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Bluebeard's Egg QUOTES

Bluebeard's Egg QUOTES

1 " It must have been then that I began to lose faith in reasonable argument as the sole measure of truth. "

― Margaret Atwood , Bluebeard's Egg

2 " In the spring, at the end of the day, you should smell like dirt. "

― Margaret Atwood , Bluebeard's Egg

3 " People change, though, especially after they are dead. "

― Margaret Atwood , Bluebeard's Egg

4 " The house, and all the objects in it, crackled with static electricity; undertows washed through it, the air was heavy with things that were known but not spoken. Like a hollow log, a drum, a church, it was amplified, so that conversations whispered in it sixty years ago can be half-heard today. "

― Margaret Atwood , Bluebeard's Egg

5 " Religious people of any serious kind made her nervous: they were like men in raincoats who might or might not be flashers. "

― Margaret Atwood , Bluebeard's Egg

6 " Walking along past the store windows, into which she peers with her usual eagerness, her usual sense that maybe, today, she will discover behind them something that will truly be worth seeing, she feels as if her feet are not on cement at all but on ice. The blade of the skate floats, she knows, on a thin film of water, which it melts by pressure and which freezes behind it. This is the freedom of the present tense, this sliding edge. "

― Margaret Atwood , Bluebeard's Egg

7 " He wants to see, he wants to know, only to see and know. I'm aware that it is this mentality, this curiosity, which is responsible for the hydrogen bomb and the imminent demise of civilization and that we would all be better off if we were still at the stone-worshipping stage. Though surely it is not this affable inquisitiveness that should be blamed. "

― Margaret Atwood , Bluebeard's Egg

8 " Have I been conditioned to believe that if I am not solicitous, if I am not forthcoming, if I am not a never-ending cornicopia of entertaining delights, they will take their collections of milk-bottle tops and their mangy one-eared teddy bears and go away into the woods by themselves to play snipers? Probably. What my mother thinks was merely cute may have been lethal. "

― Margaret Atwood , Bluebeard's Egg

9 " Have I been conditioned to believe that if I am not solicitous, if I am not forthcoming, if I am not a never-ending cornicopia of entertaining delights, they will take their collections of milk-bottle tops and their mangy one-eared teddy bears and go away into the woods by themselves to play snipers? Probably. What my mother things was merely cute may have been lethal. "

― Margaret Atwood , Bluebeard's Egg

10 " What thumbsuckers we all are...when it comes to mothers. "

― Margaret Atwood , Bluebeard's Egg

11 " In theory I can do almost anything; certainly I have been told how. In practice I do as little as possible. I pretend to myself that I would be quite happy in a hermit's cave, living on gruel, if someone else would make the gruel. Gruel, like so many other things, is beyond me. "

― Margaret Atwood , Bluebeard's Egg

12 " Some of these stories, it is understood, are not to be passed on to my father, because they would upset him. It is well known that women can deal with this sort of thing better than men can. Men are not to be told anything they might find too painful; the secret depths of human nature, the sordid physicalities, might overwhelm or damage them. For instance, men often faint at the sight of their own blood, to which they are not accustomed. For this reason you should never stand behind one in the line at the Red Cross donor clinic. Men, for some mysterious reason, find life more difficult than women do. (My mother believes this, despite the female bodies, trapped, diseased, disappearing, or abandoned, that litter her stories.) Men must be allowed to play in the sandbox of their choice, as happily as they can, without disturbance; otherwise they get cranky and won't eat their dinners. There are all kinds of things that men are simply not equipped to understand, so why expect it of them? Not everyone shares this believe about men; neverthetheless, it has its uses. "

― Margaret Atwood , Bluebeard's Egg

13 " ...he was the kind of boy for whom cleverness was female. "

― Margaret Atwood , Bluebeard's Egg

14 " She finds this objectivity of hers, this clarity, almost more depressing than she can bear, not because there is anything hideous or repellant about this man but because he has now returned to the ordinary level, the level of things she can see, in all their amazing and complex particularity, but cannot touch. "

― Margaret Atwood , Bluebeard's Egg

15 " My mother has few stories to tell about these times. What I remember from them is the odd look I would sometimes catch in her eyes. It struck me, for the first time in my life, that my mother might be afraid of me. I could not even reassure her, because I was only dimly aware of the nature of her distress, but there must have been something going on in me that was beyond her: at any time I might open my mouth and out would come a language she had never heard before. I had become a visitant from outer space, a time-traveller come back from the future, bearing news of a great disaster. "

― Margaret Atwood , Bluebeard's Egg

16 " call attention of course to the breasts. Some of these women have been within inches of getting Ed to put his head down on their chests, right there in Sally’s living room. Watching all this out of the corners of her eyes while serving the liqueurs, Sally feels the Aztec rise within her. Trouble with your heart? Get it removed, she thinks. Then you’ll have no more problems. "

― Margaret Atwood , Bluebeard's Egg

17 " Having fun has always been high on my mother’s agenda. She has as much fun as possible, but what she means by this phrase cannot be understood without making an adjustment, an allowance for the great gulf across which this phrase must travel before it reaches us. It comes from another world, which, like the stars that originally sent out the light we see hesitating in the sky above us these nights, may be or is already gone. "

― Margaret Atwood , Bluebeard's Egg

18 " How did she end up in this madhouse? By putting one foot in front of the other and never taking her eyes off her feet. You could end up anywhere that way. "

― Margaret Atwood , Bluebeard's Egg

19 " Like many other art forms of vanished civilizations, the techniques for this one have been lost and cannot quite be duplicated. "

― Margaret Atwood , Bluebeard's Egg

20 " My own hair reposes in a cardboard box in a steamer trunk in my mother’s cellar, where I picture it becoming duller and more brittle with each passing year, and possibly moth-eaten; by now it will look like the faced wreaths of hair in Victorian funeral jewelry. Or it may have developed a dry mildew; inside its tissue-paper wrappings it glows faintly, in the darkness of the trunk. "

― Margaret Atwood , Bluebeard's Egg