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| Link | Quote | Stars | Tags | Author |
| a936152 | Anything that doesn't fit this mode has been shoved into an area of lesser solemnity called 'genre fiction,' and it is here that the spy thriller and the crime story and the adventure story and the supernatural tale and the science fiction, however excellently written, must reside, sent to their rooms, as it were, for the misdemeanor of being enjoyable in what is considered a meretricious way. They invent, and we all know they invent, at le.. | literary-snobbery nonfiction | Margaret Atwood | |
| 13c8f5b | Debt . . . . that peculiar nexus where money, narrative or story, and religious belief intersect, often with explosive force. | story debt | Margaret Atwood | |
| f1fffee | My red skirt is hitched up to my waist, though no higher. Below it the Commander is fucking. What he is fucking is the lower part of my body. | Margaret Atwood | ||
| 07b9f42 | Without a word she swivels, as if she's voice activated, as if she's on little oiled wheels, as if she's on top of a music box. I resent this grace of hers. I resent her meek head, bowed as if into a heavy wind. But there is no wind. | Margaret Atwood | ||
| 12df069 | I reproached them all for not having told me of my son's departure, and for not stopping him, until that interfering old biddy Eurycleia confessed that she alone had aided and abetted him. | Margaret Atwood | ||
| bc6ef3a | The ochre-yellow linoleum floor hasn't been scrubbed for some time; splotches of dirt bloom on it like grey pressed flowers. | Margaret Atwood | ||
| 993008c | Or he'd watch the news: more plagues, more famines, more floods, more insect or microbe or small-mammal outbreaks, more droughts, more chickenshit boy-soldier wars in distant countries. Why was everything so much like itself? | Margaret Atwood | ||
| bd21c85 | Time is not a line but a dimension, like the dimensions of space. If you can bend space you can bend time also, and if you knew enough and could move faster than light you could travel backward in time and exist in two places at once. | Margaret Atwood | ||
| bf259e7 | The only way you can write the truth is to assume that what you set down will never be read. | Margaret Atwood | ||
| 8bf43c4 | Inside John, she thinks, is another John, who is much nicer. This other John will emerge like a butterfly from a cocoon, a Jack from a box, a pit from a prune, if the first John is only squeezed enough. | Margaret Atwood | ||
| 434d332 | I knelt to examine the floor, and there it was, in tiny writing, quite fresh it seemed, scratched with a pin or maybe just a fingernail, in the corner where the darkest shadow fell: Nolite te bastardes carborundorum. | Margaret Atwood | ||
| ef1dc83 | Falling in love, although it resulted in altered body chemistry and was therefore real, was a hormonally induced delusional state. | Margaret Atwood | ||
| 70bf4d7 | Falling in love,' we said; 'I fell for him.' We were falling women. We believed in it, this downward motion; so lovely, like flying, and yet at the same time so dire, so extreme, so unlikely. 'God is love,' they once said, but we reversed that, and love, like heaven, was always just around the corner. The more difficult it was to love the particular man beside us, the more we believed in Love, abstract and total. We were waiting, always, fo.. | Margaret Atwood | ||
| 0624ee5 | Boys by nature require these silences; they must not be startled by too many words, spoken too quickly. What they actually say is not that important. The important parts exist in the silences between the words. I know what we're both looking for, which is escape. They want to escape from adults and other boys, I want to escape from adults and other girls. We're looking for desert islands, momentary, unreal, but there. | Margaret Atwood | ||
| 6ebe9c3 | Once she wasn't supposed to like it. To have her in a position she didn't like, that was power. Even if she liked it she had to pretend she didn't. Then she was supposed to like it. To make her do something she didn't like and then make her like it, that was greater power. The greatest power of all is when she doesn't really like it but she's supposed to like it, so she has to pretend. | power | Margaret Atwood | |
| e6d45ea | He has been trying to sing Love into existence again And he has failed. | Margaret Atwood | ||
| 3ae0a9e | His mother said that all children were arsonists at heart, and if not for the lighter he'd have used matches. | Margaret Atwood | ||
| bfda7a2 | All Souls' Eve, when the spirits of the dead will come back to the living, dressed as ballerinas and Coke bottles and spacemen and Mickey Mice, and the living will give them candy to keep them from turning vicious. I can still taste that festival: the tart air, caramel in the mouth, the hope at the door, the belief in something for nothing all children take for granted. They won't get homemade popcorn balls any more, though, or apples: rumo.. | Margaret Atwood | ||
| 89a58b8 | I have failed once again to fulfill the expectations of others, which have become my own. | Margaret Atwood | ||
| 7bb2bae | She'd love to go over him with a fine-toothed comb. Rummage around in him. Turn him upside down. Empty him out. | Margaret Atwood | ||
| ee34906 | Betty's now have a patio garden, where the tourists can sit in the sun and fry to a crisp; it's in the back, that little square of cracked cement where they used to keep the garbage cans. They offer tortellini and cappuccino, boldly proclaimed in the window as if everyone in town just naturally knows what they are. Well, they do by now; they've had a try, if only to acquire sneering rights. | Margaret Atwood | ||
| b6f9fad | How long were you supposed to mourn, and what did they say? Make your life a tribute to the loved one. | Margaret Atwood | ||
