“A home filled with nothing but yourself. It's heavy, that lightness. It's crushing, that emptiness.”
― Margaret Atwood, quote from The Tent
“Time folds you in its arms and gives you one last kiss, and then it flattens you out and folds you up and tucks you away until it's time for you to become someone else's past time, and then time folds again.”
― Margaret Atwood, quote from The Tent
“Our heaven is their hell, said God. I like a balanced universe.”
― Margaret Atwood, quote from The Tent
“No more photos. Surely there are enough. No more shadows of myself thrown by light onto pieces of paper, onto squares of plastic. No more of my eyes, mouths, noses, moods, bad angles. No more yawns, teeth, wrinkles. I suffer from my own multiplicity. Two or three images would have been enough, or four, or five. That would have allowed for a firm idea: This is she. As it is, I'm watery, I ripple, from moment to moment I dissolve into my other selves. Turn the page: you, looking, are newly confused. You know me too well to know me. Or not too well: too much.”
― Margaret Atwood, quote from The Tent
“Perhaps its not the world that is soundless but we who are deaf.”
― Margaret Atwood, quote from The Tent
“All observations of life are harsh, because life is. I lament that fact, but I cannot change it.”
― Margaret Atwood, quote from The Tent
“We want to get there faster. Get where? Wherever we are not. But a human soul can only go as fast as a man can walk, they used to say. In that case, where are all the souls? Left behind. They wander here and there, slowly, dim lights flickering in the marshes at night, looking for us. But they're not nearly fast enough, not for us, we're way ahead of them, they'll never catch up. That's why we can go so fast: our souls don't weigh us down.”
― Margaret Atwood, quote from The Tent
“I'm working on my own life story. I don't mean I'm putting it together; no, I'm taking it apart.”
― Margaret Atwood, quote from The Tent
“If you want what's in the package you should at least know how to get the string off, is what I say.”
― Margaret Atwood, quote from The Tent
“I could end this with a moral,
as if this were a fable about animals,
though no fables are really about animals.”
― Margaret Atwood, quote from The Tent
“I'm working on my own life story. I don't mean I'm putting it together; no, I'm taking it apart. If you'd wanted the narrative line you should have asked earlier, when I still knew everything and was more than willing to tell. That was before I discovered the virtues of scissors, the virtues of matches.”
― Margaret Atwood, quote from The Tent
“It’s a good excuse, though, orphanhood. It explains everything—every mistake and wrong turn. As Sherlock Holmes declared. She had no mother to advise her. How we long for it, that lack of advice! Imprudence could have been ours. Passionate affairs. Reckless adventures. Of course we’re grateful for our stable upbringings, our hordes of informative relatives, our fleece-lined advantages, our lack of dramatic plots. But there’s a corner of envy in us all the same. Why doesn’t anything of interest happen to us, coddled as we are? Why do the orphans get all the good lines?”
― Margaret Atwood, quote from The Tent
“A road is a process, not a location.”
― Margaret Atwood, quote from The Tent
“I won't fatten them in cages, though. I won't ply them with poisoned fruit items. I won't change them into clockwork images or talking shadows. I won't drain out their life's blood. They can do all those things for themselves.”
― Margaret Atwood, quote from The Tent
“All observations of life are harsh, because life is.”
― Margaret Atwood, quote from The Tent
“Life Stories: Why hunger for these? One, it fits a hunger. Maybe it is more like bossiness. Maybe we just want to be in charge of the life, no matter who lived it...”
― Margaret Atwood, quote from The Tent
“Fear is synonymous with the future, and the future consists of forked roads, I should say forking roads, because the roads are forking all the time, like slow lightning. A road is a process, not a location.”
― Margaret Atwood, quote from The Tent
“I follow suit, said the lion,
vacating his coat of arms
and movie logos; and the eagle said,
Get me off this flag.”
― Margaret Atwood, quote from The Tent
“You don’t understand much, he says. Why do you think I was lost in the impenetrable forest in the first place?”
― Margaret Atwood, quote from The Tent
“No more photos. Surely there are enough. No more shadows of myself thrown by light onto pieces of paper, onto squares of plastic.”
― Margaret Atwood, quote from The Tent
“What are we do to? The child sex trade is not for us: our children are unattractive and rude, and - due to the knowledge of our history - have a bad habit of mugging prospective customers and shoving them over cliffs.”
― Margaret Atwood, quote from The Tent
“At this dim season of the year we hunger for such tales. Winter's tales, they are. We want to huddle round them, as if around a small but cheerful fire... It was the right thing to do on the darkest day of the year.”
― Margaret Atwood, quote from The Tent
“Human beings- I've observed- are hot-wired for score keeping, and since they like to win, they're always going one better than the other fellow.”
― Margaret Atwood, quote from The Tent
“Walking was not fast enough, so we ran. Running was not fast enough, so we galloped. Galloping was not fast enough, so we sailed. Sailing was not fast enough, so we rolled merrily along on long metal tracks. Long metal tracks were not fast enough, so we drove. Driving was not fast enough, so we flew.
