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| Link | Quote | Stars | Tags | Author |
| b820aaf | But unshed tears can turn rancid. So can memory. So can biting your tongue. My bad nights were beginning. I couldn't sleep. | sleep tears | Margaret Atwood | |
| 4d2d2b5 | He has been trying to sing | Margaret Atwood | ||
| 7e8de52 | What restless woman can resist a man with a shovel in one hand and a glowing rose bush in the other, and a moderately crazed glitter in his eyes that might be mistaken for love? | Margaret Atwood | ||
| e7f6eb4 | Nature demands variety, for men. It stands to reason, it's a part of the procreational strategy. It's Nature's Plan. Women know that instinctively. Why did they buy so many different clothes, in the old days? To trick the men into thinking they were several different women. A new one each day. | Margaret Atwood | ||
| a32ec50 | Jimmy had been full of himself back then, thinks Snowman with indulgence and a little envy. He'd been unhappy too, of course. It went without saying, his unhappiness. He'd put a lot of energy into it. | Margaret Atwood | ||
| 97f409e | Romantic people are not supposed to laugh, I know that much from looking at the pictures. | Margaret Atwood | ||
| 43320f8 | Toast is me. I am toast. | Margaret Atwood | ||
| b590ff6 | She looks like a very young old person, or a very old young person; but then, she's looked that way ever since she was two. | humor | Margaret Atwood | |
| 8f2702a | We should think only beautiful things, as much as we can. There is so much beautiful in the world if you look around. You are only looking at the dirt under your feet, Jimmy. It's not good for you. | Margaret Atwood | ||
| 07aeb51 | It's a good excuse, though, orphanhood. It explains everything--every mistake and wrong turn. As Sherlock Holmes declared. She had no mother to advise her. How we long for it, that lack of advice! Imprudence could have been ours. Passionate affairs. Reckless adventures. Of course we're grateful for our stable upbringings, our hordes of informative relatives, our fleece-lined advantages, our lack of dramatic plots. But there's a corner of en.. | Margaret Atwood | ||
| 907a8d6 | This puts him in an instructive mood, and I can see he is going to teach me something, which gentlemen are fond of doing. | Margaret Atwood | ||
| da23853 | According to Adam One, the Fall of Man was multidimensional. The ancestral primates fell out of the trees; then they fell from vegetarianism into meat-eating. Then they fell from instinct into reason, and thus into technology; from simple signals into complex grammar, and thus into humanity; from firelessness into fire, and thence into weaponry; and from seasonal mating into an incessant sexual twitching. Then they fell from a joyous life i.. | morality religion | Margaret Atwood | |
| 7d49640 | Why can't I believe? she asked the darkness. Behind her eyelids she saw an animal. It was golden colour, with gentle green eyes and canine teeth, and curly wool instead of fur. It opened its mouth, but it did not speak. Instead, it yawned. It gazed at her. She gazed at it. "You are the effect of a carefully calibrated blend of plant toxins," she told it. Then she fell asleep." | Margaret Atwood | ||
| 32699c0 | Point being that you don't have to get too worked up about us, dear educated minds. You don't have to think of us as real girls, real flesh and blood, real pain, real injustice. That might be too upsetting. Just discard the sordid part. Consider us pure symbol. We're no more real than money. | Margaret Atwood | ||
| ea719c3 | She who pays the undertaker calls the tune. | Margaret Atwood | ||
| b749ecd | But it seems she'd wanted children after all, because when she was told she'd been accidentally sterilized she could feel all the light leaking out of her. | Margaret Atwood | ||
| 20fcc8c | Fear is synonymous with the future, and the future consists of forked roads, I should say forking roads, because the roads are forking all the time, like slow lightning. A road is a process, not a location. | Margaret Atwood | ||
| 33db63b | A voice is a human gift; it should be cherished and used, to utter fully human speech as possible. Powerlessness and silence go together. | silence voice | Margaret Atwood | |
| d1c1a9d | Walking along past the store windows, into which she peers with her usual eagerness, her usual sense that maybe, today, she will discover behind them something that will truly be worth seeing, she feels as if her feet are not on cement at all but on ice. The blade of the skate floats, she knows, on a thin film of water, which it melts by pressure and which freezes behind it. This is the freedom of the present tense, this sliding edge. | Margaret Atwood | ||
| 3cd5881 | I try not to think too much. Like other things now, thought must be rationed | Margaret Atwood | ||
| d5d83a6 | Had she believed all that? Old Pilar's folklore? No, not really; or not exactly. Most likely Pilar hadn't quite believed it either, but it was a reassuring story: that the dead were not entirely dead but were alive in a different way; a paler way admittedly, and somewhat darker. But still able to send messages, if only such messages could be recognized and deciphered. People need such stories, Pilar said once, because however dark, a darkne.. | darkness folklore stories | Margaret Atwood | |
