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| Link | Quote | Stars | Tags | Author |
| 3ee7d7c | So by the time the morning came, Odysseus and I were indeed friends, as Odysseus had promised we would be. Or let me put it another way: I myself had developed friendly feelings towards him - more than that, loving and passionate ones - and he behaved as if he reciprocated them. Which is not quite the same thing. | love mythology | Margaret Atwood | |
| 65da3ab | When I saw that, the evidence left by two people, of love or something like it, desire at least, at least touch, between two people now perhaps old or dead, I covered the bed again and lay down on it. I looked up at the blind plaster eye in the ceiling. I wanted to feel Luke lying beside me. I have them, these attacks of the past, like faintness, a wave sweeping over my head. Sometimes it can hardly be borne. What is to be done, what is to .. | Margaret Atwood | ||
| 49d422c | You don't understand much, he says. Why do you think I was lost in the impenetrable forest in the first place? | Margaret Atwood | ||
| 73b22e3 | The pile of stones thus marks both an act of deliberate remembrance, and an act of deliberate forgetting. They're fond of paradox in that region. | paradox remembrance | Margaret Atwood | |
| ae5ce19 | I'm beginning to feel that I've discovered something worth knowing. There's a way out of places you want to leave, but can't. Fainting is like stepping sideways, out of your own body, out of time or into another time. When you wake up it's later. Time has gone on without you. | Margaret Atwood | ||
| eda6de1 | Now I wanted to be acknowledged, but I feared it. | Margaret Atwood | ||
| 3b058dd | 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. | Margaret Atwood | ||
| 4b68f7f | And I said that Crozier did not need to call Fuck right now because we were not in trouble and did not need his help. And Toby said, That's right, he doesn't like to be summoned on trivial matters. And Zeb coughed. | Margaret Atwood | ||
| ac8128b | Some of these stories, it is understood, are not to be passed on to my father, because they would upset him. It is well known that women can deal with this sort of thing better than men can. Men are not to be told anything they might find too painful; the secret depths of human nature, the sordid physicalities, might overwhelm or damage them. For instance, men often faint at the sight of their own blood, to which they are not accustomed. Fo.. | capabilities female-body gender men misandry sandboxes useful-belief women | Margaret Atwood | |
| 1b8db66 | A puff of air--whuff!--hits his ears, blows out the candle. He can't be bothered relighting it, because the bourbon is taking over. He'd rather stay in the dark. He can sense Oryx drifting towards him on her soft feathery wings. Any moment now she'll be with him. He sits crouched in the chair with his head down on the desk and his eyes closed, in a state of misery and peace. | Margaret Atwood | ||
| dea395a | But if you happen to be a man, sometime in the future, and you've made it this far, please remember: you will never be subjected to the temptation of feeling you must forgive, a man, as a woman. | Margaret Atwood | ||
| 1c9cda0 | Nobody wanted to be sexless, but nobody wanted to be nothing but sex. | objectification sex | Margaret Atwood | |
| 48ca275 | What is it about winter that causes people to drive as if their hands are feet? | Margaret Atwood | ||
| 4d9901d | Second-hand American was spreading over him in patches, like mange or lichen. He was infested, garbled, and I couldn't help him: it would take such time to heal, unearth him, scrape down to where he was true. | heal infested unearth | Margaret Atwood | |
| 1ce64a0 | I guess that's how they were able to do it, in the way they did, all at once, without anyone knowing beforehand. If there had still been portable money, it would have been more difficult. "It was after the catastrophe, when they shot the president and machine-gunned the Congress and the army declared a state of emergency. They blamed it on the Islamic fanatics, at the time. "Keep calm, they said on television. Everything is under control... | culture feminism future media newspapers reproduction | Margaret Atwood | |
| 2c4a5c1 | This is what I miss... not something that's gone, but something that will never happen. | Margaret Atwood | ||
| 69a8790 | Are there stars? he asks her. She nods. | Margaret Atwood | ||
| fd29d87 | Just what the doctor ordered, he says. A bottle of lemonade, a hard-boiled egg, and Thou. | love | Margaret Atwood | |
| 7f10633 | thinks Stan. She knows about the chickens. | Margaret Atwood | ||
| effcd5f | what is 'belief' but a willingness to suspend the negatives? | Margaret Atwood | ||
| 45da671 | When the water's moving faster than the boat, you can't control a thing. | Margaret Atwood | ||
| 7acefef | All stories are about wolves. All worth repeating, that is. Anything else is sentimental drivel. All of them? Sure, he says. Think about it. There's escaping from the wolves, fighting the wolves, capturing the wolves, taming the wolves. Being thrown to the wolves, or throwing others to the wolves so the wolves will eat them instead of you. Running with the wolf pack. Turning into a wolf. Best of all, turning into the head wolf. No other dec.. | Margaret Atwood | ||
| 5803479 | Grace's will is of the negative female variety - she can deny and reject much more easily than she can affirm or accept. Somewhere within herself - he's seen it, if only for a moment, that conscious, even cunning look in the corner of her eye - she know she's concealing something from him. As she stitches away at her sewing, outwardly calm as a marble Madonna, she is all the while exerting her passive stubborn strength against him. A prison.. | Margaret Atwood | ||
| ca21ed7 | Within each of these categories, the principle was the same: rarity and beauty increased value. | Margaret Atwood | ||
