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| Link | Quote | Stars | Tags | Author |
| f4f0365 | He loved her so much when he made her unhappy, or else when she made him unhappy: at these moments he scarcely knew which was which. He would pat her, standing well back as with strange dogs, stretching out his hand, saying, "I'm sorry, I'm sorry." And he was sorry, but there was more to it: he was also gloating, congratulating himself, because he'd managed to create such an effect." | Margaret Atwood | ||
| 9942841 | It was a wicked game. "Homer," says Snowman, making his way through the dripping-wet vegetation. "The Divine Comedy. Greek statuary. Aqueducts. Paradise Lost. Mozart's music. Shakespeare, complete works. The Brontes. Tolstoy. The Pearl Mosque. Chartres Cathedral. Bach. Rembrandt. Verdi. Joyce. Penicillin. Keats. Turner. Heart transplants. Polio vaccine. Berlioz. Baudelaire. Bartok. Yeats. Woolf." | Margaret Atwood | ||
| 898736e | You know I love you. You're the only one." She isn't the first woman he's ever said that to. He shouldn't have used it up so much earlier in his life, he shouldn't have treated it like a tool, a wedge, a key to open women. By the time he got around to meaning it, the words had sounded fraudulent to him and he'd been ashamed to pronounce them." | Margaret Atwood | ||
| 5c3f52c | Vancouver is the suicide capital of the country. You keep going west until you run out. You come to the edge. Then you fall off. | Margaret Atwood | ||
| 0cb5ef1 | I admired her lack of compunction, the courage of her bad manners, the energy of simple rage. Throwing a bag of spaghetti had a simplicity to it, a recklessness, a careless grandeur. It got things over with. I was a long way, then, from being able to do anything like it myself. | Margaret Atwood | ||
| e81e1dd | Jon smashes things, and glues the shards into place in the pattern of breakage. I can see the appeal. | Margaret Atwood | ||
| 078c226 | Alone is how she feels, alone is how she'll always be. You're used to solitude, she tells herself. Be a stoic. Then she's enfolded. She'd waited so long, she'd given up waiting. She'd longed for this, and denied it was possible. But now how easy it is, like coming home must have been once, for those who'd had homes. Walking through the doorway into the familiar, the place that knows you, opens to you, allows you in. Tells you the stories yo.. | Margaret Atwood | ||
| 6aabaef | I've got nothing against telepathy, said Jane; but the telephone is so much more dependable. | Margaret Atwood | ||
| d2605ed | The perennial adolescent riposte. I cared, of course. I cared what people thought. I always did care. Unlike Laura, I have never had the courage of my convictions. | cared convictions courage who-cares | Margaret Atwood | |
| fc8de06 | She takes after Laura in that respect: the same tendency towards absolutism, the same refusal to compromise, the same scorn for the grosser human failings. To get away with that, you have to be beautiful. Otherwise it seems mere peevishness. | compromise failings peevishness refusal scorn takes-after tendency | Margaret Atwood | |
| d3f28df | There was also, as it turned out, the dismay of my parents to be reckoned with: their tolerance about caterpillars and beetles and other non-human life forms did not quite extend to artists. | Margaret Atwood | ||
| 35d1ba2 | This is perhaps why Dante chooses the poet Virgil to be his guide in the Inferno; in visiting a strange location, it's always best to go with someone who's been there before, and - most important of all on a sightseeing tour of Hell - who might also know how to get you out again. | Margaret Atwood | ||
| 890de07 | Sex and violence, he thinks now. A lot of the songs were about that. We didn't even notice. We thought it was art. | Margaret Atwood | ||
| 08e2f86 | at this distance you're a mirage, a glossy image fixed in the posture of the last time I saw you. Turn you over, there's a place for the address. Wish you were here. | Margaret Atwood | ||
| 5d81710 | They'd like to see through me, but nothing is more opaque than absolute transparency. | Margaret Atwood | ||
| c4b2abf | Laura was flint in a nest of thistledown. I say flint, not stone: a flint has a heart of fire. | Margaret Atwood | ||
| 32bb10a | Nobody dies from lack of sex. It's lack of love we die from. | Margaret Atwood | ||
| 7340d3d | Perfection exacts a price, but it's the imperfect who pay it. | Margaret Atwood | ||
| 0b78da8 | But this is wrong, nobody dies from lack of sex. It's lack of love we die from. | Margaret Atwood | ||
| 3ecfbfd | To feel that empty, again, again. I listen to my heart, wave upon wave, salty and red, continuing on and on, marking time. | time | Margaret Atwood | |
| 3b7c693 | Just remember, dear Friends, What am I living for and what am I dying for are the same question. | Margaret Atwood | ||
