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The Edible Woman QUOTES

The Edible Woman QUOTES

1 " I always thought eating was a ridiculous activity anyway. I'd get out of it myself if I could, though you've got to do it to stay alive, they tell me. "

― Margaret Atwood , The Edible Woman

2 " Her metaphors for her children included barnacles encrusting a ship and limpets clinging to a rock. "

― Margaret Atwood , The Edible Woman

3 " What else can I do? Once you've gone this far you aren't fit for anything else. Something happens to your mind. You're overqualified, overspecialized, and everybody knows it. Nobody in any other game would be crazy enough to hire me. I wouldn't even make a good ditch-digger, I'd start tearing apart the sewer-system, trying to pick-axe and unearth all those chthonic symbols - pipes, valves, cloacal conduits... No, no. I'll have to be a slave in the paper-mines for all time. "

― Margaret Atwood , The Edible Woman

4 " That’s what you get for being food. "

― Margaret Atwood , The Edible Woman

5 " What else can I do? Once you've gone this far you aren't fit for anything else. Something happens to your mind. You're overqualified, overspecialized, and everybody knows it. "

― Margaret Atwood , The Edible Woman

6 " What a moron I was to think you were sweet and innocent, when it turns out you were actually college-educated the whole time! "

― Margaret Atwood , The Edible Woman

7 " This afternoon held that special quality of mournful emptiness I've connected with late Sunday afternoons ever since childhood: the feeling of having nothing to do. "

― Margaret Atwood , The Edible Woman

8 " ...she was afraid of losing her shape, spreading out, not being able to contain herself any longer, beginning (that would be worst of all) to talk a lot, to tell everybody, to cry. "

― Margaret Atwood , The Edible Woman

9 " They had been pathetically eager to have the wedding in the family church. Their reaction though, as far as she could estimate the reactions of people who were now so remote from her, was less elated glee than a quiet, rather smug satisfaction, as though their fears about the effects of her university education, never stated but aways apparent, had been calmed at last. They had probably been worried she would turn into a high-school teacher or a maiden aunt or a dope addict or a female executive, or that she would undergo some shocking physical transformation, like developing muscles and a deep voice or growing moss. "

― Margaret Atwood , The Edible Woman

10 " For an instant she felt them, their identities, almost their substance, pass over her head like a wave. At some time she would be — or no, already she was like that too; she was one of them, her body the same, identical, merged with that other flesh that choked the air in the flowered room with its sweet organic scent; she felt suffocated by this thick sargasso-sea of femininity. "

― Margaret Atwood , The Edible Woman

11 " We get along by a symbiotic adjustment of habits and with a minimum of that pale-mauve hostility you often find among women. "

― Margaret Atwood , The Edible Woman

12 " She's against it on principle, and life isn't run on principles but by adjustments "

― Margaret Atwood , The Edible Woman

13 " I can tell you're admiring my febrility. I know it's appealing, I practice at it; every woman loves an invalid. But be careful. You might do something destructive: hunger is more basic than love. Florence Nightingale was a cannibal you know. "

― Margaret Atwood , The Edible Woman

14 " What fiendishness went on in kitchens across the country, in the name of providing food! "

― Margaret Atwood , The Edible Woman

15 " Looking down, she became aware of the water, which was covered with a film of calcinous hard-water particles of dirt and soap, and of the body that was sitting in it, somehow no longer quite her own. All at once she was afraid that she was dissolving, coming apart layer by layer like a piece of cardboard in a gutter puddle. "

― Margaret Atwood , The Edible Woman

16 " I sort of like watching them," he said; "I watch laundromat washers the way other people watch television, it's soothing because you always know what to expect and you don't have to think about it. Except I can vary my programmes a little; if I get tired of watching the same stuff I can always put in a pair of green socks or something colourful like that. "

― Margaret Atwood , The Edible Woman

17 " The imprint left on her mind by the long famished body that had seemed in the darkness to consist of nothing by sharp crags and angles, the memory of its painfully-defined almost skeletal ribcage, a pattern of ridges like a washboard, was fading as rapidly as any other transient impression on a soft surface. "

― Margaret Atwood , The Edible Woman

18 " I wonder why trying to transcend time never even succeeds in stopping it... "

― Margaret Atwood , The Edible Woman

19 " I know I was alright on Friday when I got up; if anything I was feeling more stolid than usual. "

― Margaret Atwood , The Edible Woman

20 " They all say, Go on to graduate studies, and they give you a bit of money; so you do, and you think, Now I'm going to find out the real truth. But you don't find out, exactly, and things get pickier and pickier and more and more stale, and it all collapses in a welter of commas and shredded footnotes, and after a while it's like anything else: you've got stuck in it and you can't get out, and you wonder how you got there in the first place. "

― Margaret Atwood , The Edible Woman