficult than to understand the dead, I've found; but nothing is more dangerous than to ignore them. | Margaret Atwood | ||
| 604314b | It made him feel invisible--not that he wanted to feel anything else. | Margaret Atwood | ||
| a7bf581 | He throws out radiance, it must be reflected sun. Why isn't everyone staring? | Margaret Atwood | ||
| dd8886f | The French are connoisseurs of sadness, they know all kinds. This is why they have bidets. | Margaret Atwood | ||
| b988aaf | That kind of love comes and goes and is hard to remember afterwards, like pain. You would look at the man one day and you would think, I loved you, and the tense would be past, and you would be filled with a sense of wonder, because it was such an amazing and precarious and dumb thing to have done; and you would know too why your friends had been evasive about it, at the time. There is a good deal of comfort, now, in remembering this. | Margaret Atwood | ||
| 1e3e99f | SPRING POEM It is spring, my decision, the earth ferments like rising bread or refuse, we are burning last year's weeds, the smoke flares from the road, the clumped stalks glow like sluggish phoenixes / it wasn't only my fault / birdsongs burst from the feathered pods of their bodies, dandelions whirl their blades upwards, from beneath this decaying board a snake sidewinds, chained hide smelling of reptile sex / the hens roll in the dust, s.. | Margaret Atwood | ||
| 450dc65 | Paper isn't important. It's the words on them that are important. | Margaret Atwood | ||
| 05046ad | Walking into the crowd was like sinking into a stew - you became an ingredient, you took on a certain flavour. | Margaret Atwood | ||
| e3f9679 | I've learned to do without a lot of things. If you have a lot of things, said Aunt Lydia, you get too attached to this material world and you forget about spiritual values. | Margaret Atwood | ||
| 2581d20 | Perhaps they were looking for passion; perhaps they delved into this book as into a mysterious parcel - a gift box at the bottom of which, hidden in layers of rustling tissue paper, lay something they'd always longed for but couldn't ever grasp. | reading readers | Margaret Atwood | |
| 96f8091 | Why is it that we want so badly to memorialise ourselves? Even while we're still alive. we wish to assert our existence, like dogs peeing on fire hydrants. we put on display our framed photographs, our parchment diplomas, our silver-plated cups; we monogram our linen, we carve our names on trees, we scrawl them on washroom walls. It's all the same impulse. what do we hope from it? Applause, envy, respect? Or simply attention, of any kind we.. | Margaret Atwood | ||
| bd2df57 | But we still find the world astounding, we can't get enough of it; even as it shrivels, even as its many lights flicker and are extinguished (the tigers, the leopard frogs, the plunging dolphin flukes), flicker and are extinguished, by us, by us, we gaze and gaze. Where do you draw the line, between love and greed? We never did know, we always wanted more. We want to take it all in, for one last time, we want to eat the world with our eyes. | Margaret Atwood | ||
| 913a6bd | Thus the time passed. Toby stopped counting it. In any case, time is not a thing that passes, said Pilar: it's a sea on which you float. | Margaret Atwood | ||
| cea4564 | We may call Eurydice forth from the world of the dead, but we cannot make her answer; and when we turn to look at her we glimpse her only for a moment, before she slips from our grasp and flees. As all historians know, the past is a great darkness, and filled with echoes. Voices may reach us from it; but what they say to us is imbued with the obscurity of the matrix out of which they come; and, try as we may, we cannot always decipher them .. | time light past wisdom eurydice day matrix dystopia | Margaret Atwood | |
| cb3b28d | One man is no more than another, if he do no more than what another does. | Cervantes Saavedra Miguel de | ||
| a9e3c40 | My heart is wax molded as she pleases, but enduring as marble to retain. | Miguel de Cervantes Saavedra | ||
| 58f0d22 | To dream the impossible dream, that is my quest. | Miguel de Cervantes Saavedra | ||
| 87dc967 | One warm night four children stood in front of a bakery. No one knew them. No one knew where they had come from. | Gertrude Chandler Warner | ||
| e7f42c1 | I was so happy that I wanted to be kind to everyone in the world. | Dodie Smith | ||
| 1e1cf74 | What I'd really hate would be the settled feeling, with nothing but happiness to look forward to. Of course no life is perfectly happy- Rose's children will probably get ill, the servants may be difficult, perhaps dear Mrs. Cotton will prove to be the teeniest fly in the ointment. (I should like to know what fly was originally in what ointment.) There are hundreds of worries and even sorrows that may come along, but- I think what I really m.. | Dodie Smith | ||
| f9ac939 | It isn't a bit of use my pretending I'm not crying, because I am... Pause to mop up. Better now. Perhaps it would really be rather dull to be married and settled for life. Liar! It would be heaven. | marriage heaven | Dodie Smith | |
| abbaee5 | All I really want to write about is what happened just before he left. But if I let myself start with that I might forget some of the things which came first. And every word he said is of deepest value to me. | euphoria excitement | Dodie Smith | |
| fbcdc0e | perhaps it is loving that counts, not the being loved in return- that perhaps true loving can never know anything but happiness. | Dodie Smith | ||
| 9853831 | We seldom notice how each day is a holy place Where the eucharist of the ordinary happens, Transforming our broken fragments Into an eternal continuity that keeps us. | John O'Donohue | ||
| 20092b2 | The earth is our origin and destination. The ancient rhythms of the earth have insinuated themselves into the rhythms of the human heart. The earth is not outside us; it is within: the clay from where the tree of the body grows. When we emerge from our offices, rooms and houses, we enter our natural element. We are children of the earth: people to whom the outdoors is home. Nothing can separate us from the vigour and vibrancy of this inheri.. | nature | John O'Donohue |