Margaret Atwood - The Blind Assassin (2000)

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Walter turned on the radio: electric violins wailing, twisted romance, the four-square beat of heartbreak. Trite suffering, but suffering nonetheless. The entertainment business. What voyeurs we have all become.

Margaret Atwood
This is how the girl who couldn't speak and the man who couldn't see fell in love.

Margaret Atwood
Love is giving, marriage is buying and selling. You can't put love into a contract.

Margaret Atwood
She knows herself to be at the mercy of events, and she knows by now that events have no mercy.

Margaret Atwood
Those who live alone slide into the habit of vertical eating: why bother with the niceties when there's no one to share or censure? But laxity in one area may lead to derangement in all.

Margaret Atwood
Blondes are like white mice, you only find them in cages. They wouldn't last long in nature. They're too conspicuous.

Margaret Atwood
He might die for her, but living for her would be quite different.

Margaret Atwood
Home is where the heart is, I thought now, gathering myself together in Betty's Luncheonette. I had no heart any more, it had been broken; or not broken, it simply wasn't there any more. It had been scooped neatly out of me like the yolk from a hard-boiled egg, leaving the rest of me bloodless and congealed and hollow. I'm heartless, I thought. Therefore I'm homeless.

Margaret Atwood
Ten days after the war ended, my sister Laura drove a car off a bridge. The bridge was being repaired: she went right through the Danger sign. The car fell a hundred feet into the ravine, smashing through the treetops feathery with new leaves, then burst into flames and rolled down into the shallow creek at the bottom. Chunks of the bridge fell on top of it. Nothing much was left but charred smithereens.

Margaret Atwood
Things written down can cause a great deal of harm. All too often, people don't consider that.

Margaret Atwood
Reenie never went in much for God. There was mutual respect, and if you were in trouble naturally you'd call on him, as with lawyers; but as with lawyers, it would have to be bad trouble.

Margaret Atwood
When you're unhinged, things make their way out of you that should be kept inside, and other things get in that ought to be shut out. The locks lose their powers. The guards go to sleep. The passwords fail.

Margaret Atwood
Why is it we want so badly to memorialize ourselves? Even while we're still alive. We wish to assert our existence, like dogs peeing on fire hydrants.

Margaret Atwood
Nothing is more difficult than to understand the dead, I've found; but nothing is more dangerous than to ignore them.

Margaret Atwood
Don't misunderstand me. I am not scoffing at goodness, which is far more difficult to explain than evil, and far more complicated. But sometimes it's hard to put up with.

Margaret Atwood
I suppose it's everyone's fate to be reduced to quaintness by those younger than themselves.

Margaret Atwood
But some people can't tell where it hurts. They can't calm down. They can't ever stop howling.

Margaret Atwood
He was deciding whether to cut her throat or love her forever.

Margaret Atwood
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 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
Farewells can be shattering, but returns are surely worse. Solid flesh can never live up to the bright shadow cast by its absence. Time and distance blur the edges; then suddenly the beloved has arrived, and it's noon with its merciless light, and every spot and pore and wrinkle and bristle stands clear.

Margaret Atwood
Stick a shovel into the ground almost anywhere and some horrible thing or other will come to light. Good for trade, we thrive on bones; without them there'd be no stories.

Margaret Atwood
Perhaps they were looking for passion; perhaps they delved into this book as into a mysterious parcel - a gift box at the bottom of which, hidden in layers of rustling tissue paper, lay something they'd always longed for but couldn't ever grasp.

Margaret Atwood
Why does the mind do such things? Turn on us, rend us, dig the claws in. If you get hungry enough, they say, you start eating your own heart. Maybe it's much the same.

Margaret Atwood
Without the protection of surliness and levity, all children would be crushed by the past—the past of others, loaded onto their shoulders. Selfishness is their saving grace.

Margaret Atwood
Time rises and rises, and when it reaches the level of your eyes you drown.

Margaret Atwood
A Paradox, the doughnut hole. Empty space, once, but now they've learned to market even that. A minus quantity; nothing, rendered edible. I wondered if they might be used-metaphorically, of course-to demonstrate the existence of God. Does naming a sphere of nothingness transmute it into being?

Margaret Atwood
Perhaps I write for no one. Perhaps for the same person children are writing for when they scrawl their names in the snow.

Margaret Atwood
A war is a huge fire; the ashes from it drift far, and settle slowly.

Margaret Atwood
What fabrications they are, mothers. Scarecrows, wax dolls for us to stick pins into, crude diagrams.

Margaret Atwood
Touch comes before sight, before speech. It is the first language and the last, and it always tells the truth.

Margaret Atwood