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| Link | Quote | Stars | Tags | Author |
| b9dad1b | What's the difference between vision and a vision? The former relates to something it's assumed you've seen, the latter to something it's assumed you haven't. Language is not always dependable either. | Margaret Atwood | ||
| 42c201d | Thinking can hurt your chances, and I intend to last | Margaret Atwood | ||
| 631bdeb | In reality it was like this: Earth was colonized by the Zycronites, who developed the ability to travel from one space dimension to another at a period several millennia after the epoch of which we speak. They arrived here eight thousand years ago. They brought a lot of plant seeds with them, which is why we have apples and oranges, not to mention bananas--one look at a banana and you can tell it came from outer space. They also brough.. | Margaret Atwood | ||
| a6acafc | women on their own, making up their minds. They wore blouses with buttons down the front that suggested the possibilities of the word undone. These women could be undone; or not. They seemed to be able to choose. We seemed to be able to choose, then. We were a society of dying, said Aunt Lydia, of too much choice. | Margaret Atwood | ||
| 92a9fc6 | His drawings were not originals then, only copies. He must have been doing them as a sort of retirement hobby, he was an incurable amateur and enthusiast; if he'd become hooked (on these rock paintings) he would have combed the area for them, collecting them with his camera, pestering experts by letter whenever he found one; an old man's delusion of usefulness. | Margaret Atwood | ||
| 93e131d | Young girls have such sweet tooths. Or is that sweet teeth? | Margaret Atwood | ||
| cb18030 | I'm sad now, the way we're talking is infinitely sad: faded music, faded paper flowers, worn satin, an echo of an echo. All gone away, no longer possible. | sad | Margaret Atwood | |
| 42712a1 | Roughing it builds a boy's character, but only certain kinds of roughing it. | masculinity | Margaret Atwood | |
| c1a2262 | Being here with him is safety; it's a cave, where we huddle together while the storm goes on outside. This is a delusion, of course. This room is one of the most dangerous places I could be. | safety | Margaret Atwood | |
| 711ce7e | but love was undependable, it came and then it went; so it was good to have a money value, because then at least those who wanted to make a profit from you made sure you were fed enough and not damaged by too much. Also there were many who had neither love nor money value and having one of these things was better than having nothing. | Margaret Atwood | ||
| d948800 | The tide of human desire, the desire for more and better, would overwhelm them. It would take control and drive events, as it had in every large change throughout history. | Margaret Atwood | ||
| 4f712f2 | If you can call it talking, these clipped whispers, projected through the funnels of our white wings. It's more like a telegram, a verbal semaphore. Amputated speech. | Margaret Atwood | ||
| 8198958 | I am a blank, here, between parentheses. Between other people. | Margaret Atwood | ||
| 40616e0 | Ill winds blow far and find a ready welcome. | Margaret Atwood | ||
| c219390 | And they're smiling at her, not half-smiles either, but full-on total-face smiles that are only partly fake. | Margaret Atwood | ||
| d51d919 | There's nothing like a shovelful of dirt to encourage literacy. | Margaret Atwood | ||
| 3e1e3c7 | Maybe they'll just take her someplace else, like an island, with the other people on it who are like her. People who don't fit in, but not criminal elements. Surely that's what they'll do. | Margaret Atwood | ||
| 45376f2 | Then the Alumni Association man cleared his throat and gave out with a pious spiel about Winifred Griffen Prior, saint on earth. How everyone fibs when it's a question of money! I suppose the old bitch pictured the whole thing when she made her bequest, stingy as it is. She knew my presence would be requested; she wanted me writhing in the town's harsh gaze while her own munificence was lauded. | Margaret Atwood | ||
| c90b61f | Where there are wars, there will be crows, the carrion-fanciers. And ravens too, the warbirds, the eyeball gourmands. And vultures, the holy birds of yore, old connoisseurs of rot. | Margaret Atwood | ||
| a1a4349 | She doesn't have to stay locked into place, into this mournful, drawn-out, low-grade misery. She has all kinds of choices and possibilities, and the only thing that's keeping her away from them is lack of willpower. | Margaret Atwood | ||
| 8a69778 | On one wall there was a recent watercolour -- Saint E.O. Wilson of Hymenoptera | Margaret Atwood | ||
| fd8d64b | You can't help what you feel, Moira once said, but you can help how you behave. | Margaret Atwood | ||
| f414c7b | I open the gallery door, walk in with that sinking feeling I always have in galleries. It's the carpets that do it to me, the hush, the sanctimoniousness of it all: galleries are too much like churches, there's too much reverence, you feel there should be some genuflecting going on. Also I don't like it that this is where paintings end up, on these neutral-toned walls with the track lighting, sterilized, rendered safe and acceptable. It's a.. | Margaret Atwood | ||
