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Category: the-blind-assassin
Quotes of Category: the-blind-assassin
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  1. Margaret Atwood _ The Blind Assassin

    The poems that used to entrance me in the days of Miss Violence now struck me as overdone and sickly. -the archaic language of unrequited love. I was irritated with such words, which rendered the unhappy lovers-I could now see-faintly ridiculous, like poor moping Miss Violence herself. Soft-edged, blurry, soggy, like a bun fallen into the water. Nothing you'd want to touch,
    book-quotelanguagesimileunrequited-love

  2. Margaret Atwood _ The Blind Assassin

    Stick a shovel in the ground almost anywhere and some horrible thing or other will come to light.
    book-quotethe-blind-assassin

  3. Margaret Atwood _ The Blind Assassin

    The ancestral voices were prophesying war because ancestral voices never shut up, and they hate to be wrong, and war is a sure thing, sooner or later.
    book-quotewarprophesythe-blind-assassin

  4. Margaret Atwood _ The Blind Assassin

    She stubs out her cigarette in the brown glass ashtray, then settles herself against him, ear to his chest. She likes to hear his voice this way, as if it begins not in his throat but in his body, like a hum or a growl, or like a voice speaking from deep underground. Like the blood moving through her own heart: a word, a word, a word.
    book-quotethe-blind-assassin

  5. Margaret Atwood _ The Blind Assassin

    The Three of them were beautiful, in the way all girls of that age are beautiful. It can't be helped, that sort of beauty, nor can it be conserved; it's a freshness, a plumpness of the cells, that's unearned and temporary, and that nothing can replicate. None of them was satisfied with it, however; already they were making attempts to alter themselves into some impossible, imaginary mould, plucking and pencilling away at their faces. I didn't blame them, having done the same once myself.
    book-quoteyouthmakeupthe-blind-assassin

  6. Margaret Atwood _ The Blind Assassin

    Sympathy from strangers can be ruinous.
    book-quotestrangerssadnessmelancholy

  7. Margaret Atwood _ The Blind Assassin

    We'll choose knowledge no matter what, we'll maim ourselves in the process, we'll stick our hands into the flames for it if necessary. Curiosity is not our only motive; love or grief or despair or hatred is what drives us on. We'll spy relentlessly on the dead; we'll open their letters, we'll read their journals, we'll go through their trash, hoping for a hint, a final word, an explanation, from those who have deserted us--who've left us holding the bag, which is often a good deal emptier than we'd supposed.
    book-quoteknowledgesnoopingthe-blind-assassin

  8. Margaret Atwood _ The Blind Assassin

    I wonder which is preferable, to walk around all your life swollen up with your own secrets until you burst from the pressure of them, or to have them sucked out of you, every paragraph, every sentence, every word of them, so at the end you're depleted of all that was once as precious to you as hoarded gold, as close to you as your skin - everything that was of the deepest importance to you, everything that made you cringe and wish to conceal, everything that belonged to you alone - and must spend the rest of your days like an empty sack flapping in the wind, an empty sack branded with a bright fluorescent label so that everyone will know what sort of secrets used to be inside you?
    book-quotesecretssimilemetaphor
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