1
2
3
5
8
12
20
33
52
83
133
213
340
543
867
1384
2208
3346
3522
4336
4337
4338
4339
4340
5443
5619
6757
7581
8098
8422
8625
8752
8832
8882
8913
8932
8945
8953
8957
8960
8962
8963
8964
8965
▲
▼
| Link | Quote | Stars | Tags | Author |
| 3cf14de | I used to think of my body as an instrument, of pleasure, or a means of transportation, or an implement for the accomplishment of my will. I could make it run, push buttons, of one sort or another, make things happen. There were limits but my body was nevertheless lithe, single, solid, one with me. Now the flesh arranges it self differently. | Margaret Atwood | ||
| 2f31629 | There are days when I can hardly make it out of bed. I find it an effort to speak. I measure progress in steps, the next one and the next one, as far as the bathroom. These steps are major accomplishments. I focus on taking the cap off the toothpaste, getting the brush up to my mouth. I have difficulty lifting my arm to do even that. I feel I am without worth, that nothing I can do is of any value, least of all to myself. | Margaret Atwood | ||
| 9e18fb5 | Language is not morally neutral because the human brain is not neutral in its desires. Neither is the dog brain. Neither is the bird brain: crows hate owls. We like some things and dislike others, we approve of some things and disapprove of others. Such is the nature of being an organism. | Margaret Atwood | ||
| 98de66a | her own marriage had been arranged, would things have turned out any worse than they did? Is it fair, to send inexperienced young girls out into the wild forest to fend for themselves? Girls with big bones and maybe not the smallest of feet. What would help would be a wise woman, some gnarly old crone who would step out from behind a tree, who would give advice, who would say No, not this one, who would say Beauty is only skin deep, in men .. | Margaret Atwood | ||
| e4e735e | Well, they bill by the minute, these lawyers, just like the cheaper whores. | Margaret Atwood | ||
| 3236311 | I was sand, I was snow - written on, rewritten, smoothed over. | Margaret Atwood | ||
| dca8b78 | At some indeterminate point in their life cycles, they cause themselves to be placed in artificial stone or wooden cocoons, or chrysalises. They have an idea that they will someday emerge from these in an altered state, which they symbolize with carvings of themselves with wings. However, we did not observe that any had actually done so. | death human-nature humourous | Margaret Atwood | |
| ab52202 | Surviving | war | Margaret Atwood | |
| 9e6be6c | He had been with me, but he wasn't with me now, we had been walking along a street like this one and then the future swept over us and we were separated. He was in the distance now, across the ocean, on a beach, the wind ruffling his hair, I could hardly see his features. He was moving at an ever-increasing speed away from me, into the land of the dead, the dead past, irretrievable. | Margaret Atwood | ||
| 80e1f69 | The freezing rain sifts down, handfuls of shining rice thrown by some unseen celebrant. Wherever it hits, it crystallizes into a granulated coating of ice. | Margaret Atwood | ||
| 912c909 | Water does not resist. Water flows. When you plunge your hand into it, all you feel is a caress. Water is not a solid wall, it will not stop you. But water always goes where it wants to go, and nothing in the end can stand against it. | Margaret Atwood | ||
| 6805af0 | She breathes in the cold air; pellets of blown ice whip against her face. The wind's getting up, as the TV said it would. Nonetheless there's something brisk about being out in the storm, something energizing: it whisks away the cobwebs, it makes you inhale. | Margaret Atwood | ||
| 1213b78 | Sex was a given, like food, and as such was to be relished when excellent and derided when substandard; it was an entertainment, like the theatre, and could thus be reviewed like a performance. | Margaret Atwood | ||
| 4355c18 | The hair compromise he finally agreed to is a white strip on the left side - geriatric punk, he'd whispered to himself - with, recently, the addition of an arresting scarlet patch. The total image is that of an alarmed skunk trapped in the floodlights after an encounter with a ketchup bottle. | Margaret Atwood | ||
| 96ce6a0 | What could be done? We thought we had such problems. How were we to know we were happy? | Margaret Atwood | ||
| 4b43df5 | Time comes in waves here, a sickness, one day after the other rolling on; I move up, it's called awake, then down into the uneasy nights but never forward. | Margaret Atwood | ||
| 6847129 | Charis disapproves of crass words like shit. Roz has offered , but Charis rejected it as too babyish. Her alimentary canal products? Tony has suggested. No, that sounds too coldly intellectual, said Charis. Her Gifts to the Earth. | Margaret Atwood | ||
| 75b9eb9 | And the vampires. You used to know where you stood with them - smelly, evil, undead - but now there are virtuous vampires and disreputable vampires, and sexy vampires and glittery vampires, and none of the old rules about them are true any more. Once you could depend on garlic, and on the rising sun, and on crucifixes. You could get rid of the vampires once and for all. But not any more. | Margaret Atwood | ||
| d34b13d | At the outset Verna had not intended to kill anyone. | Margaret Atwood | ||
