I would like to be the air that inhabits you for a moment only. I would like to be that unnoticed and that necessary.
How could I be sleeping with this particular man…. Surely only true love could justify my lack of taste.
A truth should exist,it should not be usedlike this. If I love youis that a fact or a weapon?
Hatred would have been easier. With hatred, I would have known what to do. Hatred is clear, metallic, one-handed, unwavering; unlike love.
This is how the girl who couldn’t speak and the man who couldn’t see fell in love.
The Eskimo has fifty-names for snow because it is important to them there ought to be as many for love.
A home filled with nothing but yourself. It’s heavy, that lightness. It’s crushing, that emptiness.
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.
I’m not senile,” I snapped. “If I burn the house down it will be on purpose.
The truth is seldom welcome, especially at dinner.
It must have been then that I began to lose faith in reasonable argument as the sole measure of truth.
There were a lot of gods. Gods always come in handy, they justify almost anything.
Our heaven is their hell, said God. I like a balanced universe.
You might even provide a Heaven for them. We need You for that. Hell we can make for ourselves.
We shouldn’t have been so scornful; we should have had compassion. But compassion takes work, and we were young.
Truly amazing, what people can get used to, as long as there are a few compensations.
Romance takes place in the middle distance. Romance is looking in at yourself through a window clouded with dew. Romance means leaving things out: where life grunts and shuffles, romance only sighs.
Neither of us says the word love, not once. It would be tempting fate; it would be romance, bad luck.
We yearned for the future. How did we learn it, that talent for insatiability?
One of the gravestones in the cemetery near the earliest church has an anchor on it and an hourglass, and the words In Hope.In Hope. Why did they put that above a dead person? Was it the corpse hoping, or those still alive?
…we must be a beacon of hope, because if you tell people there’s nothing they can do, they will do worse than nothing.
I planned my death carefully, unlike my life, which meandered along from one thing to another, despite my feeble attempts to control it.
If you really want to stay the same age you are now forever and ever, she’d be thinking, try jumping off the roof: death’s a sure-fire method for stopping time.
The reason they invented coffins, to lock the dead in, preserve them, they put makeup on them; they didn’t want them spreading or changing into anything else. The stone with the name and date was on them to weight them down.
Via the conduit of a wild dog pack, she has now made the ultimate Gift to her fellow Creatures, and has become part of God’s great dance of proteins.
You fit into melike a hook into an eyea fish hookan open eye
Kill what you can’t savewhat you can’t eat throw outwhat you can’t throw out buryWhat you can’t bury give awaywhat you can’t give away you must carry with you,it is always heavier than you thought.
with shrunken fingerswe ate our oranges and bread,shivering in the parked car;though we know we had neverbeen there before,we knew we had been there before.
Fatigue is here, in my body, in my legs and eyes. That is what gets you in the end. Faith is only a word, embroidered.
By telling you anything at all I’m at least believing in you, I believe you’re there, I believe you into being. Because I’m telling you this story I will your existence. I tell, therefore you are.
Perhaps I write for no one. Perhaps for the same person children are writing for when they scrawl their names in the snow.
Good writing takes place at intersections, at what you might call knots, at places where the society is snarled or knotted up.
Everyone thinks writers must know more about the inside of the human head, but that’s wrong. They know less, that’s why they write. Trying to find out what everyone else takes for granted.
Maybe I don’t really want to know what’s going on. Maybe I’d rather not know. Maybe I couldn’t bear to know. The Fall was a fall from innocence to knowledge.
Knowing was a temptation. What you don’t know won’t tempt you.
So we couldn’t mingle with them, but we could eavesdrop. We got our knowledge that way–we caught it like germs.
Maybe I don’t really want to know what’s going on. Maybe I’d rather not know. Maybe I couldn’t bear to know.The Fall was a fall from innocence to knowledge.
Ignoring isn’t the same as ignorance, you have to work at it.
Better not to invent her in her absence. Better to wait until she’s actually here. Then he can make her up as she goes along.
You shouldn’t do that,” said Laura. “You could set yourself on fire.
Time is not a line but a dimension, like the dimensions of space. If you can bend space you can bend time also, and if you knew enough and could move faster than light you could travel backward in tie and exist in two places at once.
Time: old cold time, old sorrow, settling down in layers like silt in a pond.
We were the people who were not in the papers. We lived in the blank white spaces on the edges of print.
