“Don't let the bastards grind you down.”
― Margaret Atwood, quote from The Handmaid's Tale
“Ignoring isn’t the same as ignorance, you have to work at it.”
― Margaret Atwood, quote from The Handmaid's Tale
“Nolite te bastardes carborundorum. Don't let the bastards grind you down.”
― Margaret Atwood, quote from The Handmaid's Tale
“But who can remember pain, once it’s over? All that remains of it is a shadow, not in the mind even, in the flesh. Pain marks you, but too deep to see. Out of sight, out of mind.”
― Margaret Atwood, quote from The Handmaid's Tale
“We were the people who were not in the papers. We lived in the blank white spaces at the edges of print. It gave us more freedom.
We lived in the gaps between the stories.”
― Margaret Atwood, quote from The Handmaid's Tale
“Better never means better for everyone... It always means worse, for some.”
― Margaret Atwood, quote from The Handmaid's Tale
“Falling in love, we said; I fell for him. We were falling women. We believed in it, this downward motion: so lovely, like flying, and yet at the same time so dire, so extreme, so unlikely. God is love, they once said, but we reversed that, and love, like heaven, was always just around the corner. The more difficult it was to love the particular man beside us, the more we believed in Love, abstract and total. We were waiting, always, for the incarnation. That word, made flesh.
And sometimes it happened, for a time. That kind of love comes and goes and is hard to remember afterwards, like pain. You would look at the man one day and you would think, I loved you, and the tense would be past, and you would be filled with a sense of wonder, because it was such an amazing and precarious and dumb thing to have done; and you would know too why your friends had been evasive about it, at the time.
There is a good deal of comfort, now, in remembering this.”
― Margaret Atwood, quote from The Handmaid's Tale
“When we think of the past it's the beautiful things we pick out. We want to believe it was all like that.”
― Margaret Atwood, quote from The Handmaid's Tale
“You can only be jealous of someone who has something you think you ought to have yourself.”
― Margaret Atwood, quote from The Handmaid's Tale
“A rat in a maze is free to go anywhere, as long as it stays inside the maze.”
― Margaret Atwood, quote from The Handmaid's Tale
“There is more than one kind of freedom," said Aunt Lydia. "Freedom to and freedom from. In the days of anarchy, it was freedom to. Now you are being given freedom from. Don't underrate it.”
― Margaret Atwood, quote from The Handmaid's Tale
“What I need is perspective. The illusion of depth, created by a frame, the arrangement of shapes on a flat surface. Perspective is necessary. Otherwise there are only two dimensions. Otherwise you live with your face squashed up against a wall, everything a huge foreground, of details, close-ups, hairs, the weave of the bedsheet, the molecules of the face. Your own skin like a map, a diagram of futility, criscrossed with tiny roads that lead nowhere. Otherwise you live in the moment. Which is not where I want to be.”
― Margaret Atwood, quote from The Handmaid's Tale
“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 none of this is about control. Maybe it isn't really about who can own whom, who can do what to whom and get away with it, even as far as death. Maybe it isn't about who can sit and who has to kneel or stand or lie down, legs spread open. Maybe it's about who can do what to whom and be forgiven for it. Never tell me it amounts to the same thing.”
― Margaret Atwood, quote from The Handmaid's Tale
“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”
― Margaret Atwood, quote from The Handmaid's Tale
“But people will do anything rather than admit that their lives have no meaning. No use, that is. No plot.”
― Margaret Atwood, quote from The Handmaid's Tale
“We thought we had such problems. How were we to know we were happy?”
― Margaret Atwood, quote from The Handmaid's Tale
“You can think clearly only with your clothes on.”
― Margaret Atwood, quote from The Handmaid's Tale
“Night falls. Or has fallen. Why is it that night falls, instead of rising, like the dawn? Yet if you look east, at sunset, you can see night rising, not falling; darkness lifting into the sky, up from the horizon, like a black sun behind cloud cover. Like smoke from an unseen fire, a line of fire just below the horizon, brushfire or a burning city. Maybe night falls because it’s heavy, a thick curtain pulled up over the eyes. Wool blanket.”
