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"Yet each flower, each twig, each pebble, shines as though illuminated from within, as once before, on her first day in the Garden. It's the stress, it's the adrenalin, it's a chemical effect: she knows this well enough. But why is it built in? she thinks. Why are we designed to see the world as supremely beautiful just as we're about to be snuffed? Do rabbits feel the same as the fox teeth bite down on their necks? Is it mercy?"
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"There is no conclusive evidence of life after death, but there is no evidence of any sort against it. Soon enough you will know, so why fret about it?"

"Among the tortures and devastations of life is this then-our friends are not able to finish their stories."

"Are-you dying?" she asked."Just can't breathe. This air.""Poor, poor-good lord. I've forgotten your name.""Hell of a thing.""Barney!"He clutched her."No! Don't stop!" She arched her back. Her teeth chattered."I wasn't going to," he said. "Oooaugh!"He laughed."Don't please laugh at me.""Not meant unkindly."A long silence, then. Then, "Oof."

"I think of death only with tranquility, as an end. I refuse to let death hamper life. Death must enter life only to define it."

"Dying is a troublesome business: there is pain to be suffered, and it wrings one's heart; but death is a splendid thing-a warfare accomplished, a beginning all over again, a triumph. You can always see that in their faces."

"For he who lives more lives than one More deaths than one must die."

"After you die, a rare friend or family member may carry your memory throughout life. Most will forget you. As if you were never here."

"You could have died later on, you could have died after peace had been declared. But, in any case, you were going to die."

"Personally, I always wondered about authors and celebrities who loudly declared there was no God. It was usually when they were healthy and popular and being listened to by crowds. What happens, I wondered, in the quiet moments before death? By then, they have lost the stage, the world has moved on. If suddenly, in their last gasping moments, through fear, a vision, a late enlightenment, they change their minds about God, who would know?"
Explore more quotes by Margaret Atwood

"The heart with letters on it shining like a light bulb through the trim hole painted in the chest, art history."

"After they had skated around the pond several times, my father asked my mother to marry him. I expect he did it awkwardly, but awkwardness in men was a sign of sincerity then."

"The palliative care nurses welcome him: he's a spot of brightness, they claim he keeps the patients interested in life. "We don't think of the clients here as dying," one of them said to him on his first visit. "After all everyone's dying, just some of us more slowly."

"Can I be blamed for wanting a real body, to put my arms around? Without it I too am disembodied. I can listen to my own heartbeat against the bedsprings...but there's something dead about it, something deserted."

"Maybe I don't really want to know what's going on. Maybe I'd rather not know. Maybe I couldn't bear to know. The Fall was a fall from innocence to knowledge."

"I am certain that a Sewing Machine would relieve as much human suffering as a hundred Lunatic Asylums, and possibly a good deal more."

"Heroes need monsters to establish their heroic credentials. You need something scary to overcome."
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