That is how we writers all started: by reading. We heard the voice of a book speaking to us.
I lie on the floor, washed by nothing and hanging on. I cry at night. I am afraid of hearing voices, or a voice. I have come to the edge, of the land. I could get pushed over.
What am I living for and what am I dying for are the same question.
This is what I miss, Cordelia: not something that’s gone, but something that will never happen. Two old women giggling over their tea.
Perhaps its not the world that is soundless but we who are deaf.
It wasn’t so easy though, ending the war. A war is a huge fire; the ashes from it drift far, and settle slowly.
Could it be he was feeling a certain nostalgia for the war, despite its stench and meaningless carnage? For that questionless life of instinct?
How did the war creep up? How did it gather itself together? What was it made from? What secrets, lies, betrayals? What loves and hatreds? What sums of money, what metals?
But my dreaming self refuses to be consoled. It continues to wander, aimless, homeless, alone. It cannot be convinced of its safety by any evidence drawn from my waking life.
In the daylight we knowwhat’s gone is gone,but at night it’s different.Nothing gets finished,not dying, not mourning;
from under the ground, from under the waters,they clutch at us, they clutch at us,we won’t let go.
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.
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.
These things sneak up on him for no reason, these flashes of irrational happiness. It’s probably a vitamin deficiency.
I always thought eating was a ridiculous activity anyway. I’d get out of it myself if I could, though you’ve got to do it to stay alive, they tell me.
Her metaphors for her children included barnacles encrusting a ship and limpets clinging to a rock.
Here’s a health to our Captain, so gallant and freeWhether stuck on a rock or asleep ‘neath a treeOr rolled in the arms of some nymph of the seaWhich is where we would all like to be, man!
We still think of a powerful man as a born leader and a powerful woman as an anomaly.
Vanity is becoming a nuisance, I can see why women give it up, eventually. But I’m not ready for that yet.
Forgiving men is so much easier than forgiving women.
I am tempted to think that to be despised by her sex is a very great compliment to a woman.
According to Tobias, women hang around longer because they’re less capable of indignation and better at being humiliated, for what is old age but one long string of indignities? What person of integrity would put up with it?
My self is a thing that I must now compose…as one composes a speech. What I must present is a ‘made’ thing. Not something born.
Our big mistake was teaching them to read. We won’t do that again.
As we know from the study of history, no new system can impose itself upon a previous one without incorporating many of the elements to be found in the latter…
Like preachers, I sell vision,like perfume ads, desireor its facsimile. Like jokesor war, it’s all in the timing.I sell men back their worse suspicions:that everything’s for sale,
When any civilization is dust and ashes,” he said, “art is all that’s left over. Images, words, music. Imaginative structures. Meaning—human meaning, that is—is defined by them. You have to admit that.
I read for pleasure and that is the moment I learn the most.
The answers you get from literature depend on the questions you pose.
If writing novels – and reading them – have any redeeming social value, it’s probably that they force you to imagine what it’s like to be somebody else. Which increasingly is something we all need to know.
How easy it is to invent a humanity, for anyone at all.
Of course there are mothers,squeezing their breastsdry, pawning their bodies,shedding teeth for their children,or that’s our fond belief.But remember – Hanseland Gretel were dumped in the forestbecause their parents were starving.
In the spring, at the end of the day, you should smell like dirt.
Nature is an expert in cost-benefit analysis,’ she says. ‘Although she does her accounting a little differently. As for debts, she always collects in the long run…
They will not let you have peace, they don’t want you to have anything they don’t have themselves.
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.
What you don’t know won’t hurt you. A dubious maxim: sometimes what you don’t know can hurt you very much.
They were new money, without a doubt: so new it shrieked. Their clothes looked as it they’d covered themselves in glue, then rolled around in hundred-dollar bills.
The heart with letters on it shining like a light bulb through the trim hole painted in the chest, art history.
Can I be blamed for wanting a real body, to put my arms around? Without it I too am disembodied. I can listen to my own heartbeat against the bedsprings…but there’s something dead about it, something deserted.
Heroes need monsters to establish their heroic credentials. You need something scary to overcome.
Expand your world. (Stories about wizards and spells) are very frequently about power relationships…
No mother is ever, completely, a child’s idea of what a mother should be, and I suppose it works the other way around as well.
Moira had power now, she’d been set loose, she’d set herself loose. She was now a loose woman.I think we found this frightening.