| 0f3621e | Guess it's the climate change," says Sam. That's what people say, the way they used to say, We've angered God." | Margaret Atwood | ||
| 580465b | He feels like saying that of course there's lint on Mr. Wiggly, or dust at any rate, or maybe rust; what does she expect, because as she is well aware Mr. Wiggly has been on the shelf for some time. | Margaret Atwood | ||
| f9a4918 | She rents herself a large, empty apartment on the top floor of a house. She has no long-term plans. At night she listens to the radio and cooks subsistence meals, and cries onto her plate. | Margaret Atwood | ||
| 7759b42 | The moment of betrayal is the worst, the moment when you know beyond any doubt that you've been betrayed: that some other human being has wished you that much evil. It was like being in an elevator cut loose at the top. Falling, falling, and not knowing when you will hit. | Margaret Atwood | ||
| ba30403 | I pray where I am, sitting by the window, looking out through the curtain at the empty garden. I don't even close my eyes. Out there or inside my head, it's an equal darkness. Or light. My God. Who Art in the Kingdom of Heaven, which is within. I wish you would tell me Your Name, the real one I mean. But You will do as well as anything. I wish I knew what You were up to. But whatever it is, help me to get through it, please. Though maybe it.. | Margaret Atwood | ||
| 61e5723 | the gods often mumble | inspiration religion revelation | Margaret Atwood | |
| 7107add | His generation believed that if there was trouble all you'd have to do was shoot someone and then it would be okay. | Margaret Atwood | ||
| ccff593 | She'd stepped out of sex as if out of a loose dress. Now she was brisk, decisive, no nonsense. | Margaret Atwood | ||
| a641c8f | Female artists are biologically confused," said Crake." | Margaret Atwood | ||
| 30c6822 | This bug is something new though. We've got the bioprint. | Margaret Atwood | ||
| 7874324 | There is so much beautiful in the world if you look around. You are looking only at the dirt under your feet, Jimmy. It's not good for you. | Margaret Atwood | ||
| 0e4ed7e | The Human Words of God speak of the Creation in terms that could be understood by the men of old. There is no talk of galaxies or genes, for such terms would have confused them greatly! But must we therefore take as scientific fact the story that the world was created in six days, thus making a nonsense of observable data? | Margaret Atwood | ||
| 2c2e58b | But remember that forgiveness too is a power. To beg for it is a power, and to withhold or bestow it is a power, perhaps the greatest. Maybe | Margaret Atwood | ||
| 859bb04 | The answer can only be that God has given Adam free will, and therefore Adam may do things that God Himself cannot anticipate in advance. | Margaret Atwood | ||
| c227684 | She writes like an angel, it says of Laura on the back of one of the editions of The Blind Assassin. An American edition, as I recall, with gold scrollwork on the cover: they set a lot of store by angels in those parts. In point of fact angels don't write much. They record sins and the names of the dammed and the saved, or they appear as disembodied hands and scribble warnings on walls. Or they deliver messages, few of which are good news: .. | angels | Margaret Atwood | |
| 643dbed | You can't live with such fears and keep on whistling. The waiting builds up in you like a tide. You start wanting it to be done with. You find yourself saying to the sky, Just do it. Do your worst. Get it over with. | fear strength | Margaret Atwood | |
| 155a9ca | One day, he said that what you had to do in any adversarial situation was to kill the king, as in chess. I said people didn't have kings any more. He said he meant the centre of power, but today it wouldn't be a single person, it would be the technological connections. | Margaret Atwood | ||
| ac4e6c8 | You create your own world by your inner attitude, the Gardeners used to say. | Margaret Atwood | ||
| 126add7 | It's always an advantage to have something to do with your hands. That way, if someone makes an inappropriate remark, you can pretend you haven't heard it. Then you don't have to answer. | Margaret Atwood | ||
| eb5ff63 | This thing I'm doing can hardly be called living. Instead I'm lying dormant, like a bacterium in a glacier. Getting time over with. That's all. | living time | Margaret Atwood | |
| cb7b5cd | A wall that cannot be defended is no sooner built than ended. | Margaret Atwood | ||
| d71412c | Like stage magic, knowledge before you knew it took place before your very eyes, but you were looking elsewhere. | Margaret Atwood | ||
| c5c5261 | Margaret Atwood started writing The Handmaid's Tale in West Berlin in the spring of 1984. Like Orwell when he began Nineteen Eighty-Four, she was in her early forties and she knew exactly what she wanted to say. The novel originated with a file of newspaper cuttings she had begun collecting while living in England, covering such topics as the religious right, prisons in Iran, falling birth rates, Nazi sexual politics, polygamy and credit ca.. | Dorian Lynskey | ||
| be8bd96 | Homelessness is a nationality now. | sad | Margaret Atwood | |
| c510c59 | But all my love ever came to was a bad end. Red-hot shoes, barrels studded with nails. That's what it feels like, unrequited love. | Margaret Atwood |