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Alias Grace QUOTES

Alias Grace QUOTES

1 " 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. "

― Margaret Atwood , Alias Grace

2 " It is shocking how many crimes the Bible contains. The Governor's wife should cut them all out and paste them into her scrapbook. "

― Margaret Atwood , Alias Grace

3 " 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. "

― Margaret Atwood , Alias Grace

4 " I am certain that a Sewing Machine would relieve as much human suffering as a hundred Lunatic Asylums, and possibly a good deal more. "

― Margaret Atwood , Alias Grace

5 " 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. "

― Margaret Atwood , Alias Grace

6 " He’s a young man, my own age or a little older, which is young for a man although not for a woman, as at my age a woman is an old maid but a man is not an old bachelor until he’s fifty, and even then there’s still hope for the ladies, as Mary Whitney used to say. "

― Margaret Atwood , Alias Grace

7 " The door of Reverend Verringer’s impressive manse is opened by an elderly female with a face like a pine plank; the Reverend is unmarried, and has need of an irreproachable housekeeper. Simon is ushered into the library. It is so self-consciously the right sort of library that he has an urge to set fire to it. "

― Margaret Atwood , Alias Grace

8 " If they want a monster so badly they ought to be provided by one. "

― Margaret Atwood , Alias Grace

9 " If we were all on trial for our thoughts, we would all be hanged. "

― Margaret Atwood , Alias Grace

10 " When you are in the middle of a story it isn't a story at all, but only a confusion; a dark roaring, a blindness, a wreckage of shattered glass and splintered wood; like a house in a whirlwind, or else a boat crushed by the icebergs or swept over the rapids, and all aboard powerless to stop it. It's only afterwards that it becomes anything like a story at all. When you are telling it, to yourself or to someone else. "

― Margaret Atwood , Alias Grace

11 " There is no fool like an educated fool... "

― Margaret Atwood , Alias Grace

12 " If I am good enough and quiet enough, perhaps after all they will let me go; but it’s not easy being quiet and good, it’s like hanging on to the edge of a bridge when you’ve already fallen over; you don’t seem to be moving, just dangling there, and yet it is taking all your strength. "

― Margaret Atwood , Alias Grace

13 " Because you may think a bed is a peaceful thing, Sir, and to you it may mean rest and comfort and a good night's sleep. But it isn't so for everyone; and there are many dangerous things that may take place in a bed. "

― Margaret Atwood , Alias Grace

14 " I am afraid of falling into hopeless despair, over my wasted life, and I am still not sure how it happened. "

― Margaret Atwood , Alias Grace

15 " In his student days, he used to argue that if a woman has no other course open to her but starvation, prostitution, or throwing herself from a bridge, then surely the prostitute, who has shown the most tenacious instinct for self-preservation, should be considered stronger and saner than her frailer and no longer living sisters. One couldn't have it both ways, he'd pointed out: if women are seduced and abandoned they're supposed to go mad, but if they survive, and seduce in their turn, then they were mad to begin with. "

― Margaret Atwood , Alias Grace

16 " The small details of life often hide a great significance. "

― Margaret Atwood , Alias Grace

17 " A prison does not only lock its inmates inside, it keeps all others out. Her strongest prison is of her own construction. "

― Margaret Atwood , Alias Grace

18 " They are hypocrites, they think the Church is a cage to keep God in, so he will stay locked up there and not go wandering about the earth during the week, poking his nose into their business, and looking in the depths and darkness and doubleness of their hearts, and their lack of true charity; and they believed they need only be bothered about him on Sundays when they have their best clothes on and their faces straight, and their hands washed and their gloves on, and their stories all prepared. "

― Margaret Atwood , Alias Grace

19 " He doesn't understand yet that guilt comes to you not from the things you've done, but from the things that others have done to you. "

― Margaret Atwood , Alias Grace

20 " While he writes, I feel as if he is drawing me; or not drawing me, drawing on me - drawing on my skin - not with the pencil he is using, but with an old-fashioned goose pen, and not with the quill end but with the feather end. As if hundreds of butterflies have settled all over my face, and are softly opening and closing their wings. "

― Margaret Atwood , Alias Grace