They didn’t realize that her clumsiness was not the ordinary kind, not poor coordination. It was just because she wasn’t sure where the edges of her body ended and the rest of the world began.
This form of love is like the painof childbirth: so intenseit’s hard to remember afterwards,
Messy love is better than none.I guess. I’m no authorityon sane living.
Sex is like a drink, it’s bad to start brooding about it too early in the day.
A bachelor, a studio, those were the names for that kind of apartment. Separate entrance it would say in the ads, and that meant you could have sex, unobserved.
It’s all about sex and territory,which are what will finish us offin the long run.
I remember Queen Victoria’s advice to her daughter. Close your eyes and think of England.
Nobody wanted to be sexless, but nobody wanted to be nothing but sex.
Not that it isn’t great to see you. But it’s not so great for you. What’d you do wrong? Laugh at his dick?
Nobody wanted to be sexless, but nobody wanted to be nothing but sex
But it seems she’d wanted children after all, because when she was told she’d been accidentally sterilized she could feel all the light leaking out of her.
Men are afraid that women will laugh at them. Women are afraid that men will kill them.
All you have to do, I tell myself, is keep your mouth shut and look stupid. It shouldn’t be that hard.
She was not stunned, the way I was. In some strange way she was gleeful, as if this was what she had been expecting for some time and now she’d been proven right.
There’s just one thing I want you to remember. You know those chemicals women have in them, when they’ve got PMS? Well, men have the very same chemicals in them all the time.
He was a dork, a dink, a dong… Why should the male member be used as a term of abuse? No man hated his own dorkdinkdong, quite the opposite. But maybe it was an affront that any other man had one. That must be the truth.
I don’t want a man around, what use are they except for ten seconds’ worth of half babies
Lambhood and tigerishness may be found in either gender, and in the same individual at different times.
But if you happen to be a man, sometime in the future, and you’ve made it this far, please remember: you will never be subjected to the temptation of feeling you must forgive, a man, as a woman.
But there’s something missing in them, even the nice ones. It’s like they’re permanently absent-minded, like that can’t quite remember who they are.
Fraternize means to behave like a brother. Luke told me that. He said there was no corresponding word that meant to behave like a sister. Sororize, it would have to be, he said. From the Latin.
Though I knew how this failure would hurt you, I had to fold like a grey moth and let go.You could not believe I was more than your echo.
A lot of people call you a feminist painter.””What indeed,” I say. “I hate party lines, I hate ghettos. Anyway. I’m too old to have invented it and you’re too young to understand it, so what’s the point of discussing it at all?
You can wipe your feet on me, twist my motives around all you like, you can dump millstones on my head and drown me in the river, but you can’t get me out of the story. I’m the plot, babe, and don’t ever forget it.
… Remember that forgiveness too is a power. To beg for it is a power, and to withold or bestow it is a power, perhaps the greatest.
What is believed in society is not always the equivalent of what is true; but as regards to a woman’s reputation, it amounts to the same thing.
What fabrications they are, mothers. Scarecrows, wax dolls for us to stick pins into, crude diagrams. We deny them an existence of their own, we make them up to suit ourselves — our own hungers, our own wishes, our own deficiencies.
He feels the need to hear a human voice—a fully human voice like his own. Sometimes he laughs like a hyena or roars like a lion—his idea of a hyena his idea of a lion.
By telling you anything at all I’m at least believing in you, I believe you’re there, I believe you into being.
Debt . . . . that peculiar nexus where money, narrative or story, and religious belief intersect, often with explosive force.
All stories are about wolves. All worth repeating, that is. Anything else is sentimental drivel.
When they’re gone out of his head, these words, they’ll be gone, everywhere, forever. As if they had never been.
speech to him was a task, a battle, words mustered behind his beard and issued one at a time, heavy and square like tanks.
You couldn’t leave words lying around where our enemies might find them.
Last night I felt the approach of nothing. Not too close but on its way, like a wingbeat, like the cooling of the wind, the slight initial tug of an undertow.
Never pray for justice, because you might get some.
Men and women tried each other on, casually, like suits, rejecting whatever did not fit.
…He was wrong about the sadness though: far better to have it when you’re young. A sad pretty girl inspires the urge to console, unlike a sad old crone.
They spent the first three years of school getting you to pretend stuff and then the rest of it marking you down if you did the same thing.
