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| Link | Quote | Stars | Tags | Author |
| 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 | ||
| 217c471 | I'd wanted to leave home, but have it stay in place, waiting for me, unchanged, so I could step back into it at will. | Margaret Atwood | ||
| a7bd5be | Maybe all women should be robots, he thinks with a tinge of acid: the flesh-and-blood ones are out of control. | Margaret Atwood | ||
| 12e1888 | When I was younger, imagining age, I would think, Maybe you appreciate things more when you don't have much time left. I forgot to include the loss of energy. Some days I do appreciate things more, eggs, flowers, but then I decide I'm only having an attack of sentimentality, my brain going pastel Technicolor, like a beautiful-sunset greeting cards they used to make so many of in California. High-gloss hearts. The danger is grayout. | Margaret Atwood | ||
| 10e40fe | She's the kind of woman who wants what she doesn't have and gets what she wants and then despises what she gets. | the-robber-bride | Margaret Atwood | |
| dbc7899 | This form of love is like the pain of childbirth: so intense it's hard to remember afterwards, | intense love love-hurts obsession passion | Margaret Atwood | |
| 0b42ff7 | It hasn't escaped me that the object that keeps me alive is the same one that will kill me. In this way it's like love, or a certain kind of it. | Margaret Atwood | ||
| a3bb603 | She had her reasons. Not that they were ever the same as anybody else's reasons. She was completely ruthless in that way. | Margaret Atwood | ||
| 9a47fcd | After having imposed itself on us like the egomaniac it is, clamouring about its own needs, foisting upon us its own sordid and perilous desires, the body's final trick is simply to absent itself. Just when you need it, just when you could use an arm or a leg, suddenly the body has other things to do. It falters, it buckles under you; it melts away as if made of snow, leaving nothing much. Two lumps of coal, an old hat, a grin made of pebbl.. | body old-age | Margaret Atwood | |
| 4ed9830 | You think you can get rid of things, and people too--leave them behind. You don't know yet about the habit they have, of coming back. | life | Margaret Atwood | |
| f5bd416 | there's often more in silences than in what is actually said - in the lips pressed together, the head turned away, the quick sideways glance. The shoulders drawn up as if carrying a heavy weight. | Margaret Atwood | ||
| ec5f08e | 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 | ||
| 9b08e46 | A story is like a letter. Dear You, I'll say. Just you, without a name. Attaching a name attaches you to the world of fact, which is riskier, more hazardous: who knows what the chances are out there, of survival, yours? I will say you, you, like an old love song. You can mean more than one. You can mean thousands. I'm not in any immediate danger, I'll say to you. I'll pretend you can hear me. But it's no good, because I know you can't. | Margaret Atwood | ||
| 60e458b | 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. | Margaret Atwood | ||
| 1eadb90 | And the Internet was such a jumble of false and true factoids that no one believed what was on it any more, or else they believed all of it, which amounted to the same thing. | Margaret Atwood | ||
| b0cb014 | Sucked into the well of knowledge, you could only plummet, learning more and more, but not getting any happier. | Margaret Atwood | ||
| 784bb68 | It's fun to be different, but not too different! | Margaret Atwood | ||
| 12480de | Confronted by too much emptiness, said Adam One, the brain invents. Loneliness creates company as thirst creates water. How many sailors have been wrecked in pursuit of islands that were merely a shimmering? | loneliness | Margaret Atwood | |
| ce1a897 | On the eastern horizon there's a greyish haze, lit now with a rosy, deadly glow. Strange how that colour still seems tender. He gazes at it with rapture; there is no other word for it. Rapture. The heart seized, carried away, as if by some large bird of prey. After everything that's happened, how can the world still be so beautiful? Because it is. | Margaret Atwood | ||
| 8531f18 | Lighting a fire is an act of renewal, of beginning, and she doesn't want to begin, she wants to continue. No: she wants to go back. | Margaret Atwood | ||
| b0992c1 | I would like to believe this is a story I'm telling. I need to believe it. I must believe it. Those who can believe that such stories are only stories have a better chance. If it's a story I'm telling, then I have control over the ending. Then there will be an ending, to the story, and real life will come after it. I can pick up where I left off. It isn't a story I'm telling. It's also a story I'm telling, in my head, as I go along. Tel.. | Margaret Atwood | ||
| 11325e7 | It's lack of love we die from. | Margaret Atwood | ||
| 725bcba | I was shut up inside that doll of myself, and my true voice could not get out. | Margaret Atwood | ||
| 4600a59 | We were the people who were not in the papers. We lived in the blank white spaces on the edges of print. | oppression women | Margaret Atwood | |
| 77681eb | So few people understand about anything. | margaret-atwood the-robber-bride | Margaret Atwood | |
| 3032905 | At night, Toby breathed herself in. Her new self. Her skin smelled like honey and salt. And earth | Margaret Atwood | ||
| 5eb796b | Why do men want to kill the bodies of other men? Women don't want to kill the bodies of other women. | Margaret Atwood | ||
| b5807e3 | But the waves kept moving, with the white wake of the ship traced in them for an instant, and then smoothed over by the water. And it was as if my own footsteps were being erased behind me, the footsteps I'd made as a child on the beaches and pathways of the land I'd left, and the footsteps I'd made on this side of the ocean, since coming here; all the traces of me, smoothed over and rubbed away as if they had never been, like polishing the.. | Margaret Atwood | ||
| df872ad | There is indeed something delightful about being able to combine obedience and disobedience in the same act. | Margaret Atwood | ||
| a767444 | But then it came to me that who I really am is a person who doesn't need to know who he really is, in the usual sense. What does it mean, anyway - family background and so forth? People use it mostly as an excuse for their own snobbery, or else their failings. I'm free of the temptation, that's all. I'm free of the strings. Nothing ties me down. | Margaret Atwood | ||
| e00065f | It is spring, and the night wind is moist with the smell of turned loam and the early flowers; the moon pours out its beauty which you see as beauty finally, warm and offering everything. You have only to take. | Margaret Atwood | ||
| d8317ea | Thus on Predator Day we meditate on the Alpha Predator aspects of God. The suddenness and ferocity with which an apprehension of the Divine may appear to us; our smallness and fearfulness-may I say, our Mouselikeness-in the face of such Power; our feelings of individual annihilation in the brightness of that splendid Light. God walks in the tender dawn Gardens of the mind, but He also prowls in its night Forests. He is not a tame Being, my .. | Margaret Atwood | ||
| e9ab912 | on the Street of Dreams it was dream eat dream. | Margaret Atwood | ||
| 8fb1e44 | It would be nice to believe that love should be dished out in a fair way so that everyone got some. But that wasn't how it was going to be for me. | Margaret Atwood |