Flying isn't fast enough for us. We want to get there faster. Get where? Wherever we are not. But a human soul can only go as fast as a man can walk, they used to say. In that case, where are all the souls? Left behind.”
― Margaret Atwood, quote from The Tent
“You're not my real parents, every child has thought. I'm not your real child. But with orphans, it's true. What freedom, to thumb your nose authentically!”
― Margaret Atwood, quote from The Tent
“I suffer from my own multiplicity. Two or three images would have been enough, or four, or five. That would be allowed for a firm idea: This is she. As it is, I'm watery, I ripple, from moment to moment I dissolve into my other selves.”
― Margaret Atwood, quote from The Tent
“Everyone believed him of course, but you always knew with Salome that if anyone’s head was going to roll it wouldn’t be hers.”
― Margaret Atwood, quote from The Tent
“Wind comes in, your candle tips over and flares up, and a loose tent-flap catches fire, and through the widening black-edged gap you can see the eyes of the howlers, red and shining in the light from your burning paper shelter, but you keep on writing anyway because what else can you do?”
― Margaret Atwood, quote from The Tent
“whose life am I living. Whose life am I failing to live”
― Margaret Atwood, quote from The Tent
“listen. the leaves no longer rustle, the wind no longer sighs, our hearts no longer beat. They've fallen silent. Fallen, as if into the earth. Or is it we who have fallen? Perhaps it's not the world that is soundless but we who are dear. What membrane seals us off from the music we used to dance to? Why can't we hear?”
― Margaret Atwood, quote from The Tent
Margaret Atwood
Born place: in Ottawa, Ontario, Canada
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“كذلك هم البشر! انهم جميعا من طينة واحدة: يعرفون مقدما كل الجوانب السيئة في عمل من الاعمال. يساعدونك،و ينصحونك،و قد يشجعونك،اذا رأوا انه يستحيل ان يفعلوا غير ذلك. و لكنهم بعدئذ يغسلون أيديهم من الامر، و ينصرفون،مستائين، عن الشخص الذي تجرأ أن يتحمل كل تبعته.نعم انهم جميعا من طينة واحدة،لا يشذ عن ذلك حتى احسنهم، او اذكاهم”
― Mikhail Lermontov, quote from Der Held unserer Zeit: Kaukasische Lebensbilder
“You think you're the only one?" Theo said. "Everyone has scars. We just don't all wear them on the outside.”
― Natasha Friend, quote from My Life in Black and White
“I’ve found that obedience to God creates quiet fulfillment in the present. There is a spiritual satisfaction that comes even in the midst of our trials. It is a demeanor that may not be as “showy” as gleeful happiness, but it is much less subject to moods and makes for much more permanent a disposition.”
― Gary L. Thomas, quote from Sacred Marriage: Celebrating Marriage as a Spiritual Discipline
“Perdí varias cosas en Buenos Aires. Por el apuro o la mala suerte, nadie sabe adónde fueron a parar. Salí con un poco de ropa y un puñado de papeles. No me quejo. Con tantas personas perdidas, llorar por las cosas sería como faltarle el respeto al dolor. Vida”
― Eduardo Galeano, quote from Days and Nights of Love and War
“[There is] a widespread approach to ideas which Objectivism repudiates altogether: agnosticism. I mean this term in a sense which applies to the question of God, but to many other issues also, such as extra-sensory perception or the claim that the stars influence man’s destiny. In regard to all such claims, the agnostic is the type who says, “I can’t prove these claims are true, but you can’t prove they are false, so the only proper conclusion is: I don’t know; no one knows; no one can know one way or the other.”
The agnostic viewpoint poses as fair, impartial, and balanced. See how many fallacies you can find in it. Here are a few obvious ones: First, the agnostic allows the arbitrary into the realm of human cognition. He treats arbitrary claims as ideas proper to consider, discuss, evaluate—and then he regretfully says, “I don’t know,” instead of dismissing the arbitrary out of hand. Second, the onus-of-proof issue: the agnostic demands proof of a negative in a context where there is no evidence for the positive. “It’s up to you,” he says, “to prove that the fourth moon of Jupiter did not cause your sex life and that it was not a result of your previous incarnation as the Pharaoh of Egypt.” Third, the agnostic says, “Maybe these things will one day be proved.” In other words, he asserts possibilities or hypotheses with no jot of evidential basis.
The agnostic miscalculates. He thinks he is avoiding any position that will antagonize anybody. In fact, he is taking a position which is much more irrational than that of a man who takes a definite but mistaken stand on a given issue, because the agnostic treats arbitrary claims as meriting cognitive consideration and epistemological respect. He treats the arbitrary as on a par with the rational and evidentially supported. So he is the ultimate epistemological egalitarian: he equates the groundless and the proved. As such, he is an epistemological destroyer. The agnostic thinks that he is not taking any stand at all and therefore that he is safe, secure, invulnerable to attack. The fact is that his view is one of the falsest—and most cowardly—stands there can be.”
― Leonard Peikoff, quote from Objectivism: The Philosophy of Ayn Rand
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