Ah men,why do you want all this attention?I can write poems for myself, make love to a doorknob if absolutelynecessary. What do you have to offer meI can’t find otherwiseexcept humiliation? Which I no longerneed.
After they had skated around the pond several times, my father asked my mother to marry him. I expect he did it awkwardly, but awkwardness in men was a sign of sincerity then.
I wasn’t even sure I wanted a man in my life again; by that time I’d exhausted the notion that the answer to a man is another man, and I was out of breath.
It isn’t chic for women to be drunk. Men drunks are more excusable, more easily absolved, but why? It must be thought they have better reasons.
When we think of the past it’s the beautiful things we pick out. We want to believe it was all like that.
The fact is that I hate this city. I’ve hated it so long I can hardly remember feeling any other way about it.
I can’t remember what I really felt. Maybe nothing happened, maybe these emotions I remember are not the right emotions.
He keeps his voice kindly but remote. A cross between a pedagogue, soothsayer, and a benevolent uncle – that should be his tone.
Those who live alone slide into the habit of vertical eating: why bother with the niceties when there’s no one to share or censure? But laxity in one area may lead to derangement in all.
Confronted by too much emptiness, said Adam One, the brain invents. Loneliness creates company as thirst creates water. How many sailors have been wrecked in pursuit of islands that were merely a shimmering?
What should I take? Something that will not be missed. In the wood at midnight, a magic flower.
But people will do anything rather than admit that their lives have no meaning.
I want everything back, the way it was. But there is no point to it, this wanting.
The past isn’t quaint while you’re in it. Only at a safe distance, later, when you can see it as décor, not as the shape your life’s been squeezed into.
I didn’t much like it, this grudge-holding against the past.
you can’t change the past,Aunt Lou used to say.Oh, but I wanted to;that was the one thing I really wanted to do
You cynical shit,” he told himself. Then he started to weep.”Don’t be so fucking sentimental,” Crake used to tell him. But why not? Why shouldn’t he be sentimental? It wasn’t as if there was anyone around to question his
I wonderif I should let my hair go greyso my advice will be better.
Pink is supposed to weaken your enemies, make them go soft on you, which must be why it’s used for baby girls. It’s a wonder the military hasn’t got on to this.
I’m not mad because I’m a woman,” I say. “I’m mad because you’re an asshole.
You always do good ones. We trust you, Mr. Duke,” Says Dylan. Foolish lads, thinks Felix: never trust a professional ham.
Perhaps he was merely being friendly. Perhaps he saw the look on my face and mistook it for something else. Really what I wanted was the cigarette.
There’s an epigram tacked to my office bulletin board, pinched from a magazine — “Wanting to meet an author because you like his work is like wanting to meet a duck because you like pâté.
With the young writers now it’s F and C all day long, which he, personally, finds boring.
Stupidity is the same as evil if you judge by the results.
I am not scoffing at goodness, which is far more difficult to explain than evil, and just as complicated. But sometimes it’s hard to put up with.
Falling in love… how could he have made such light of it? Sneered even. As if it was trivial for us, a frill, a whim. It was, on the contrary, heavy going. It was the central thing, the way you understood yourself.
In the desert there is no sign that says, ‘Thou shalt not eat stones.
Experiences were what you got when you couldn’t get what you wanted.
Touch comes before sight, before speech. It is the first language and the last, and it always tells the truth.
He put his arms around me. We were both feeling miserable. How were we to know we were happy, even then? Because we at least had that: arms, around.
I’m sad now, the way we’re talking is infinitely sad: faded music, faded paper flowers, worn satin, an echo of an echo. All gone away, no longer possible.
Why do we want other people to like us, even if we don’t really care about them all that much?
Our problem right now is that we’re so specialized that if the lights go out, there are a huge number of people who are not going to know what to do. But within every dystopia there’s a little utopia.
It disturbs me that he can remember some of these things about himself, but not others; that the things he’s lost or misplaced exist now only for me. If he’s forgotten so much, what have I forgotten?
An odd thing souvenir-hunting: now becomes then even while it is still now.
A place with no handholds,no landmarks,no past at all:That would have been too much like dying
If someone wants to suck your toes, those toes should be worth sucking.
I would like to be without shame. I would like to be shameless. I would like to be ignorant. Then I would not know how ignorant I was.
Because I am a mother, I am capable of being shocked; as I never was when I was not one.
