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Margaret Atwood

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Famous Margaret Atwood Quotes

“Helen of Troy Does Counter Dancing The world is full of women who'd tell me I should be ashamed of myself if they had the chance. Quit dancing. Get some self-respect and a day job. Right. And minimum wage, and varicose veins, just standing in one place for eight hours behind a glass counter bundled up to the neck, instead of naked as a meat sandwich. Selling gloves, or something. Instead of what I do sell. You have to have talent to peddle a thing so nebulous and without material form. Exploited, they'd say. Yes, any way you cut it, but I've a choice of how, and I'll take the money. I do give value. Like preachers, I sell vision, like perfume ads, desire or its facsimile. Like jokes or war, it's all in the timing. I sell men back their worst suspicions: that everything's for sale, and piecemeal. They gaze at me and see a chain-saw murder just before it happens, when thigh, ass, inkblot, crevice, tit, and nipple are still connected. Such hatred leaps in them, my beery worshipers! That, or a bleary hopeless love. Seeing the rows of heads and upturned eyes, imploring but ready to snap at my ankles, I understand floods and earthquakes, and the urge to step on ants. I keep the beat, and dance for them because they can't. The music smells like foxes, crisp as heated metal searing the nostrils or humid as August, hazy and languorous as a looted city the day after, when all the rape's been done already, and the killing, and the survivors wander around looking for garbage to eat, and there's only a bleak exhaustion. Speaking of which, it's the smiling tires me out the most. This, and the pretense that I can't hear them. And I can't, because I'm after all a foreigner to them. The speech here is all warty gutturals, obvious as a slam of ham, but I come from the province of the gods where meaning are lilting and oblique. I don't let on to everyone, but lean close, and I'll whisper: My mothers was raped by a holy swan. You believe that? You can take me out to dinner. That's what we tell all the husbands. There sure are a lot of dangerous birds around. Not that anyone here but you would understand. The rest of them would like to watch me and feel nothing. Reduce me to components as in a clock factory or abattoir. Crush out the mystery. Wall me up alive in my own body. They'd like to see through me, but nothing is more opaque than absolute transparency. Look - my feet don't hit the marble! Like breath or a balloon, I'm rising, I hover six inches in the air in my blazing swan-egg of light. You think I'm not a goddess? Try me. This is a torch song. Touch me and you'll burn.”

HouseMorningDancingBurnedOfHelenTroyDoesCounterMargaretAtwood
Book:Morning in the Burned House: Poems
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“It's a wonder they can sit down at all, and when they walk, nothing touches their legs under the billowing skirts, except their shifts and stockings. They are like swans, drifting along on unseen feet; or else like the jellyfish in the waters of the rocky harbour near our house, when I was little, before I ever made the long sad journey across the ocean. They were bell-shaped and ruffled, gracefully waving and lovely under the sea; but if they washed up on the beach and dried out in the sun there was nothing left of them. And that is what the ladies are like: mostly water.”

SwansJellyfish
Book:Alias Grace
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“He wants to see, he wants to know, only to see and know. I'm aware that it is this mentality, this curiosity, which is responsible for the hydrogen bomb and the imminent demise of civilization and that we would all be better off if we were still at the stone-worshipping stage. Though surely it is not this affable inquisitiveness that should be blamed.”

CuriosityMargaret AtwoodInquisitivenessBluebeard S EggUnearthing Suite
Book:Bluebeard's Egg
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“His view of life has darkened since Mr. Banerji returned to India. There is some obscurity around this: it is not talked of much. My mother says he was homesick, and hints at a nervous breakdown, but there was more to it than that. “They wouldn’t promote him,” says my father. There’s a lot behind they (not we), and wouldn’t (not didn’t). “He wasn’t properly appreciated.” I think I know what this means. My father’s view of human nature has always been bleak, but scientists were excluded from it, and now they aren’t. He feels betrayed.”

HumanityRacism And Culture
Book:Cat’s Eye
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“The question, then, is not whether boy should meet girl in Winnipeg or in New York; instead it is, What happens in Canadian literature when boy meets girl? And what sort of boy, and what sort of girl? If you've got this far, you may predict that when boy meets girl she gets cancer and he gets hit by a meteorite. . . .”

HumourousCanlitUniversal ThemesCanadian Tradition
Book:Survival: A Thematic Guide to Canadian Literature
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“Era così che si viveva allora? Vivevamo di abitudini. Come tutti, la maggior parte del tempo. Qualsiasi cosa accade rientra sempre nelle abitudini. Anche questo, ora, è un vivere di abitudini. Vivevamo, come al solito, ignorando. Ignorare non è come non sapere, ti ci devi mettere di buona volontà. Nulla muta istantaneamente: in una vasca da bagno che si riscaldi gradualmente moriresti bollito senza nemmeno accorgertene. C'erano notizie sui giornali, certi giornali, cadaveri dentro rogge o nei boschi, percossi a morte o mutilati, manomesso, così si diceva, ma si trattava di altre donne, e gli uomini che commettevano simili cose erano altri uomini. Non erano gli uomini che conoscevamo. Le storie dei giornali erano come sogni per noi, brutti sogni sognati da altri. Che cose orribili, dicevamo, e lo erano, ma erano orribili senza essere credibili. Erano troppo melodrammatico, avevano una dimensione che non era la dimensione della nostra vita. Noi eravamo la gente di cui non si parlava sui giornali. Vivevamo nei vuoti spazi bianchi ai margini dei fogli e questo ci dava più libertà. Vivevamo negli interstizi tra le storie altrui.”