| 0561bd9 | Anyway, you don't know what's going to happen. I'm only just thickening the plot. --I'd say it was pretty thick already. Thick plots are my specialty. If you want a thinner kind, look elsewhere. | plot thick-plot writing | Margaret Atwood | |
| c293e80 | Everyone believed him of course, but you always knew with Salome that if anyone's head was going to roll it wouldn't be hers. | Margaret Atwood | ||
| cbe897c | Maybe that was the real Bernice, I thought - kind and innocent. Maybe she was truly like that inside, and all the fighting we used to do and all her sharp and unpleasant edges - that was her way of struggling to get out of the hard skin she'd grown all over herself like a beetle shell. But no matter how she hit out and raged, she'd been stuck in there. That thought made me feel so sorry for her that I cried. | Margaret Atwood | ||
| 372e95b | Pero quien puede recordar el dolor, una vez que este ha desaparecido? Todo lo que queda de el es una sombra, ni siquiera en la mente ni en la carne. El dolor deja una marca demasiado profunda como para que se vea, una marca que queda fuera del alcance de la vista y de la mente. | Margaret Atwood | ||
| 8af52ae | Blessed be those that mourn, for they shall be comforted. Nobody said when. | Margaret Atwood | ||
| 424830f | Watch out for the leaders, Crake used to say. First the leaders and the led, then the tyrants and the slaves, then the massacres. That's how it's always gone. | Margaret Atwood | ||
| d4f001d | Last night I felt the approach of nothing. Not too close but on its way, like a wingbeat, like the cooling of the wind, the slight initial tug of an undertow. | Margaret Atwood | ||
| 86d5731 | The fact is that I hate this city. I've hated it so long I can hardly remember feeling any other way about it. | memory | Margaret Atwood | |
| 6dfcaec | I believe in the resistance as I believe there can be no light without shadow; or rather no shadow unless there is also light. | resistance shadow | Margaret Atwood | |
| 33e78ce | You can never see yourself the way you are to someone else - to a man looking at you, from behind, when you don't know - because in a mirror your own head is always cranked around over your shoulder. A coy, inviting pose. You can hold up another mirror to see the back view, but then what you see is what so many painters have loved to paint - Woman Looking In Mirror, said to be an allegory of vanity. Though it is unlikely to be vanity, but t.. | Margaret Atwood | ||
| b4f7ec7 | On impulse he might die for her, but living for her would be quite different. He has no talent for monotony. | Margaret Atwood | ||
| 38db28c | Gods always come in handy, they justify almost anything, | Margaret Atwood | ||
| b8b9479 | They should all be cheered by it, for isn't it what they want? What we all want: to leave a message behind us that has an effect, if only a dire one: a message that cannot be cancelled out. | Margaret Atwood | ||
| 0f966b7 | One detaches oneself. One describes. | Margaret Atwood | ||
| 3b6e61b | Congratulations on a good outcome! We've all been rooting for you." Charmaine wonders who's been doing the rooting, because she hasn't noticed anyone. But like so many things around here, maybe the rooting has taken place behind the scenes." | Margaret Atwood | ||
| 0f35573 | He can't shake the feeling that this place is some sort of pyramid scheme, and that those who fail to understand that will be left empty-handed. But there's no obvious reason for this feeling of his. Maybe he's ungrateful by nature. | Margaret Atwood | ||
| 582746f | And so I step up, into the darkness within; or else the light. | Margaret Atwood | ||
| 1158c36 | She had an idea, but it was the wrong idea. It was hardly even an idea, just a white idea balloon with no writing inside it. | idea margaret-atwood metaphor the-robber-bride | Margaret Atwood | |
| f2df40f | A breath would blow you away, they beam down at her silently. You wish, thinks Tony, smiling up. Many have blown. She | Margaret Atwood | ||
| e022c96 | Chemistry can be like magic. It can be merciless. | Margaret Atwood | ||
| 1c1d0b4 | I read about that in introduction to Psychology; that, and the chapter on caged rats who'd give themselves electric shocks for something to do And the one on the pigeons, trained to peck a button that made a grain of corn appear. Three groups of them: the first got one grain per peck, the second one grain every other peck, the third was random. When the man in charge cut off the grain, the first group gave up quite soon, the second group a .. | Margaret Atwood | ||
| aa25bdb | Was she in any way like us? thinks Tony. Or, to put it the other way around: Are we in any way like her? | margaret-atwood musing question questioning similarities the-robber-bride | Margaret Atwood | |
| 0f0242c | Actually, they took turns trying to avoid being the victims. That's the whole point about war! | Margaret Atwood |