There is something subversive about this garden of Serena’s, a sense of buried things bursting upwards, wordlessly, into the light, as if to point, to say: Whatever is silenced will clamor to be heard, though silently.
A voice is a human gift; it should be cherished and used, to utter fully human speech as possible. Powerlessness and silence go together.
It is shocking how many crimes the Bible contains. The Governor’s wife should cut them all out and paste them into her scrapbook.
People change, though, especially after they are dead.
They seemed to be able to choose. We seemed to be able to choose, then. We were a society dying of too much choice.
I am a believer in sensible choices, so different from many of my own. Also in sensible names for children.
Where were we? I’ve forgotten. He was deciding whether to cut her throat or love her forever.Right. Yes. The usual choices.
I used to jog but it’s bad for the knees. Too much beta carotene turns you orange, too much calcium gives you kidney stones. Health kills.
Money isn’t the only thing that must flow and circulate in order to have good value: good turns and gifts must flow and circulate . . . for any social system to remain in balance.
That’s the kind of stories I know. Sad ones. Anyway, taken to it’s logical conclusion, every story is sad, because at the end everyone dies.
Things that are falling apart encourage me: whatever else, I’m in better shape than they are.
And then she began to cry, and when I asked her why she was doing that, she said it was because I was to have a happy ending, and it was just like a book; and I wondered what books she’d been reading.
It must have been an endless breathing in: between the wish to know and the wish to praise there was no seam.
(…) everything I’d been longing to get away from, true, but not through destruction. I’d wanted to leave home, but have it stay in place, waiting for me, unchanged, so I could step back into it at will.
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.
I remember my mean mouth, I remember how wise I thought I was. But I was not wise then. Now I am wise.
I was tired of her getting away with being so young.
Happiness is a garden walled with glass: there’s no way in or out. In Paradise there are no stories, because there are no journeys. It’s loss and regret and misery and yearning that drive the story forward, along its twisted road.
A writer’s age at the time of a work’s composition is never irrelevant.
Madness is only an amplification of what you already are.
I’m not going to have a husband anyway,” said Laura. “I’m going to live by myself in the garage.
Every Canadian has a complicated relationship with the United States, whereas Americans think of Canada as the place where the weather comes from.
He would have died soon, but more painfully. Anyway, it was Urban Bloodshed Limitation. First rule: limit bloodshed by making sure that none of your own gets spilled.
And if I talk to him, I’ll say something wrong, give something away. I can feel it coming, a betrayal of myself.
I am certain that a Sewing Machine would relieve as much human suffering as a hundred Lunatic Asylums, and possibly a good deal more.
No wires tender even as nervescan transmit the impact ofour seasons, our catastropheswhile we are closed inside them
Then sail, my fine lady, on the billowing wave -The water below is as dark as the grave,And maybe you’ll sink in your little blue boat -It’s hope, and hope only, that keeps us afloat
But unshed tears can turn rancid. So can memory. So can biting your tongue. My bad nights were beginning. I couldn’t sleep.
More and more I feel like a letter—deposited here, collected there. But a letter addressed to no one.
I could end this with a moral,as if this were a fable about animals,though no fables are really about animals.
I follow suit, said the lion, vacating his coat of arms and movie logos; and the eagle said, Get me off this flag.
This murdered girl troubles me. After the first shock, nobody at school says much about her. Even Cordelia does not want to talk about her. It’s as if this girl has done something shameful, herself, by being murdered.
He was deciding whether to cut her throat or love her forever.
She looks like a very young old person, or a very old young person; but then, she’s looked that way ever since she was two.
Whatever it was, she knew she would not be blamed for it, she was blameless. But what use had that been to her in the past, to be blameless? So at the same time she felt guilty, and as if she was about to be punished.
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…
…yes, in the obscured sky a moon does float, newly, a wishing moon, a sliver of ancient rock, a goddess, a wink.
So this was the rest of his life. It felt like a party to which he’d been invited, but at an address he couldn’t actually locate. Someone must be having fun at it, this life of his; only, right at the moment, it wasn’t him.
Bless you. Be careful. Anyone intending to meddle with words needs such blessing, such warning.
His father was self-made, but his mother was constructed by others, and such edifices are notoriously fragile.
The best way of keeping a secret is to pretend there isn’t one.