FeminismEqual RightsFemminismoFeminicide
Book:The Handmaid's Tale
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“Ma se sei un uomo in un qualsiasi tempo futuro, e ce l’hai fatta sin qui, ti prego ricorda: non sarai mai soggetto alla tentazione del perdono, tu uomo, come lo sarà una donna. È difficile resistere, credimi. Ricorda, però, che anche il perdono è un potere. Chiederlo è un potere, e negarlo o concederlo è un potere, forse il più grande.”

ForgivenessMargaret AtwoodThe Handmaid S TaleIl Racconto Dell Ancella
Book:Il racconto dell'Ancella
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“Después de tanto tiempo juntos, ambos tenemos la cabeza atiborrada de esas advertencias menores, esas pistas útiles sobre la otra persona: lo que le gusta y lo que le disgusta, sus preferencias y sus tabúes. No te pongas detrás de mí cuando estoy leyendo. No uses mis cuchillos de cocina. No desordenes. Cada cual cree que el otro debería respetar esa serie frecuentemente repetida de instrucciones de uso, pero el caso es que se anulan las unas a las otras: si Tig debe respetar mi necesidad de remolonear sin pensar en nada, libre de malas noticias, antes de la primera taza de café ¿no debería yo respetar su necesidad de escupir catástrofes para librarse cuanto antes de ellas? -Oh, lo siento- dice, y me dirige una mirada de reproche. ¿Por qué tengo que decepcionarlo de ese modo? ¿No sé acaso que si no puede contarme las malas noticias de inmediato, alguna glándula biliar o alguna úlcera de las malas noticias estallará en su interior y le producirá una peritonitis del alma? Entonces quien lo sentirá seré yo. Tiene razón, debería sentirlo. No me queda nadie más cuyo pensamiento pueda leer.”

MatrimonioRelacionesParejas
Book:Moral Disorder
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“Vosotros los jóvenes no sabéis apreciar las cosas, proseguía. No sabéis lo que hemos tenido que pasar para lograr que estéis donde estáis. Míralo, es él quien pela las zanahorias. ¿Sabéis cuántas vidas de mujeres, cuántos cuerpos de mujeres han tenido que arrollar los tanques para llegar a esta situación? La cocina es mi pasatiempo predilecto, decía Luke. Disfruto cocinando. Un pasatiempo muy original, replicaba mi madre. No tienes por qué darme explicaciones. En otros tiempos no te habrían permitido tener semejante pasatiempo, te habrían llamado marica. Vamos, madre, le decía yo. No discutamos por tonterías. Tonterías, repetía amargamente. Las llamas tonterías. Veo que no entiendes. No entiendes nada de lo que estoy diciendo.”

FeminismHuman RightsFeminismoWomen RightsPuritanismTotalitarismoTotalitarismPuritanismo
Book:The Handmaid’s Tale
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“I look at him with the nostalgic affection men are said to feel for their wars, their fellow veterans. I think, I once threw things at this man. I threw a glass ashtray, a fairly cheap one which didn't break. I threw a shoe (his) and a handbag (mine), not even snapping the handbag shut first, so that he was showered with a metal rain of keys and small change. The worst thing I threw was a small portable television set, standing on the bed and heaving it at him with the aid of the bouncy springs, although the instant I let fly I thought, Oh God, let him duck! I once thought I was capable of murdering him. Today I feel only a mild regret that we were not more civilized with each other at the time. Still, it was amazing, all those explosions, that recklessness, that Technicolor wreckage. Amazing and agonizing and almost lethal.”

Relationships
Book:Cat's Eye
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“If you worked out enough, maybe the man would too. Maybe you would be able to work it out together, as if the two of you were a puzzle that could be solved; otherwise, one of you, most likely the man, taking his addictive body with him and leaving you with bad withdrawal, which you could counteract by exercise. If you didn't work it out it was because one of you had the wrong attitude.”

Relationships
Book:The Handmaid’s Tale
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“The north smells different from the city: clearer, thinner. You can see farther. A sawmill, a hill of sawdust, the teepee shape of a sawdust burner; the smokestacks of the copper smelters, the rocks around them bare of trees, burnt-looking, the heaps of blackened slag: I’ve forgotten about these things all winter, but here they are again, and when I see them I remember them, I know them, I greet them as if they are home.”

