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Cat's Eye QUOTES

Cat's Eye QUOTES

1 " Hatred would have been easier. With hatred, I would have known what to do. Hatred is clear, metallic, one-handed, unwavering; unlike love. "

― Margaret Atwood , Cat's Eye

2 " Love blurs your vision; but after it recedes, you can see more clearly than ever. It's like the tide going out, revealing whatever's been thrown away and sunk: broken bottles, old gloves, rusting pop cans, nibbled fishbodies, bones. This is the kind of thing you see if you sit in the darkness with open eyes, not knowing the future. The ruin you've made. "

― Margaret Atwood , Cat's Eye

3 " Potential has a shelf life. "

― Margaret Atwood , Cat's Eye

4 " I look at him with the nostalgic affection men are said to feel for their wars, their fellow veterans. I think, I once threw things at this man. I threw a glass ashtray, a fairly cheap one which didn't break. I threw a shoe (his) and a handbag (mine), not even snapping the handbag shut first, so that he was showered with a metal rain of keys and small change. The worst thing I threw was a small portable television set, standing on the bed and heaving it at him with the aid of the bouncy springs, although the instant I let fly I thought, Oh God, let him duck! I once thought I was capable of murdering him. Today I feel only a mild regret that we were not more civilized with each other at the time. Still, it was amazing, all those explosions, that recklessness, that Technicolor wreckage. Amazing and agonizing and almost lethal. "

― Margaret Atwood , Cat's Eye

5 " All this will happen because people have neglected the basic lessons of Science, they have gone in for politics and religion and wars instead, and sought out passionate excuses for killing one another. Science on the other hand is dispassionate and without bias, it is the only universal language. The language is numbers. When at last we are up to our ears in death and garbage, we will look to Science to clean up our mess. "

― Margaret Atwood , Cat's Eye

6 " I lie on the floor, washed by nothing and hanging on. I cry at night. I am afraid of hearing voices, or a voice. I have come to the edge, of the land. I could get pushed over. "

― Margaret Atwood , Cat's Eye

7 " This is what I miss, Cordelia: not something that’s gone, but something that will never happen. Two old women giggling over their tea. "

― Margaret Atwood , Cat's Eye

8 " She can outstare anyone, and I am almost as good. We’re impervious, we scintillate, we are thirteen. We wear long wool coats with tie belts, the collars turned up to look like those of movie stars, and rubber boots with the tops folded down and men’s work socks inside. In our pockets are stuffed the kerchiefs our mothers make us wear but that we take off as soon as we’re out of their sight. We scorn head coverings. Our mouths are tough, crayon-red, shiny as nails. We think we are friends. "

― Margaret Atwood , Cat's Eye

9 " In my dreams of this city I am always lost. "

― Margaret Atwood , Cat's Eye

10 " Vanity is becoming a nuisance, I can see why women give it up, eventually. But I'm not ready for that yet. "

― Margaret Atwood , Cat's Eye

11 " Forgiving men is so much easier than forgiving women. "

― Margaret Atwood , Cat's Eye

12 " I have periods now, like normal girls; I too am among the knowing, I too can sit out volleyball games and go to the nurse's for aspirin and waddle along the halls with a pad like a flattened rabbit tail wadded between my legs, sopping with liver-colored blood. "

― Margaret Atwood , Cat's Eye

13 " There is never only one, of anyone "

― Margaret Atwood , Cat's Eye

14 " They are boiling with the pressured energy of explosive forces confined in a small space, and with the fervor of all religious movements in their early, purist stages. It is not enough to give lip service and to believe in equal pay: there has to be a conversion, from the heart. Or so they imply. "

― Margaret Atwood , Cat's Eye

15 " I don't want to see anyone. I lie in the bedroom with the curtains drawn and nothingness washing over me like a sluggish wave. Whatever is happening to me is my own fault. I have done something wrong, something so huge I can't even see it, something that's drowning me. I am inadequate and stupid, without worth. I might as well be dead. "

― Margaret Atwood , Cat's Eye

16 " There are days when I can hardly make it out of bed. I find it an effort to speak. I measure progress in steps, the next one and the next one, as far as the bathroom. These steps are major accomplishments. I focus on taking the cap off the toothpaste, getting the brush up to my mouth. I have difficulty lifting my arm to do even that. I feel I am without worth, that nothing I can do is of any value, least of all to myself. "

― Margaret Atwood , Cat's Eye

17 " Last night I felt the approach of nothing. Not too close but on its way, like a wingbeat, like the cooling of the wind, the slight initial tug of an undertow. "

― Margaret Atwood , Cat's Eye

18 " Never pray for justice, because you might get some. "

― Margaret Atwood , Cat's Eye

19 " There were no men in this painting, but it was about men, the kind who caused women to fall. I did not ascribe any intentions to these men. They were like the weather, they didn't have a mind. They merely drenched you or struck you like lightning and moved on, mindless as blizzards. Or they were like rocks, a line of sharp slippery rocks with jagged edges. You could walk with care along between the rocks, picking your steps, and if you slipped you'd fall and cut yourself, but it was no use blaming the rocks. "

― Margaret Atwood , Cat's Eye

20 " He's lost something, some illusion I used to think was necessary to him. He's come to realize he too is human. Or is this a performance, for my benefit, to show me he's up-to-date? Maybe men shouldn't have been told about their own humanity. It's only made them uncomfortable. It's only made them trickier, slier, more evasive, harder to read. "

― Margaret Atwood , Cat's Eye