| 96435aa | Toast was a pointless invention from the Dark Ages. Toast was an implement of torture that caused all those subjected to it to regurgitate in verbal form the sins and crimes of their past lives. Toast was a ritual item devoured by fetishists in the belief that it would enhance their kinetic and sexual powers. Toast cannot be explained by any rational means. | Margaret Atwood | ||
| 6a99c45 | Art is what you can get away with, said somebody or other, which makes it sound like shoplifting or some other minor crime. And maybe that's all it ever was, or is: a kind of stealing. A hijacking of the visual. | Margaret Atwood | ||
| 79a036f | Not that it isn't great to see you. But it's not so great for you. What'd you do wrong? Laugh at his dick? | humor moira sex | Margaret Atwood | |
| 78af7e7 | Then I find I'm not ashamed after all. I enjoy the power; power of a dog bone, passive but there. | Margaret Atwood | ||
| 18aee93 | Nothing wrecks your nails like a lethal pandemic plague, | Margaret Atwood | ||
| 06e36f4 | There was always an element of melancholy involved in sex. After his indiscriminate adolescence he'd preferred sad women, delicate and breakable, women who'd been messed up and who needed him. | Margaret Atwood | ||
| 3d6f517 | The future is in your hands, she resumed. She held her own hands out to us, the ancient gesture that was both an offering and an invitation, to come forward, into an embrace, an acceptance. In your hands, she said, looking down at her own hands as if they had given her the idea. But there was nothing in them. They were empty. It was our hands that were supposed to be full, full of the future; which could be held but not seen. | Margaret Atwood | ||
| 38e806b | Can I be blamed for wanting a real body, to put my arms around? Without it I too am disembodied. I can listen to my own heartbeat against the bedsprings, I can stroke myself, under the dry white sheets, in the dark, but I too am dry and white, hard, granular; it's like running my hand over a plateful of dried rice; it's like snow. There's something dead about it, something deserted. I am like a room where things once happened and now nothin.. | Margaret Atwood | ||
| 16357b2 | Is that all there is? they must be thinking. Shouldn't it be less ordinary, more sordid, more epic, more truly harrowing, this flesh wound of your? Tell us more! Couldn't we please crank up the pain? | Margaret Atwood | ||
| 591e893 | I'm dreaming that I am awake. | Margaret Atwood | ||
| b7b8bc0 | O, lente, lente currite noctis equi! | night ovid | Margaret Atwood | |
| 138998d | Maybe the life I think I'm living is a paranoid delusion. | Margaret Atwood | ||
| 51c37ca | With no orders to follow, she occupies her mind by painting her nails, which is a very soothing thing to do when you're anxious and keyed up. Some people like to throw objects, such as glasses of water or rocks, but nail painting is more positive. If more world leaders would take it up there would be less overall suffering, in her opinion. After | Margaret Atwood | ||
| 599995e | It's strange to remember how we used to think, as if everything were available to us, as if there were no contingencies, no boundaries; as if we were free to shape and reshape forever the ever--expanding perimeters of our lives. I was like that too, I did that too. | Margaret Atwood | ||
| d68c4af | Well stuff it, Jimmy thought. If he wants to be an asshole it's a free country. Millions before him have made the same life choice. He was annoyed with himself for jabbering and capering, while Crake gave him brief, indifferent glances, and that one-sided demi-smile. Nevertheless there was something about Crake. That kind of cool slouchiness always impressed Jimmy, coming from another guy: it was the sense of energies being held back, held .. | Margaret Atwood | ||
| c66bbd8 | the reason you can't really imagine yourself being dead was that as soon as you say, "I'll be dead," you've said the word I, and so you're still alive inside the sentence. And that's how people got the idea of the immortality of the soul -- it was a consequence of grammar." | Margaret Atwood | ||
| 239b79b | For present purposes he's shortened the name. He's only Snowman. He's kept the abominable to himself, his own secret hair shirt. | Margaret Atwood | ||
| 4a7918b | You can't lead if no one will follow. | Margaret Atwood | ||
| f29e43e | We lived, as usual, by ignoring. Ignoring isn't the same as ignorance, you have to work at it. Nothing | Margaret Atwood | ||
| d69083e | We do like to have such good opinions of our own motives when we're about to do something harmful, to someone else. But as Mr. Erskine also pointed out, Eros with his bow and arrows is not the only blind god. Justitia is the other one. Clumsy blind gods with edged weapons: Justicia totes a sword, which, coupled with her blindfold, is a pretty good recipe for cutting yourself. | blindfold bow-and-arrows clumsy eros justicia motives weapons | Margaret Atwood | |
| e49528a | one of them had been limited to nouns, verbs, and roaring. | Margaret Atwood |