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| Link | Quote | Stars | Tags | Author |
| 7a027dc | What has having a baby got to do with getting a job at an art gallery? You're always thinking in terms of either/or. The thing is wholeness. | Margaret Atwood | ||
| eb8c0a8 | Too friendly, too eager to be on message, man is obsolete, dooming ourselves to extinction, restore the balance of nature and babble babble, he overdid it so much that he sounded preposterous, and in an outfit like Bearlift, with its full quota of preposterous green-hued furfuckers, that took some effort. | Margaret Atwood | ||
| 39b31f0 | I was nervous. How was I to know he loved me? It might be just an affair. Why did we ever say just? Though at that time men and women tried each other on, casually, like suits, rejecting whatever did not fit. | Margaret Atwood | ||
| 54935d0 | The male frog, in mating season," said Crake, "makes as much noise as it can. The females are attracted to the male frog with the biggest, deepest voice because it suggests a more powerful frog, one with superior genes. Small male frogs - it's been documented - discover that if they position themselves in empty drainpipes, the pipe acts as a voice amplifier, and the small frog appears much larger than it really is." "So?" "So that's what ar.. | attraction biology evolution humans humor | Margaret Atwood | |
| 973207b | There's time to spare. This is one of the things I wasn't prepared for - the amount of unfilled time, the long parentheses of nothing. Time as white sound. | Margaret Atwood | ||
| dc9f5a4 | In this country you can say what you like because no one will listen to you anyway | Margaret Atwood | ||
| 9f502ec | Feathers," he says. They ask this question at least once a week. He gives the same answer. Even over such a short time -- two months, three? He's lost count -- they've accumulated a stock of lore, of conjecture about him: Snowman was once a bird but he's forgotten how to fly and the rest of his feathers fell out, and so he is cold and he needs a second skin, and he has to wrap himself up. No: he's cold because he eats fish, and fish are col.. | Margaret Atwood | ||
| 8db5604 | Fake it, I scream at myself inside my head. You must remember how. Let's get this over with or you'll be here all night. Bestir yourself. Move your flesh around, breathe audibly. It's the least you can do. | Margaret Atwood | ||
| 521cedd | Reenie never went in much for God. There was mutual respect, and if you were in trouble naturally you'd call on him, as with lawyers; but as with lawyers, it would have to be bad trouble. Otherwise it didn't pay to get too mixed up with him. | Margaret Atwood | ||
| 4092867 | I listened humbly, resentfully. I knew I did not have charm. Neither Laura nor I had it. We were too secretive for charm, or else too blunt. We'd never learned it, because Reenie had spoiled us. She felt that who we were ought to be enough for anybody. We shouldn't have to lay ourselves out for people, court them with coaxings and wheedlings and eye-batting displays. | Margaret Atwood | ||
| 9df748e | I did not yet know that my lack of enjoyment - my distaste, my suffering even - would be considered normal and even desirable by my husband. He was one of those men who felt that if a woman did not experience sexual pleasure this was all to the good, because then she would not be liable to wander off seeking it elsewhere. | Margaret Atwood | ||
| 8a6ed49 | Money isn't the only thing that must flow and circulate in order to have good value: good turns and gifts must flow and circulate . . . for any social system to remain in balance. | Margaret Atwood | ||
| f3bc0e8 | By telling you anything at all I'm at least believing in you, I 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. | believe faith power | Margaret Atwood | |
| 9244f9c | China does not exist. Nevertheless, she longs to be there. | Margaret Atwood | ||
| ffaebcd | He feels the need to hear a human voice--a fully human voice like his own. Sometimes he laughs like a hyena or roars like a lion--his idea of a hyena his idea of a lion. | psychology | Margaret Atwood | |
| 5b57023 | Messy love is better than none, I guess. I'm no authority on sane living. Which is all true and no hep at all, because this form of love is like the pain of childbirth: so intense it's hard to remember afterwards, or what kind of screams and grimaces it pushed you into. | Margaret Atwood | ||
| 7d244b6 | I shouldn't have taken a vow of silence, I told myself. What did I want? Nothing much. Just a memorial. But what is a memorial, when you come right down to it, but a commemoration of wounds endured? Endured, and resented. Without memory, there can be no revenge. | revenge vow-of-silence | Margaret Atwood | |
| 91feece | He told me that everyone had a hidden door, which was the way into the heart, and that it was a point of honour with him to be able to find the handles to those doors. For the heart was both key and lock, and he who could master the hearts of men and learn their secrets was well on the way to mastering the Fates and controlling the thread of his own destiny. Not, he hastened to add, that any man can really do that. Not even the gods, he sai.. | Margaret Atwood | ||
| f98a7bc | Ger says that Kat has a tendency to push things to extremes, to go over the edge, merely from a juvenile desire to shock, which is hardly a substitute for wit. One of these days, he says, she will go way too far. Too far for him, is what he means. | extremes shock strong-woman strong-women | Margaret Atwood | |
| 0a1c2e7 | I was unfair to him, of course, but where would I have been without unfairness? In thrall, in harness. Young women need unfairness, it's one of their few defenses. They need their callousness, they need their ignorance. They walk in the dark, along the edges of high cliffs, humming to themselves, thinking themselves invulnerable. | Margaret Atwood | ||
