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Moral Disorder and Other Stories QUOTES

Moral Disorder and Other Stories QUOTES

1 " You can't lead if no one will follow. "

― Margaret Atwood , Moral Disorder and Other Stories

2 " Breasts were one thing: they were in front, where you could have some control over them. Then there were bums, which were behind, and out of sight, and thus more lawless. Apart from loosely gathered skirts, nothing much could be done about them. "

― Margaret Atwood , Moral Disorder and Other Stories

3 " 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. "

― Margaret Atwood , Moral Disorder and Other Stories

4 " In the end, we'll all become stories. "

― Margaret Atwood , Moral Disorder and Other Stories

5 " She wasn't ready to settle down, she told her friends. That was one way of putting it. Another was would have been that she had not found anyone to settle down with. There had been several men in her life, but they hadn't been convincing. They'd been somewhat like her table - quickly acquired, brightened up a little, but temporary. The time for that kind of thing was running out, however. She was tired of renting. "

― Margaret Atwood , Moral Disorder and Other Stories

6 " The objects I chose were designed to hold something, but I didn't fill them up. They remained empty. They were little symbolic shrines to thirst. "

― Margaret Atwood , Moral Disorder and Other Stories

7 " I thought everyone would be familiar with this figure: if I'd studied a thing in school I assumed it was general knowledge. I hadn't yet discovered that I lived in a sort of transparent balloon, drifting over the world without making much contact with it, and that the people I knew appeared to me at a different angle from the one at which they appeared to themselves; and that the reverse was also true. I was smaller to others, up there in my balloon, than I was to myself. I was also blurrier. "

― Margaret Atwood , Moral Disorder and Other Stories

8 " In the end, we'll all become stories. Or else we'll become entities. Maybe it's the same. "

― Margaret Atwood , Moral Disorder and Other Stories

9 " I've learned quite a lot, over the years, by avoiding what I was supposed to be learning. "

― Margaret Atwood , Moral Disorder and Other Stories

10 " In pictures like these there are always empty shoes. It's the shoes that get to me. Sad, that innocent daily task - putting your shoes on your feet, in the firm belief that you'll be going somewhere. "

― Margaret Atwood , Moral Disorder and Other Stories

11 " Dead was not an absolute concept to her. Some people were more dead than others, and finally it was a matter of opinion who was dead and who was alive, so it was best not to discuss such a thing. "

― Margaret Atwood , Moral Disorder and Other Stories

12 " I could do a good imitation of a competent young woman. "

― Margaret Atwood , Moral Disorder and Other Stories

13 " That was all quite long ago. I see it in retrospect, indulgently, from the point I've reached now. But how else could I see it. We can't really travel to the past, no matter how we try. if we do, it's as tourists. "

― Margaret Atwood , Moral Disorder and Other Stories

14 " I thought of myself as an itinerant brain--the equivalent of a strolling player of Elizabethan times, or else a troubadour, clutching my university degree like a cheap lute. "

― Margaret Atwood , Moral Disorder and Other Stories

15 " One boy had drawn a perfect isosceles triangle on every single page- meticulously, it was emphasized. Meticulously was a chilling touch: meticulousness, we knew, was just one step away from full-blown lunacy. "

― Margaret Atwood , Moral Disorder and Other Stories

16 " But all doors used regularly are doors to the afterlife. "

― Margaret Atwood , Moral Disorder and Other Stories

17 " That image - of a little child being suffocated, or almost suffocated, by others who thought the whole thing was a game - melded with the furtive nocturnal slugs, and my solitary pacing and singing, and the separate, claustrophobic stairway, and the charmless abstract painting, and the gold-framed mirror, and the slithery green satin bedspread, and became inseperable from them. It wasn't a cheerful composite. As a memory, it is more like a fog bank than a sunlit meadow.

Yet I think of that period as having been a happy time in my life.

Happy is the wrong word. Important. "

― Margaret Atwood , Moral Disorder and Other Stories

18 " As any bank robber can tell you (Nell would say), the best thing to do when running away is not to run. Just walk. Just stroll. A combination of ease and purposefulness is desirable. Then no one will notice you're running. In addition to which, don't carry heavy suitcases, or canvas bags full of money, or packsacks with body parts in them. Leave everything behind you except what's in your pockets. Lightest is best. "

― Margaret Atwood , Moral Disorder and Other Stories

19 " Once, I discovered it propped up on my sister's pillow, its neck wrapped in one of our mother's best linen dishtowels. Cookie fragments on dolls' plates were laid out around it, mixed with berries from the prickly-berry hedge, like offerings made to appease an idol. It was wearing a chaplet woven of carrot fronds and marigolds that my sister and Leonie had picked in the garden. The flowers were wilted, the garland was lopsided; the effect was astonishingly depraved, as if a debauched Roman emperor had arrived on the scene and had hacked off his own body in a maiden's chamber as the ultimate sexual thrill. "

― Margaret Atwood , Moral Disorder and Other Stories

20 " bye-bye love, as in songs. All alone now. It was so sad. Why did such things have to disintegrate like that? Why did longing and desire, and friendliness and goodwill too, have to shatter into pieces? Why did they have to be so thoroughfully over?

I could make myself cry even more by repeating the key word: love,alone, sad, over. I did it on purpose. "

― Margaret Atwood , Moral Disorder and Other Stories