Knowing this secret, being the only one chosen to know, makes me feel important in a way. But it’s a negative importance, it’s the importance of a blank sheet of paper. I can know because I don’t count. I feel singled out, but also bereft.
No mother is ever, completely, a child’s idea of what a mother should be, and I suppose it works the other way around as well. But despite everything, we didn’t do too badly by one another, we did as well as most.
I write as if I’ve lived a lot of things I haven’t lived.
Religious people of any serious kind made her nervous: they were like men in raincoats who might or might not be flashers.
Suddenly revenge is so close he can actually taste it. It tastes like steak, rare.
I thought my heart was pure. We do like to have such good opinions of our own motives when we’re about to do something harmful, to someone else.
But what is a memorial, when you come right down to it, but a commemoration of wounds endured? Endured, and resented. Without memory, there can be no revenge.
The young habitually mistake lust for love, they’re infested with idealism of all kinds.
So that’s what art is, for the artist,” said Crake. “An empty drainpipe. An amplifier. A stab at getting laid.
Or he’d watch the news: more plagues, more famines, more floods, more insect or microbe or small-mammal outbreaks, more droughts, more chickenshit boy-soldier wars in distant countries. Why was everything so much like itself?
So that made me happy but the part that really made me happy was that you wanted me to be happy. That’s what Thank you means.
Perfection exacts a price, but it’s the imperfect who pay it
He is talking to people in Toronto, trying to find out if I am guilty; but he won’t find it out that way. He doesn’t understand yet that guilt comes to you not from the things you’ve done, but from the things that other have done for you.
Every habit he’s ever had is still there in his body, lying dormant like flowers in the desert. Given the right conditions, all his old addictions would burst into full and luxuriant bloom.
I’m not used to girls, or familiar with their customs. I feel awkward around them, I don’t know what to say. I know the unspoken rules of boys, but with girls I sense that I am always on the verge of some unforeseen, calamitous blunder.
Nothing is more difficult than to understand the dead, I’ve found; but nothing is more dangerous than to ignore them.
She knows herself to be at the mercy of events, and she knows by now that events have no mercy.
Why is it we want so badly to memorialize ourselves? Even while we’re still alive. We wish to assert our existence, like dogs peeing on fire hydrants.
The best way of being kind to bears is not to be very close to them.
Gender roles suck,” says Swift Fox.Then you should stop playing them, thinks Toby.
You can only be jealous of someone who has something you think you ought to have yourself.
The newspaper journalists like to believe the worst; they can sell more papers that way, as one of them told me himself; for even upstanding and respectable people dearly love to read ill of others.
Why is it always such a surprise? thinks Toby. The moon. Even though we know it’s coming. Every time we see it, it makes us pause, and hush.
Don’t interfere with false gods, you’ll get the gold paint all over your hands.
I am alive, I live, I breathe, I put my hand out, unfolded, into the sunlight.
Galleries are frightening places, places of evaluation, of judgement.
You need to give money when someone gives you a knife. So the bad luck won’t cut you. I wouldn’t like it for you to be cut by the bad luck, Jimmy.
I want, I don’t want.How can one live with such a heart?
To take that risk, to offer life and remain alive, open yourself like this and become whole.
She wasn’t stupid. She just didn’t want to put her neuron power into long sentences.
Every war is the war for whoever’s lived through it.
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.
Time rises and rises, and when it reaches the level of your eyes you drown.
How furious she must be, now that she’s been taken at her word.
Creating some god for one’s inspirations was always a good way to avoid accusations of pride should the scheme succeed, as well as the blame if did not.
It isn’t the sort of thing you ask questions about, because the answers are not usually answers you want to know.
Am I shallow? she asks the mirror. Yes, I am shallow. The sun shines on the ripples where it’s shallow. Deep is too dark.
A Tennyson garden, heavy with scent, languid; the return of the word swoon.
Alcohol’s a depressant, it will let me down later.
What else can I do? Once you’ve gone this far you aren’t fit for anything else. Something happens to your mind. You’re overqualified, overspecialized, and everybody knows it.
She would roll up her sleeves and dispense with sentimentality, and do whatever blood-soaked, bad-smelling thing had to be done. She would become adept with axes.
Science fiction, to me, has not only things that wouldn’t happen, but other planets.
It can’t last forever. Others have thought such things, in bad times before this, and they were always right, they did get out one way or another, and it didn’t last forever. Although for them it may have lasted all the forever they had.