CanadaOntarioNorth
Book:Cat’s Eye
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“All stories are about wolves. All worth repeating, that is. Anything else is sentimental drivel. All of them? Sure, he says. Think about it. There's escaping from the wolves, fighting the wolves, capturing the wolves, taming the wolves. Being thrown to the wolves, or throwing others to the wolves so the wolves will eat them instead of you. Running with the wolf pack. Turning into a wolf. Best of all, turning into the head wolf. No other decent stories exist.”

WritingStories
Author:Margaret Atwood
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“When the pendulum swings and it reaches an extreme on either side, you're going to get a totalitarianism, no matter what it starts out calling itself because once people with extreme ideologies actually get some power - although they may have come in on this will make everything wonderful, except we have to get rid of those people, and there's always a those people that have to be gotten rid of - and then that doesn't happen, and they've got some power. And they quite enjoy it, and they wish to retain it. So the American experiment, one of the hallmarks of it was peaceful transfer of power. That is what we consider, you know, one of the absolute key elements of an open liberal democracy. And when you see that starting to be shut down and going away, rule of law goes out the window, another kind of law replaces it, which is joined at the hip with whoever's running the thing. And if you get on the bad side of that, you're kind of doomed because you're not going to get a fair trial, and you're probably going to get a bullet in the back of the neck.”

AmericaPowerDemocracyTotalitarianismRule Of LawAmerican Experiment
Author:Margaret Atwood
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“Dutiful How did I get so dutiful? Was I always that way? Going around as a child with a small broom and dustpan, sweeping up dirt I didn't make, or out into the yard with a stunted rake,, weeding the gardens of others -the dirt blew back, the weeds flourished, despite my efforts- and all the while with a frown of disapproval for other people's fecklessness, and my own slavery. I didn't perform these duties willingly. I wanted to be on the river, or dancing, but something had me by the back of the neck. That's me too, years later, a purple-eyed wreck, because whatever had to be finished wasn't, and I stayed late, grumpy as a snake, on too much coffee, and further on still, those groups composed of mutterings and scoldings, and the set-piece exhortation: somebody ought to do something! That was my hand shooting up. But I've resigned. I've ditched the grip of my echo. I've decided to wear sunglasses, and a necklace adorned with the gold word NO, and eat flowers I didn't grow. Still, why do I feel so responsible for the wailing from shattered houses, for birth defects and unjust wars, and the soft, unbearable sadness filtering down from distant stars?”

Dutiful
Book:The Door
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“In the latter half of the twentieth century, two visionary books cast their shadows over our futures. One was George Orwell's 1949 novel, Nineteen Eighty-Four, with its horrific vision of a brutal mind-controlling totalitarian state - a book that gave us Big Brother, and Thoughtcrime and Newspeak and the Memory Hole and the torture palace called the Ministry of Love, and the discouraging spectacle of a boot grinding into the human face forever. The other was Aldous Huxley's Brave New World (1932), which proposed a different and Softer Form of Totalitarianism - one of conformity achieved through engineered, bottle-grown babies and Hypnotic Persuasion rather than through brutality; of boundless consumption that keeps the wheels of production turning and of officially enforced promiscuity that does away with sexual frustration; of a pre-ordained caste system ranging from a highly intelligent managerial class to a subgroup of dimwitted serfs programmed to love their menial work; and of Soma, a drug that confers instant bliss with no side effects. Which template would win, we wondered? ....Would it be possible for both of these futures - the hard and the soft - to exist a the same time, in the same place? And what would that be like? ....Thoughtcrime and the boot grinding into the human face could not be got rid of so easily, after all. The Ministry of Love is back with us... ....those of us still pottering along on the earthly plane - and thus still able to read books - are left with Brave New World. How does it stand up, seventy-five years later? And how close have we come, in real life, to the society of vapid consumers, idle pleasure-seekers, inner-space trippers, and programmed conformists that it presents? - excerpts from Margaret Atwood's introduction (2007) to Aldous Huxley's Brave New World.”

TotalitarianismBig BrotherNewspeakThoughtcrimeHard Soft TotalitarianismInner Space TrippersMemory HoleMinistry Of LoveVapid Consumers
Author:Margaret Atwood
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“Nyttemmin kadonneessa entisessä maassani oli kaikki mennyt alamäkeä vuosikaudet. Tulvia, tulipaloja, rajumyrskyjä, hurrikaaneja, kuivuuskausia, vesipulaa, maanjäristyksiä. Liian paljon yhtä ja liian vähän toista. Kunnallistekniikka oli romahtamaisillaan - miksi kukaan ei ollut purkanut atomireaktoreja ennen kuin oli liian myöhäistä? Talouskriisi, työttömyys, syntyvyyden lasku. Ihmiset säikähtivät. Sitten he suuttuivat. Tehokkaita lääkkeitä ei ollut. Tarvittiin syntipukki. Miksi luulin, että kaikki siitä huolimatta jatkuisi entiseen tapaan? Siksi kai, että näistä asioista oli puhuttu niin pitkään. Sitä ei tahdo uskoa, että taivas putoaa niskaan, ennen kuin saa murikan päähänsä.”

YhteiskuntaKatastrofiMaailmanloppu
Book:The Testaments
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