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Margaret Atwood -
The Handmaid's Tale (1985)
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These things you did were like prayers; you did them and you hoped they would save you. And for the most part they did. Or something did; you could tell by the fact that you were still alive.
Margaret Atwood
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Knowing was a temptation. What you don't know won't tempt you.
Margaret Atwood
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Nothing changes instantaneously: in a gradually heating bathtub you'd be boiled to death before you knew it.
Margaret Atwood
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You can wet the rim of a glass and run your finger around the rim and it will make a sound. This is what I feel like: this sound of glass. I feel like the word shatter. I want to be with someone.
Margaret Atwood
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By telling you anything at all I'm at least believing in you, I believe you're there, I believe you into being. Because I'm telling you this story I will your existence. I tell, therefore you are.
Margaret Atwood
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Ignoring isn't the same as ignorance, you have to work at it.
Margaret Atwood
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That was when they suspended the Constitution. They said it would be temporary. There wasn't even any rioting in the streets. People stayed home at night, watching television, looking for some direction. There wasn't even an enemy you could put your finger on.
Margaret Atwood
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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.
Margaret Atwood
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You can't make an omelette without breaking eggs, is what he says. We thought we could do better.
Better? I say, in a small voice. How can he think this is better?
Better never means better for everyone, he says. It always means worse, for some.
Margaret Atwood
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Fatigue is here, in my body, in my legs and eyes. That is what gets you in the end. Faith is only a word, embroidered.
Margaret Atwood
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Neither of us says the word love, not once. It would be tempting fate; it would be romance, bad luck.
Margaret Atwood
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All you have to do, I tell myself, is keep your mouth shut and look stupid. It shouldn't be that hard.
Margaret Atwood
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It was like being in an elevator cut loose at the top. Falling, falling, and not knowing when you will hit.
Margaret Atwood
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Maybe I don't really want to know what's going on. Maybe I'd rather not know. Maybe I couldn't bear to know. The Fall was a fall from innocence to knowledge.
Margaret Atwood
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They seemed to be able to choose. We seemed to be able to choose, then. We were a society dying of too much choice.
Margaret Atwood
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The body is so easily damaged, so easily disposed of, water and chemicals is all it is, hardly more to it than a jellyfish drying on sand.
Margaret Atwood
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Nobody dies from the lack of sex. It's lack of love we die from.
Margaret Atwood
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You can only be jealous of someone who has something you think you ought to have yourself.
Margaret Atwood
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We yearned for the future. How did we learn it, that talent for insatiability?
Margaret Atwood
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Quote of the day
Now if the harvest is over, And the world cold, Give me the bonus of laughter, As I lose hold.
John Betjeman
Margaret Atwood
Creative Commons
Born:
November 18, 1939
(age 84)
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