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"Perhaps they were looking for passion; perhaps they delved into this book as into a mysterious parcel - a gift box at the bottom of which, hidden in layers of rustling tissue paper, lay something they'd always longed for but couldn't ever grasp."
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"Without 'Gnan' (True Knowledge of the Self), desire(s) will not go away."

"I struggled to think pure thoughts, as Hector sucked out my psyche with his eyes."

"Are deepest desires are: someone to understand us, someone to appreciate us, someone to inspire us, and someone to enjoy what we are."

"You have a nice mouth," he says. "I can't stop looking at it.""You should taste it. It's quite lovely."

"To have a desire means to have dependency."
Explore more quotes by Margaret Atwood

"And then she began to cry, and when I asked her why she was doing that, she said it was because I was to have a happy ending, and it was just like a book; and I wondered what books she'd been reading."

"Why is it that night falls, instead of rising, like the dawn? Yet if you look east, at sunset, you can see night rising, not falling; darkness lifting into the sky, up from the horizon..."

"All you have to do, I tell myself, is keep your mouth shut and look stupid. It shouldn't be that hard."

"Men and women tried each other on, casually, like suits, rejecting whatever did not fit."

"Writers are much better behaved nowadays, for a couple of reasons. Once upon a time nobody was thinking of a career, unless you lived in New York, so there wasn't as much pressure to present a respectable exterior. And secondly, there was no social media. So if you were found face down on the floor - people did do that quite a bit; usually men, but not always - or fell through plate glass windows or got into scrapes, it became a rumour, and rumours are hard to pin down."

"I was taking something away from her, although she didn't know it. I was filching. Never mind that it was something she apparently didn't want or had no use for, had rejected even; still, it was hers, and if I took it away, this mysterious "it" I couldn't quite define."

"I sink down into my body as into a swamp, fenland, where only I know the footing. I'm a cloud, congealed around a central object, the shape of a pear, which is hard and more real than I am and glows red within its translucent wrapping. Inside it is a space, huge as the sky at night and dark and curved like that, though black-red rather than black."

"In the old days, trouble was kept in the family, which is still the best place for it, not that there's ever a best place for trouble. Why stir everything up again after that many years, with all concerned tucked, like tired children, so neatly into their graves?"
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