| 9ed7cfd | What she read was a series of short connected lyrics, "Isis in Darkness." The Egyptian Queen of Heaven and Earth was wandering in the Underworld, gathering up pieces of the murdered and dismembered body of her lover Osiris. At the same time, it was her own body she was putting back together; and it was also the physical universe. She was creating the universe by an act of love." | Margaret Atwood | ||
| ddc625b | the argument for the perfectibility of humankind rests on a logical fallacy. Thus: man is by definition imperfect, say those who would perfect him. But those who would perfect him are themselves, by their own definition, imperfect. | Margaret Atwood | ||
| b564086 | The prospect of his future life stretched before him like a sentence; not a prison sentence, but a long-winded sentence with a lot of unnecessary subordinate clauses, | Margaret Atwood | ||
| 737e349 | I leafed through all the men I had known to see whether or not I hated them. But then I realized it wasn't the men I hated, it was the Americans, the human beings, men and women both. They'd had their chance but they had turned against the gods, and it was time for me to choose sides. I wanted there to be a machine that could make them vanish, a button I could press that would evaporate them without disturbing anything else, that way there .. | Margaret Atwood | ||
| cd44a84 | Northrop] Frye was concerned mostly with literary criticism, and myths interested him as structural elements in works of literature. He used the word myth to mean story, without attaching any connotation of truth or falsehood to it; but a myth is a story of a certain kind. The myths of a culture are those stories it takes seriously--the ones that are thought to be a key to its identity. | myth | Margaret Atwood | |
| cfe8380 | They were both in their own ways earnest; they both wanted to achieve some worthy end or other, change the world for the better. Such alluring, such perilous ideals! | earnest ideals | Margaret Atwood | |
| 46d4193 | For these dances the boys send corsages, which I keep afterward and keep in my bureau drawer; squashed carnations and brown-edged rosebuds, wads of dead vegetation, like a collection of floral shrunken heads. | Margaret Atwood | ||
| a211c23 | She would be invisible, of course. No one would hear her. And nothing has happened, really, that hasn't happened before. | Margaret Atwood | ||
| af8f483 | Now maybe I wouldn't do it, but I was a child then," said Oryx more softly. "Why are you so angry?" "I don't buy it," said Jimmy. Where was her rage, how far down was it buried, what did he have to do to dig it up? "You don't buy what?" "Your whole fucking story. All this sweetness and acceptance and crap." "If you don't want to buy that, Jimmy," said Oryx, looking at him tenderly, "what is it that you would like to buy instead?" (167)" | Margaret Atwood | ||
| 46c5cf1 | The only way you can write the truth is to assume that what you set down will never be read. Not by any other person, and not even by yourself at some later date. Otherwise you begin excusing yourself. You must see the writing as emerging like a long scroll of ink from the index finger of your right hand; you must see your left hand erasing it. Impossible, of course. | Margaret Atwood | ||
| 6956973 | I had now been a servant for three years, and could act the part well enough by that time. But Nancy was very changeable, two-faced you might call her, and it wasn't easy to tell what she wanted from one hour to the next. One minute she would be up on her high horse and ordering me about and finding fault, and the next minute she would be my best friend, or pretend to be, and would put her arm through mine, and say I looked tired, and shoul.. | Margaret Atwood | ||
| a2398ed | The lock splits. The iron gate swings open. She emerges, raises her arms towards the suddenly chilled moon. The world changes. | Margaret Atwood | ||
| 9071175 | The genres, it is thought, have other designs on us. They want to entertain, as opposed to rubbing our noses in the daily grit produced by the daily grind. Unhappily for realistic novelists, the larger reading public likes being entertained. | genre-snobbery nonfiction popularity reading | Margaret Atwood | |
| c2748f8 | Love is not a profession genteel or otherwise sex is not dentistry the slick filling of aches and cavities you are not my doctor you are not my cure, | Margaret Atwood | ||
| 7f3edcc | He's coming to hate the gratitude of women. It is like being fawned on by rabbits, or like being covered with syrup: you can't get it off. | Margaret Atwood | ||
| 57e2c8a | The question about the page is: what is beneath it? It seems to have only two dimensions, you can pick it up and turn it over and the back is the same as the front. Nothing, you say, disappointed. But you were looking in the wrong place, you were looking instead of . is another story. Beneath the page is a story. Beneath the page is everything that has ever happened, most of which you would rather not hear about. The page is not a pool.. | Margaret Atwood | ||
| 9aea074 | If the stock market exists, so must previous lives. | past-lives stock-market | Margaret Atwood | |
| 8dee41e | bye-bye love, as in songs. All alone now. It was so sad. Why did such things have to disintegrate like that? Why did longing and desire, and friendliness and goodwill too, have to shatter into pieces? Why did they have to be so thoroughfully over? I could make myself cry even more by repeating the key word: love,alone, sad, over. I did it on purpose. | Margaret Atwood | ||
| d6864ad | Death makes me hungry. Maybe it's because I've been emptied; or maybe it's the body's way of seeing to it that I remain alive. | Margaret Atwood | ||
| 1d883ce | The air is saturated with the stink of perfumes at war. There are video screens on which flawless complexions turn, preen, sigh through their parted lips, are caressed. On other screens are close-ups of skin pores, before and after, details of regimes for everything, your hands, your neck, your thighs. Your elbows, especially your elbows: aging begins at the elbows and metastasizes. This is religion. Voodoo and spells. I want to believe in.. | Margaret Atwood |