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“I feel like the word shatter.”
Margaret Atwood, The Handmaid’s Tale
“If he wants to be an asshole, it's a free country. Millions before him have made the same life choice.”
Margaret Atwood, Oryx and Crake
“You can't help what you feel, but you can help how you behave”
Margaret Atwood, The Handmaid’s Tale
“A home filled with nothing but yourself. It's heavy, that lightness. It's crushing, that emptiness.”
Margaret Atwood, The Tent
“It's impossible to say a thing exactly the way it was, because of what you say can never be exact, you always have to leave something out, there are too many parts, sides, crosscurrents, nuances; too many gestures, which could mean this or that, too many shapes which can never be fully described, too many flavors, in the air or on the tongue, half-colors, too many.”
Margaret Atwood, The Handmaid’s Tale
“Potential has a shelf life.”
Margaret Atwood, CAT'S EYE.
“When you are in the middle of a story it isn't a story at all, but only a confusion; a dark roaring, a blindness, a wreckage of shattered glass and splintered wood; like a house in a whirlwind, or else a boat crushed by the icebergs or swept over the rapids, and all aboard powerless to stop it. It's only afterwards that it becomes anything like a story at all. When you are telling it, to yourself or to someone else.”
Margaret Atwood, Alias Grace
“Forgiving men is so much easier than forgiving women.”
Margaret Atwood, CAT'S EYE.
“How could I have been so ignorant? she thinks. So stupid, so unseeing, so given over to carelessness. But without such ignorance, such carelessness, how could we live? If you knew what was going to happen, if you knew everything that was going to happen next—if you knew in advance the consequences of your own actions—you'd be doomed. You'd be as ruined as God. You'd be a stone. You'd never eat or drink or laugh or get out of bed in the morning. You'd never love anyone, ever again. You'd never dare to.”
Margaret Atwood, The Blind Assassin
“You think I'm not a goddess?
Try me.
This is a torch song.
Touch me and you'll burn.”
Margaret Atwood
“Nothing changes instantaneously: in a gradually heating bathtub you'd be boiled to death before you knew it.”
Margaret Atwood, The Handmaid’s Tale
“Knowing was a temptation. What you don't know won't tempt you.”
Margaret Atwood, The Handmaid’s Tale
“Maybe the life I think I'm living is a paranoid delusion...Sanity is a valuable possession; I hoard it the way people once hoarded money. I save it, so I will have enough, when the time comes.”
Margaret Atwood, The Handmaid’s Tale
“All you have to do, I tell myself, is keep your mouth shut and look stupid. It shouldn't be that hard.”
Margaret Atwood, The Handmaid’s Tale
“I knew what love was supposed to be: obsession with undertones of nausea. ”
Margaret Atwood, Cat’s Eye
“Happiness is a garden walled with glass: there's no way in or out. In Paradise there are no stories, because there are no journeys. It's loss and regret and misery and yearning that drive the story forward, along its twisted road.”
Margaret Atwood, The Blind Assassin
“There were a lot of gods. Gods always come in handy, they justify almost anything.”
Margaret Atwood, The Blind Assassin
“We yearned for the future. How did we learn it, that talent for insatiability?”
Margaret Atwood, The Handmaid’s Tale
“If I love you, is that a fact or a weapon?”
Margaret Atwood, Power Politics: Poems
tags: love
“I lie on the floor, washed by nothing and hanging on. I cry at night. I am afraid of hearing voices, or a voice. I have come to the edge, of the land. I could get pushed over.”
Margaret Atwood, CAT'S EYE.
“I believe in the resistance as I believe there can be no light without shadow; or rather, no shadow unless there is also light.”
Margaret Atwood, The Handmaid’s Tale
“In the end, we'll all become stories.”
Margaret Atwood, Moral Disorder and Other Stories
“When I am lonely for boys it’s their bodies I miss. I study their hands lifting the cigarettes in the darkness of the movie theaters, the slope of a shoulder, the angle of a hip. Looking at them sideways, I examine them in different lights. My love for them is visual: that is the part of them I would like to possess. Don’t move, I think. Stay like that, let me have that.”
Margaret Atwood, Cat’s Eye
“The Eskimo has fifty-names for snow because it is important to them; there ought to be as many for love.”
Margaret Atwood
tags: love
“I wonder which is preferable, to walk around all your life swollen up with your own secrets until you burst from the pressure of them, or to have them sucked out of you, every paragraph, every sentence, every word of them, so at the end you're depleted of all that was once as precious to you as hoarded gold, as close to you as your skin - everything that was of the deepest importance to you, everything that made you cringe and wish to conceal, everything that belonged to you alone - and must spend the rest of your days like an empty sack flapping in the wind, an empty sack branded with a bright fluorescent label so that everyone will know what sort of secrets used to be inside you?”
Margaret Atwood, The Blind Assassin
“I exist in two places,
here and where you are.”
Margaret Atwood
“Nobody dies from the lack of sex. It's lack of love we die from.”
Margaret Atwood
tags: love
“People cry at weddings for the same reason they cry at happy endings: because they so desperately want to believe in something they know is not credible.”
Margaret Atwood
“I want everything back, the way it was. But there is no point to it, this wanting.”
Margaret Atwood, The Handmaid’s Tale
“This is how the girl who couldn't speak and the man who couldn't see fell in love.”
Margaret Atwood, The Blind Assassin

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