― Margaret Atwood, quote from The Handmaid's Tale
“I am not your justification for existence.”
― Margaret Atwood, quote from The Handmaid's Tale
“I want to be held and told my name. I want to be valued, in ways that I am not; I want to be more than valuable. I repeat my former name; remind myself of what I once could do, how others saw me. I want to steal something.”
― Margaret Atwood, quote from The Handmaid's Tale
“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, quote from The Handmaid's Tale
“I feel like the word shatter.”
― Margaret Atwood, quote from The Handmaid's Tale
“If it's a story I'm telling, then I have control over the ending...
But if it's a story, even in my head, I must be telling it to someone.
You don't tell a story only to yourself. There's always someone else. Even when there is no one.”
― Margaret Atwood, quote from 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, quote from The Handmaid's Tale
“We yearned for the future. How did we learn it, that talent for insatiability?”
― Margaret Atwood, quote from 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, quote from The Handmaid's Tale
“Truly amazing, what people can get used to, as long as there are a few compensations.”
― Margaret Atwood, quote from The Handmaid's Tale
“Knowing was a temptation. What you don't know won't tempt you.”
― Margaret Atwood, quote from The Handmaid's Tale
“I want everything back, the way it was. But there is no point to it, this wanting.”
― Margaret Atwood, quote from The Handmaid's Tale
“With a gentle pressure, our lips met. His hands slipped more firmly about me, and I held myself back, not afraid, but wanting to feel everything slowly as I leaned in, tasting the wine on him, feeling the warmth of his body pressing into mine, breathing in our scents that were mingling and changing with the warmth. My hands rose to find his hair, and I relaxed into him as the silky strands brushed through my fingers. I wanted more, and I leaned into him as our lips moved against each other.”
― Kim Harrison, quote from Ever After
“What we, or at any rate what I, refer to confidently as memory - meaning a moment, a scene, a fact that has been subjected to a fixative and thereby rescued from oblivion - is really a form of storytelling that goes on continually in the mind and often changes with the telling.”
― William Maxwell, quote from So Long, See You Tomorrow
“found Rolly in his office, sitting at his computer, staring at something on the monitor. He pointed at the screen. “They want more testing. Pretty soon, we won’t have any time to teach them anything. We’ll just test them from the moment they get here to the moment they go home.”
― Linwood Barclay, quote from No Time for Goodbye
“But what is the philosophy of this generation? Not God is dead, that point was passed long ago. Perhaps it should be stated Death is God. This generation thinks – and this is its thought of thoughts – that nothing faithful, vulnerable, fragile can be durable or have any true power. Death waits for these things as a cement floor waits for a dropping light bulb. The brittle shell of glass loses its tiny vacuum with a burst, and that is that. And this is how we teach metaphysics on each other. "You think history is the history of loving hearts? You fool! Look at these millions of dead. Can you pity them, feel for them? You can nothing! There were too many. We burned them to ashes, we buried them with bulldozers. History is the history of cruelty, not love as soft men think.”
― Saul Bellow, quote from Herzog
“You mean we won't get to run through burning buildings?" I could see he wanted to laugh, but instead he watched me intently. "What? Why are you staring at me?"
"I'm not staring. I'm observing."
I smiled through my tears. "And what do you observe?"
He brushed his lips against my ear. "A brave young woman who has always fought for what was right, even when it was unpopular. A woman who can't return to the land of her birth, but is wlcome to cross the seas and rebuild Alexandria in mine. And a woman who has suffered enough in Rome and deserves happiness for a change. Will you come to Mauretania and be my queen?"
He drew back to look at me, but I held him closer. "Yes."
"Just yes?"
I nodded and pressed my lips against his.”
― Michelle Moran, quote from Cleopatra's Daughter
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