Quote

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.

Margaret Atwood

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Margaret Atwood
Age: 85
Born: 1939
Born: November 18
Essayist
Inventor
Literary Critic
Non-Fiction Writer
Novelist
Pedagogue
Poet
Science Fiction Writer
Writer
Ottawa (Ontario)
Margaret Eleanor Atwood
Happiness
Regret
Journeys
Stories
Road
Twisted
Way
Garden
Yearning
Forward
Glass
Loss
Paradise
Along
Glasses
Journey
Drive
Story
Misery
Walled

More quotes by Margaret Atwood

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I felt white, drained of blood, cared for, purified. Peaceful.
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How could I be sleeping with this particular man.... Surely only true love could justify my lack of taste.
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There is something reassuring about the toilets. Bodily functions at least remain democratic. Everybody shits.
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If it's a story I'm telling, then I have control over the ending... But if it's a story, even in my head, I must be telling it to someone. You don't tell a story only to yourself. There's always someone else. Even when there is no one.
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We slept in what had once been the gymnasium.
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Things might have been different if she hadn't been able to drift if she'd had to concentrate on her next meal, instead of dwelling on all the injuries she felt we'd done her. An unearned income encourages self-pity in those already prone to it.
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Vanity is becoming a nuisance, I can see why women give it up, eventually. But I'm not ready for that yet.
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No matter how much you've been warned, Death always comes without knocking. Why now? is the cry. Why so soon? It's the cry of a child being called home at dusk.
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We should take a lesson from the Irish potato famine: monocultures are vulnerable. Monocultures of any kind are very vulnerable, because one change and you're cooked. So we should be diversifying, wouldn't you say?
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we lived in the gaps between the stories
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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.
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There may not be one Truth - there may be several truths - but saying that is not to say that reality doesn't exist.
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oil paints...the look of licked lips.
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... all this talking, this rather liquid confessing, was something I didn't think I could ever bring myself to do. It seemed foolhardy to me, like an uncooked egg deciding to to come out of its shell: there would be a risk of spreading out too far, turning into a formless puddle.
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But in the end, back she comes. There's no use resisting. She goes to him for amnesia, for oblivion. She renders herself up, is blotted out enters the darkness of her own body, forgets her name. Immolation is what she wants, however briefly. To exist without boundaries.
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More of your brain is involved when reading than it is when you watch television... because you are supplying just about everything... you're a creator.
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Knowledge is power only as long as you keep your mouth shut.
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Like the trains, she's never on time and always departing.
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You aren't sick & unhappy only alive & stuck with it.
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Fear has a smell, as love does.
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