| 4cd188b | It was Colonel Parkman who upped stakes, crossed the border, and named our town, thus perversely commemorating a battle in which he'd lost. (Though perhaps that's not so unusual: many people take a curatorial interest in their own scars.) He's shown astride his horse, waving a sword and about to gallop into the nearby petunia bed: a craggy man with seasoned eyes and pointed beard, every sculptor's idea of every cavalry leader. No one knows .. | war truth reality-check wit | Margaret Atwood | |
| 52fa073 | Of late the three of them wouldn't even let him dry the dishes because he'd dropped too many of them on the floor. He'd done that on purpose, since it was useful to be considered inept when it came to chore division, | Margaret Atwood | ||
| a0666b0 | I didn't want to identify the body, or see it at all. If you don't see the body, it's easier to believe nobody's dead. | Margaret Atwood | ||
| 90d3db6 | It was as if they could read each other's minds. No, not minds: each other's mindlessness. | Margaret Atwood | ||
| 4ddbdd8 | The people in the chaos cannot learn. They cannot understand what they are doing to the sea and the sky and the plants and the animals. They cannot understand that they are killing them, and that they will end by killing themselves. And there are so many of them, and each one of them is doing part of the killing, whether they know it or not. And when you tell them to stop, they don't hear you. | Margaret Atwood | ||
| a21f3c3 | She had loved him, uselessly. | Margaret Atwood | ||
| 9bde65b | nobody dies from lack of sex. It's lack of love we die from. There's nobody here I can love, all the people I could love are dead or elsewhere. Who knows where they are or what their names are now? They might as well be nowhere, as I am for them. I too am a missing person. | Margaret Atwood | ||
| 86f0198 | gazing up at the stars through the gently moving leaves. They seem close, the stars, but they're far away. Their light is millions, billions of years out of date. Messages with no sender. | Margaret Atwood | ||
| 595bc4b | I don't want her to be like me. Give in, go along, save her skin. That is what it comes down to. I want gallantry from her, swashbuckling, heroism, single-handed combat. Something I lack. | Margaret Atwood | ||
| 0e75339 | You cynical shit," he told himself. Then he started to weep. "Don't be so fucking sentimental," Crake used to tell him. But why not? Why shouldn't he be sentimental? It wasn't as if there was anyone around to question his taste. Once in a while he considered killing himself-it seemed mandatory-but somehow he didn't have the required energy. Anyway, killing yourself was something you did for an audience, as on nitee-nitee.com. Under the ci.. | suicide sentimental | Margaret Atwood | |
| 08c9983 | Human society, they claimed, was a sort of monster, its main by-products being corpses and rubble. | Margaret Atwood | ||
| 89e5f5c | I can't believe in my own sadness, I can't take it seriously. I watch myself crying in the mirror, intrigued by the sight of tears. | Margaret Atwood | ||
| 0b1797f | What I have always assumed in him to be bravery may be merely an ignorance of consequences. He thinks he is safe, because he is what he says he is. But he's out in the open, and surrounded by strangers. | Margaret Atwood | ||
| 666d962 | There's nothing more for me to see. The bridge is only a bridge, the river a river, the sky is a sky. This landscape is empty now, a place for Sunday runners. Or not empty: filled with whatever it is by itself, when I'm not looking. | Margaret Atwood | ||
| 39a24ba | So that made me happy but the part that really made me happy was that you wanted me to be happy. That's what Thank you means. | happiness meanings thanks | Margaret Atwood | |
| 7b13517 | Mouth to mouth I'm bringing you back to life. Why did you drown like that without telling? What numbed you? What rose over your head was gradual and only everybody's air, standard & killing. Your head floats on your hand, on water, you turn over, your heart returns unsteadily to its two strong notes. I'm bringing you back to life, it's mutual. | Margaret Atwood | ||
| a146ede | I avoid looking down at my body, not so much because it's shameful or immodest but because I don't want to see it. I don't want to look at something that determines me so completely. I | Margaret Atwood | ||
| 1ea6a45 | One boy had drawn a perfect isosceles triangle on every single page- meticulously, it was emphasized. Meticulously was a chilling touch: meticulousness, we knew, was just one step away from full-blown lunacy. | Margaret Atwood | ||
| db1e3af | I wish this story were different. I wish it were more civilized. I wish it showed me in a better light, if not happier, then at least more active, less hesitant, less distracted by trivia. I wish it had more shape. I wish it were about love, or about sudden realizations important to one's life, or even about sunsets, birds, rainstorms, or snow. (...) I'm sorry there is so much pain in this story. I'm sorry it's in fragments, like a body cau.. | Margaret Atwood | ||
| 9ba9ca8 | My mother took the train to Halifax to see my father off. It was crammed with men en route to the Front; she could not get a sleeper, so she travelled sitting up. There were feet in the aisles, and bundles, and spittoons; coughing, snoring - drunken snoring, no doubt. As she looked at the boyish faces around her, the war became real to her, not as an idea but as a physical presence. | Margaret Atwood | ||
| b47826b | As the architects of Gilead knew, to institute an effective totalitarian system or indeed any system at all you must offer some benefits and freedoms, at least to a privileged few, in return for those you remove. | Margaret Atwood | ||
| 8af74b5 | But some people can't tell where it hurts. They can't calm down. They can't ever stop howling. | Margaret Atwood |