Margaret Atwood citáty

strana 5

„Žijte v přítomnosti, co nejvíc ji využívejte, nic jiného nemáte.“

„Pokud je národní duševní nemocí Spojených států megalomanie, v Kanadě je to paranoidní schizofrenie.“

„Moje seznámení s náboženstvím proběhlo způsobem, jakým se většina dětí v té době seznamovala se sexem, ne na ulici, ale na betonovém školním dvoře se štěrkovými cestičkami, během zimních měsíců, kdy jsem chodila do školy. Děti tu postávaly ve skupinkách, držely se za ruce v palčácích a špitaly si. Strašily mě líčením, že na nebi je nějaký mrtvý stařec, který vidí všechno, co dělám, a já jsem se jim pomstila tím, že jsem jim řekla, jak se rodí miminka. Některé matky pak telefonovaly mojí matce a stěžovaly si na mě, ale já jsem přesvědčená, že mě jejich děti vyděsily víc než já je: ony mi nevěřily, zato já jim ano.“

„V určitém okamžiku se musel můj krk nějak uzavřít, jako když zamrzne rybník nebo se zacelí rána, a já jsem zůstala uvězněná ve své hlavě; od té chvíle se ode mě všechno odráželo, jako bych byla uvnitř nějaké skleněné vázy nebo procházela vesnicí, jejíž obyvatele sice vidím, ale neslyším, protože jim nerozumím. Stěny lahve zkreslují obraz i vnějšímu pozorovateli: žába ve sklenici vypadá široká; když se na mě dívali, musela jsem jim připadat směšná.“

„Minulost je mnohem bezpečnější, protože cokoli v ní je, se už stalo. Nelze to změnit, takže se svým způsobem není čeho bát.“

“She knows herself to be at the mercy of events, and she knows by now that events have no mercy.”

“I'm not senile," I snapped. "If I burn the house down it will be on purpose.”

“Faith is only a word, embroidered.”

“One and one and one and one doesn't equal four. Each one remains unique, there is no way of joining them together. They cannot be exchanged, one for the other. They cannot replace each other.”

“The young habitually mistake lust for love, they're infested with idealism of all kinds.”

“Most mothers worry when their daughters reach adolescence but I was the opposite. I relaxed, I sighed with relief. Little girls are cute and small only to adults. To one another they are not cute. They are life sized.”

“You can wet the rim of a glass and run your finger around the rim and it will make a sound. This is what I feel like: this sound of glass. I feel like the word shatter. I want to be with someone.”

“I'm a fool, to confuse this with goodness. I am not good.
I know too much to be good. I know myself.
I know myself to be vengeful, greedy, secretive and sly.”

“Immortality,' said Crake, ' is a concept. If you take 'mortality' as being, not death, but the foreknowledge of it and the fear of it, then 'immortality' is the absence of such fear. Babies are immortal. Edit out the fear, and you'll be…”

“There's the story, then there's the real story, then there's the story of how the story came to be told. Then there's what you leave out of the story. Which is part of the story too.”

“As all historians know, the past is a great darkness, and filled with echoes.”

“We understand more than we know.”

“You can forget who you are if you're alone too much.”

“There's something to be said for hunger: at least it lets you know you're still alive.”

“The answers you get from literature depend on the questions you pose.”

“Our heaven is their hell, said God. I like a balanced universe.”

“These things sneak up on him for no reason, these flashes of irrational happiness. It's probably a vitamin deficiency.”

“Ah men,
why do you want
all this attention?
I can write poems for myself, make
love to a doorknob if absolutely
necessary. What do you have to offer me
I can't find otherwise
except humiliation? Which I no longer
need.”

“Which of us can resist the temptation of being thought indispensable?”

“I planned my death carefully, unlike my life, which meandered along from one thing to another, despite my feeble attempts to control it.”

“I avoid looking down at my body, not so much because it’s shameful or immodest but because I don’t want to see it. I don’t want to look at something that determines me so completely.”

“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.”

“It wasn't so easy though, ending the war. A war is a huge fire; the ashes from it drift far, and settle slowly.”

“When they're gone out of his head, these words, they'll be gone, everywhere, forever. As if they had never been.”

“I believe that everyone else my age is an adult whereas I am merely in disguise.”

“When you're unhinged, things make their way out of you that should be kept inside, and other things get in that ought to be shut out. The locks lose their powers. The guards go to sleep. The passwords fail.”

“A man is just a woman’s strategy for making other women.”

“Waste not want not. I am not being wasted. Why do I want?”

“We are survivors, of each other. We have been shark to one another, but also lifeboat. That counts for something.”