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The Heart Goes Last QUOTES

The Heart Goes Last QUOTES

1 " The past is so much safer, because whatever's in it has already happened. It can't be changed; so, in a way, there's nothing to dread. "

― Margaret Atwood , The Heart Goes Last

2 " Oblivion is increasingly attractive to the young, and even to the middle-aged, since why retain your brain when no amount of thinking can even begin to solve the problem? "

― Margaret Atwood , The Heart Goes Last

3 " How dare she show herself to be everything he was so annoyed with her for not being? "

― Margaret Atwood , The Heart Goes Last

4 " You want your decisions taken away from you so you won’t be responsible for your own actions? "

― Margaret Atwood , The Heart Goes Last

5 " Don't cry anymore, she tells herself. Just do one thing at a time. Get from hour to hour and day to day like a frog jumping on lily pads. "

― Margaret Atwood , The Heart Goes Last

6 " Looking back on his life, he sees himself spread out on the earth like a giant covered in tiny threads that have held him down. Tiny threads of petty cares and small concerns, and fears he took seriously at the time. Debts, timetables, the need for money, the longing for comfort; the earworm of sex, repeating itself over and over like a neural feedback loop. He’s been the puppet of his own constricted desires. "

― Margaret Atwood , The Heart Goes Last

7 " She’s been a distraction for him, but not a necessity of life. More like a super-strong mint: intense while it lasted but quickly finished. "

― Margaret Atwood , The Heart Goes Last

8 " She gives him an LED smile: light, but no heat. "

― Margaret Atwood , The Heart Goes Last

9 " That was the original idea, but once you’ve got a controlled population with a wall around it and no oversight, you can do anything you want. "

― Margaret Atwood , The Heart Goes Last

10 " She's been a distraction for him, but not a necessity of life. More like a super-strong mint: intense while it lasted, but quickly finished. "

― Margaret Atwood , The Heart Goes Last

11 " Nothing is ever settled,” says Jocelyn. “Every day is different. Isn’t it better to do something because you’ve decided to? Rather than because you have to? "

― Margaret Atwood , The Heart Goes Last

12 " I don’t think they’ll ever replace the living and breathing,” says Gary. “They said that about e-books,” says Kevin. “You can’t stop progress. "

― Margaret Atwood , The Heart Goes Last

13 " Maybe all women should be robots, he thinks with a tinge of acid: the flesh-and-blood ones are out of control. "

― Margaret Atwood , The Heart Goes Last

14 " At first the solution was to build more prisons and cram more people into them, but that soon became prohibitively expensive. (Here Ed flicks through a few more slides.) Not only that, it resulted in platoons of prison graduates with professional-grade criminal skills they were more than willing to exercise once they were back in the outside world. "

― Margaret Atwood , The Heart Goes Last

15 " And they’re smiling at her, not half-smiles either, but full-on total-face smiles that are only partly fake. "

― Margaret Atwood , The Heart Goes Last

16 " Maybe they’ll just take her someplace else, like an island, with the other people on it who are like her. People who don’t fit in, but not criminal elements. Surely that’s what they’ll do. "

― Margaret Atwood , The Heart Goes Last

17 " The past is so much safer, because whatever’s in it has already happened. It can’t be changed; so, in a way, there’s nothing to dread. "

― Margaret Atwood , The Heart Goes Last

18 " Congratulations on a good outcome! We’ve all been rooting for you.” Charmaine wonders who’s been doing the rooting, because she hasn’t noticed anyone. But like so many things around here, maybe the rooting has taken place behind the scenes. "

― Margaret Atwood , The Heart Goes Last

19 " He can’t shake the feeling that this place is some sort of pyramid scheme, and that those who fail to understand that will be left empty-handed. But there’s no obvious reason for this feeling of his. Maybe he’s ungrateful by nature. "

― Margaret Atwood , The Heart Goes Last

20 " Chemistry can be like magic. It can be merciless. "

― Margaret Atwood , The Heart Goes Last