| 7470b69 | I am like a room where things once happened and now nothing does, except the pollen of the weeds that grow up outside the window, blowing in as dust across the floor. | Margaret Atwood | ||
| d750c5c | One look at a banana and you can tell it came from outer space. | Margaret Atwood | ||
| 038ba06 | I forgave her, of course. I always did; I had to, because there were only the two of us. The two of us on our thorn-encircled island, waiting for rescue; and, on the mainland, everyone else. | Margaret Atwood | ||
| 7b8ce11 | Being socially retarded is like being mentally retarded, it arouses in others disgust and pity and the desire to torment and reform. | Margaret Atwood | ||
| f42d70b | The shroud itself became a story almost instantly. 'Penelope's web', it was called; people used to say that of any task that remained mysteriously unfinished. I did not appreciate the term web. If the shroud was a web, then I was a spider. But I had not been attempting to catch men like flies: on the contrary, I'd merely been trying to avoid entanglement myself. | Margaret Atwood | ||
| f534d55 | Death is much too high a price to pay for the satisfaction of curiosity, needless to say. | Margaret Atwood | ||
| 1df4a25 | God is a cluster of neurons. | science | Margaret Atwood | |
| aced801 | I remember a television program I once saw [...] I must have been seven or eight, too young to understand it. It was the sort of thing my mother liked to watch: historical, educational. She tried to explain it to me afterwards, to tell me that the things in it had really happened, but to me it was only a story. I thought someone had made it up. I suppose all children think that, about any history before their own. If it's only a story, it b.. | Margaret Atwood | ||
| 6369d45 | Eating fire is your ambition: to swallow the flame down take it into your mouth and shoot it forth, a shout or an incandescent tongue, a word exploding from you in gold, crimson, unrolling in a brilliant scroll To be lit up from within vein by vein To be the sun | Margaret Atwood | ||
| 9f6eeec | The reason of the unreasonableness which against my reason is wrought, doth so weaken my reason, as with all reason I do justly complain on your beauty. | Miguel de Cervantes Saavedra | ||
| a0e92bd | The fear thou art in, Sancho," said Don Quixote, "prevents thee from seeing or hearing correctly, for one of the effects of fear is to derange the senses and make things appear different from what they are; if thou art in such fear, withdraw to one side and leave me to myself, for alone I suffice to bring victory to that side to which I shall give my aid;" and so saying he gave Rocinante the spur, and putting the lance in rest, shot down th.. | Miguel de Cervantes Saavedra | ||
| dbfbac2 | Je cherche dans la mort la vie, Dans la prison la liberte, La sante dans la maladie, Dans le traitre la loyaute. Mais mon infortune est si grande Que le destin impatiente, Si l'impossible je demande, M'a le possible refuse. | Miguel de Cervantes Saavedra | ||
| 369c925 | Where one door shuts, another opens. | Miguel de Cervantes Saavedra | ||
| 021e6da | Que gigantes? | Miguel de Cervantes Saavedra | ||
| f4b8293 | but once more I say do as you please, for we women are born to this burden of being obedient to our husbands, though they be blockheads | marriage women | Miguel de Cervantes Saavedra | |
| 072a792 | When I read a book, I put in all the imagination I can, so that it is almost like writing a book as well as reading it - or rather, it is like living it. | Dodie Smith | ||
| 910127b | Prayer's a very tricky business. | Dodie Smith | ||
| 32347fd | And at last father flung the rug off as if it were hampering him and strode over to the table saying, 'cocoa, cocoa!'-- it might have been the most magnificent drink in the world; which, personally, I think it is. | Dodie Smith | ||
| b64339b | I suddenly knew that religion, God - something beyond everyday life - was there to be found, provided one is really willing. And I saw that though what I felt in the church was only imagination, it was a step on the way; because imagination itself can be a kind of willingness - a pretense that things are real, due to one's longing for them. It struck me that this was somehow tied up with what the Vicar said about religion being an extension.. | god | Dodie Smith | |
| de267b6 | but it is always dreadful when the pictures in front of one's eyes become meaningless and the real word is there instead and seems meaningless, too. | Dodie Smith | ||
| 344d95a | My God - it's a green child!" said the American. "What is this place - the House of Usher?" | Dodie Smith | ||
| f2f5b7b | There's nothing you can do wrong when just breathing makes everything right. | Katie McGarry | ||
| dc10873 | Liar," she spat. "Because the only way anyone will ever be okay with me is if they love me. Really love me enought to not care that I'm damaged. You don't love people. You have sex with them. So how could you want to be with me?" | Katie McGarry |