It can’t last forever. Others have thought suchthings, in bad times before this, and they were always right, they did get out one way or another, and it didn’tlast forever. Although for them it may have lasted all the forever they had.
What a moron I was to think you were sweet and innocent, when it turns out you were actually college-educated the whole time!
What thumbsuckers we all are…when it comes to mothers.
Think of yourselves as pearls. We, sitting in our rows, eyes down, we make her salivate morally. We are hers to define, we must suffer her adjectives. I think about pearls. Pearls are congealed oyster spit.
It isn’t running away they’re afraid of. We wouldn’t get far. It’s those other escapes, the ones you can open in yourself, given a cutting edge.
Time in dreams is frozen. You can never get away from where you’ve been.
You think you can get rid of things, and people too–leave them behind. You don’t know yet about the habit they have, of coming back.
God works in mysterious ways his wonders to perform, as Reenie used to say. Could it be that Myra is my designated guardian angel? Or is she instead a foretaste of Purgatory? And how do you tell the difference?
Does feminist mean large unpleasant person who’ll shout at you or someone who believes women are human beings? To me it’s the latter, so I sign up
More powerful than God, more evil than the Devil; the poor have it, the rich lack it, and if you eat it you die?
If the national mental illness of the United States is megalomania that of Canada is paranoid schizophrenia.
There are some women who seem to be born without fear just as there are people who are born without the ability to feel pain. … Providence appears to protect such women maybe out of astonishment.
The Eskimos had fifty-two names for snow because it was important to them there ought to be as many for love.
Time is compressed like the fist I close on my knee … I hold inside it the clues and solutions and the power for what I must do now.
A divorce is like an amputation: you survive it but there’s less of you.
Little girls are cute and small only to adults. To one another they are not cute. They are life-sized.
The Eskimos had fifty-two names for snow because it was important to them there ought to be as many for love.
The answers you get from literature depend upon the questions you pose.
A voice is a human gift it should be cherished and used to utter as fully human speech as possible. Powerlessness and silence go together.
Another belief of mine: that everyone else my age is an adult whereas I am merely in disguise.
The Eskimo has fifty-two names for snow because it is important to them there ought to be as many for love.
The Eskimo has fifty-two names for snow because it is important to them there ought to be as many for love.
Being here with him is safety; it’s a cave, where we huddle together while the storm goes on outside. This is a delusion, of course. This room is one of the most dangerous places I could be.
If they want a monster so badly they ought to be provided by one.
Writing is work. It’s also gambling. You don’t get a pension plan. Other people can help you a bit, but essentially you’re on your own. Nobody is making you do this: you chose it, so don’t whine.
You need a certain amount of nerve to be a writer.
I hope that people will finally come to realize that there is only one ‘race’ – the human race – and that we are all members of it.
Sooner or later, I hate to break it to you, you’re gonna die, so how do you fill in the space between here and there? It’s yours. Seize your space.
I hate to tell you this, but you will never actually go to a galaxy far, far away and encounter Darth Vader. That’s science fiction; it isn’t going to happen.
Another belief of mine; that everyone else my age is an adult, whereas I am merely in disguise.
If one of the arguments against eating meat is to do with cruelty and animal intelligence, then lab meat avoids that. There’s also the environmental argument for it.
The Eskimos had fifty-two names for snow because it was important to them: there ought to be as many for love.
If I were going to convert to any religion I would probably choose Catholicism because it at least has female saints and the Virgin Mary.
I tend to feel if people say they’re going to do something, they will, if given the chance.
You will always have partial points of view, and you’ll always have the story behind the story that hasn’t come out yet. And any form of journalism you’re involved with is going to be up against a biased viewpoint and partial knowledge.
Science fiction is filled with Martians and space travel to other planets, and things like that.
Every aspect of human technology has a dark side, including the bow and arrow.
When I am writing fiction, I believe I am much better organized, more methodical – one has to be when writing a novel. Writing poetry is a state of free float.
The society in ‘The Handmaid’s Tale’ is a throwback to the early Puritans whom I studied extensively at Harvard under Perry Miller, to whom the book is dedicated.
I’ve never understood why people consider youth a time of freedom and joy. It’s probably because they have forgotten their own.
If social stability goes pear-shaped, you have a choice between anarchy and dictatorship. Most people will opt for more security, even if they have to give up some personal freedom.