Quotes from The Year of the Flood

“What am I living for and what am I dying for are the same question.”
― Margaret Atwood, quote from The Year of the Flood

“Maybe that's what love is, I thought: it's being pissed off.”
― Margaret Atwood, quote from The Year of the Flood

“You can forget who you are if you're alone too much.”
― Margaret Atwood, quote from The Year of the Flood

“...we must be a beacon of hope, because if you tell people there's nothing they can do, they will do worse than nothing.”
― Margaret Atwood, quote from The Year of the Flood

“Remember,' she'd tell her staff, 'every customer wants to feel like a princess, and princesses are selfish and overbearing.”
― Margaret Atwood, quote from The Year of the Flood

“I could see how you could do extreme things for the person you loved. Adam One said that when you loved a person, that love might not always get returned the way you wanted, but it was a good thing anyway because love went out all around you like an energy wave, and a creature you didn't know would be helped by it.”
― Margaret Atwood, quote from The Year of the Flood

“We shouldn't have been so scornful; we should have had compassion. But compassion takes work, and we were young.”
― Margaret Atwood, quote from The Year of the Flood

“How easy it is, treachery. You just slide into it.”
― Margaret Atwood, quote from The Year of the Flood

“Amazing how the heart clutches at anything familiar, whimpering Mine!Mine!”
― Margaret Atwood, quote from The Year of the Flood

“Why are we designed to see the world as supremely beautiful just as we're about to be snuffed? Do rabbits feel the same as the fox teeth bite down on their necks? Is it mercy?”
― Margaret Atwood, quote from The Year of the Flood

“All Creatures know that some must die
That all the rest may take and eat;
Sooner or later, all transform
Their blood to wine, their flesh to meat.

But Man alone seeks Vengefulness,
And writes his abstract Laws on stone;
For this false Justice he has made,
He tortures limb and crushes bone.

Is this the image of a god?
My tooth for yours, your eye for mine?
Oh, if Revenge did move the stars
Instead of Love, they would not shine.”
― Margaret Atwood, quote from The Year of the Flood

“I tried to visualize my jealousy as a yellowy-brown cloud boiling around inside me, then going out through my nose like smoke and turning into a stone and falling down into the ground. That did work a little. But in my visualization a plant covered with poison berries would grow out of the stone, whether I wanted it to or not.”
― Margaret Atwood, quote from The Year of the Flood

“She said love was useless, because it led you into dumb exchanges in which you gave too much away, and then you got bitter and mean.”
― Margaret Atwood, quote from The Year of the Flood

“Without the light, no chance; without the dark, no dance.”
― Margaret Atwood, quote from The Year of the Flood

“Maybe sadness was a kind of hunger, she thought. Maybe the two went together.”
― Margaret Atwood, quote from The Year of the Flood

“Now I can see how that can happen. You can fall in love with anybody--a fool, a criminal, a nothing. There are no good rules.”
― Margaret Atwood, quote from The Year of the Flood

“You couldn’t leave words lying around where our enemies might find them.”
― Margaret Atwood, quote from The Year of the Flood

“I'm fine," said Pilar, "for the moment. And the moment is the only time we can be fine in.”
― Margaret Atwood, quote from The Year of the Flood

“As with all knowledge, once you knew it, you couldn't imagine how it was that you hadn't known it before. Like stage magic, knowledge before you knew it took place before your very eyes, but you were looking elsewhere.”
― Margaret Atwood, quote from The Year of the Flood

“It's better to hope than mope!”
― Margaret Atwood, quote from The Year of the Flood

“The Adams and the Eves used to say, We are what we eat, but I prefer to say, we are what we wish. Because if you can't wish, why bother?”
― Margaret Atwood, quote from The Year of the Flood

“But reality has too much darkness in it. Too many crows”
― Margaret Atwood, quote from The Year of the Flood

“She knows she's deceiving herself about that, but she prefers to deceive herself. She desperately needs to believe such pure joy is still possible.”
― Margaret Atwood, quote from The Year of the Flood

“Thus the time passed. Toby stopped counting it. In any case, time is not a thing that passes, said Pilar: it’s a sea on which you float.”
― Margaret Atwood, quote from The Year of the Flood

“Why can't I believe? she asked the darkness.
Behind her eyelids she saw an animal. It was golden colour, with gentle green eyes and canine teeth, and curly wool instead of fur. It opened its mouth, but it did not speak. Instead, it yawned.
It gazed at her. She gazed at it. "You are the effect of a carefully calibrated blend of plant toxins," she told it.
Then she fell asleep.”
― Margaret Atwood, quote from The Year of the Flood

“What restless woman can resist a man with a shovel in one hand and a glowing rose bush in the other, and a moderately crazed glitter in his eyes that might be mistaken for love?”
― Margaret Atwood, quote from The Year of the Flood

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“love. “In time you’ll know joy again.” Joy? I wanted to argue with him. It didn’t seem likely or even possible. One doesn’t heal from this kind of pain. I remembered how my family and friends had struggled to find the right words to comfort me. But there are no words … there simply are no words.”
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“It also makes us question the admonitions that carbohydrate restriction cannot “generally be used safely,” as Theodore Van Itallie wrote in 1979, because it has “potential side effects,” including “weakness, apathy, fatigue, nausea, vomiting, dehydration, postural hypotension, and occasional exacerbation of preexisting gout.” The important clinical question is whether these are short-term effects of carbohydrate withdrawal, or chronic effects that might offset the benefits of weight loss. The same is true for the occasional elevation of cholesterol that will occur with fat loss—a condition known as transient hypercholesterolemia—and that is a consequence of the fact that we store cholesterol along with fat in our fat cells. When fatty acids are mobilized, the cholesterol is released as well, and thus serum levels of cholesterol can spike. The existing evidence suggests that this effect will vanish with successful weight loss, regardless of the saturated-fat content of the diet. Nonetheless, it’s often cited as another reason to avoid carbohydrate-restricted diets and to withdraw a patient immediately from the diet should such a thing be observed, under the mistaken impression that this is a chronic effect of a relatively fat-rich diet. In”
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“It made me hope he would tell me that he still needed me despite all that he had, that he really missed me and wanted me back, but he didn't.”
― Durjoy Datta, quote from Hold My Hand

“Two selfish people make miserable love story. One selfless person and one selfish person make an okay love story that may or may not continue depending on how selfless the one person is. But when two people are selfless... you will have the most beautiful love story in the world and it will only get better in time.”
― Marilyn Grey, quote from Where Love Finds You

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