| 78a2c31 | She longs for tonight, she longs to skip the day that's just begun and plunge headlong into the night as if into a pool; a pool with the moon reflected in it. She longs to swim in liquid moonlight. | Margaret Atwood | ||
| 2de3b1c | She wasn't stupid. She just didn't want to put her neuron power into long sentences. | ommunication simplicity | Margaret Atwood | |
| b8d9cf5 | There are several diseases of the memory. Forgetfulness of nouns, for instance, or of numbers. Or there are more complex amnesias. With one, you can lose your entire past; you start afresh, learning how to tie your shoelaces, how to eat with a fork, how to read and sing. You are introduced to your relatives, your oldest friends, as if you've never met them before; you get a second chance with them, better than forgiveness because you can be.. | Margaret Atwood | ||
| f8a5906 | I tell myself it doesn't matter, your name is like your telephone number, useful only to others; but what I tell myself is wrong, it does matter. | Margaret Atwood | ||
| 5c6cdf0 | I and the girl in the picture have ceased to be the same person. I am her outcome, the result of the life she once lived headlong; whereas she, if she can be said to exist at all, is composed only of what I remember. I have the better view - I can see her clearly, most of the time. But even if she knew enough to look, she can't see me at all. | past time youth | Margaret Atwood | |
| 82405bf | 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 do not dare to eat. What prevents you? The future. The future .. | Margaret Atwood | ||
| 66bc917 | But if it's a story, even in my head, I must be telling it to someone. You don't tell a story only to yourself. There's always someone else. Even when there is no one. | Margaret Atwood | ||
| 2b860f3 | she doesn't want to begin, she wants to continue. No: she wants to go back. | Margaret Atwood | ||
| 85c4ae6 | There were signs and I missed them. For instance, Crake said once, "Would you kill someone you loved to spare them pain?" "You mean, commit euthanasia?" said Jimmy. "Like putting down your pet turtle?" "Just tell me," said Crake. "I don't know. What kind of love, what kind of pain?" | Margaret Atwood | ||
| 6f0c824 | She stood for a long time, breathing in and breathing in, the scent of the trees and dogs and night flowers and water, because this was the best thing, it was what she wanted, to be outside in the night by herself. She wasn't sick any longer. | Margaret Atwood | ||
| c433a6c | I am not scoffing at goodness, which is far more difficult to explain than evil, and just as complicated. But sometimes it's hard to put up with. | good | Margaret Atwood | |
| 1f620c0 | By the time he got around to meaning it, the words had sounded fraudulent to him and he'd been afraid to pronounce them. | Margaret Atwood | ||
| 2d0984d | Then they fell from a joyous life in the moment into the anxious contemplation of the vanished past and the distant future. | Margaret Atwood | ||
| 6a1063a | It is not only the body that travels, Adam One used to say, it is also the Soul. And the end of one journey is the beginning of another. | soul | Margaret Atwood | |
| 1c80bc2 | Nature may be dumb as a sack of hammers, Zeb used to say, but it's smarter than you. | Margaret Atwood | ||
| 036c5e6 | Keep calm, they said on television. Everything is under control. I was stunned. Everyone was, I know that. It was hard to believe. The entire government, gone like that. How did they get in, how did it happen? That was when they suspended the Constitution. They said it would be temporary. There wasn't even any rioting in the streets. People stayed home at night, watching television, looking for some direction. There wasn't even an enemy you.. | Margaret Atwood | ||
| 438f2ac | When you are in the middle of a story it isn't a story at all, but only a confusion; a dark roaring, a blindness, a wreckage of shattered glass and splintered wood; like a house in a whirlwind, or else a boat crushed by the icebergs or swept over the rapids, and all aboard powerless to stop it. It's only afterwards that it becomes anything like a story at all. When you are telling it, to yourself or to someone else. --Margaret Atwood, Alias.. | Brené Brown | ||
| 7736f69 | Unlike some other religions, we have never felt it served a higher purpose to lie to children about geology. | Margaret Atwood | ||
| acdfc49 | How can I teach her some way of being human that won't destroy her? | Margaret Atwood | ||
| 81df839 | Walking was not fast enough, so we ran. Running was not fast enough, so we galloped. Galloping was not fast enough, so we sailed. Sailing was not fast enough, so we rolled merrily along on long metal tracks. Long metal tracks were not fast enough, so we drove. Driving was not fast enough, so we flew. Flying isn't fast enough for us. We want to get there faster. Get where? Wherever we are not. But a human soul can only go as fast as a man c.. | Margaret Atwood | ||
| ec2dad6 | I thought of myself as an itinerant brain--the equivalent of a strolling player of Elizabethan times, or else a troubadour, clutching my university degree like a cheap lute. | working | Margaret Atwood | |
| 72f63fb | Falling in love... how could he have made such light of it? Sneered even. As if it was trivial for us, a frill, a whim. It was, on the contrary, heavy going. It was the central thing, the way you understood yourself. | love understanding | Margaret Atwood | |
| 2ed3462 | All those years I'd kept an outline of my father in my head, like a chalk line enclosing a father-shaped space. When I was little, I'd coloured it in often enough. But those colours had been too bright and the outline had been too large... | Margaret Atwood | ||
| 70e715c | They say, Grace, why don't you ever smile or laugh, we never see you smiling, and I say I suppose Miss I have gotten out of the way of it, my face won't bend in that direction any more. | sadness | Margaret Atwood |