“We understand more than we know.”
Author detail
Margaret Eleanor Atwood, OC is a Canadian writer. A prolific poet, novelist, literary critic, feminist and activist, she has received national and international recognition for her writing. ATWOOD, whose work has been published in over forty countries, is the author of more than fifty books of fiction, poetry, and critical essays. In addition to The Handmaid's Tale, now a successful MGM-Hulu television series currently preparing its fourth season, her novels include Cat's Eye, shortlisted for the Booker Prize; Alias Grace, which won the Giller Prize in Canada and the Premio Mondello in Italy; The Blind Assassin, winner of the 2000 Booker Prize; Oryx and Crake, shortlisted for the 2003 Booker Prize; The Penelopiad; The Heart Goes Last; Hag-seed; and The Testaments, a sequel to The Handmaid's Tale, published in September, 2019. She lives in Toronto some of the time.
Quotes
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“We understand more than we know.”
“We shouldn't have been so scornful; we should have had compassion. But compassion takes work, and we were young.”
“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 onl...”
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“Neither of us says the word love, not once. It would be tempting fate; it would be romance, bad luck.”
“You fit into me like a hook into an eye a fish hook an open eye”
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“Variation on the Word Sleep I would like to watch you sleeping, which may not happen. I would like to watch you, sleeping. I would like to sleep with you, to enter your sleep as its smooth d...”
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“Kill what you can't save what you can't eat throw out what you can't throw out bury What you can't bury give away what you can't give away you must carry with you, it is always heavier than...”
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“Where do the words go when we have said them?”
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“with shrunken fingers we ate our oranges and bread, shivering in the parked car; though we know we had never been there before, we knew we had been there before.”
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“Then there's the two of us. This word is far too short for us, it has only four letters, too sparse to fill those deep bare vacuums between the stars that press on us with their deafness. It...”
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“I planned my death carefully, unlike my life, which meandered along from one thing to another, despite my feeble attempts to control it.”
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“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 co...”
“Glenn used to say the reason you can't really imagine yourself being dead was that as soon as you say, 'I'll be dead,' you've said the word I, and so you're still alive inside the sentence....”
“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 Chorus Line: A Rope-Jumping Rhyme we are the maids the ones you killed the ones you failed we danced in air our bare feet twitched it was not fair with every goddess, queen, and bitch fr...”
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“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 dat...”
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“Truly amazing, what people can get used to, as long as there are a few compensations.”
“There I am, in the Grade Six class picture, smiling broadly. Happy as a clam, is what my mother says for happy. I am happy as a clam: hardshelled, firmly closed.”
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“We yearned for the future. How did we learn it, that talent for insatiability?”
“...we must be a beacon of hope, because if you tell people there's nothing they can do, they will do worse than nothing.”