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Margaret Quotes

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Margaret Quotes

“"Who taught you to raise the dead?" "N-no one. I—I've never even met another necromancer before you." Not exactly true. I'd briefly met the ghost of one, but he hadn't been much help. "Did the Edison Group give you books? Manuals?" "J-Just a history book that I—I skimmed through a bit. Th-there wasn't anything on rituals." A moment of silence as she studied me through the mirror. "You were trying to make a point, weren't you, Chloe?" "Wh-what?" "I said you couldn't raise the dead; you proved you could. You visualized returning a soul—" "No!" my stutter fell away. "Returning a ghost to a rotting corpse to make a point? I'd never do that. I was doing exactly what you asked—trying to pull that spirit through. I was summoning. But if I do that with dead bodies around, I can raise the dead. That's what I tried to tell you." She drove for a minute, the silence heavy. Then her gaze rose to the mirror again, meeting mine. "You're telling me you can raise the dead simply by summoning?" "Yes." "My God," she whispered, staring at me. "What have they done?" Hearing her words and seeing her expression, I knew Derek had been right last night. I'd just done something worse than raising the dead—I'd confirmed her worst fears about us.”

BlameChloeSummoningAccusationsMargaretRaising The Dead
Book:The Reckoning
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“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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