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"We shouldn't have been so scornful; we should have had compassion. But compassion takes work, and we were young."
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"The distinction between pretending you are better than you are and beginning to be better in reality is finer than moral sleuth hounds conceive."
"And there, right in the middle of it, I find 'Forgive us our sins as we forgive those that sin against us.' There is no slightest suggestion that we are offered forgiveness on any other terms. It is made perfectly clear that if we do not forgive we shall not be forgiven."
"Taste is the only morality. Tell me what you like and I'll tell you what you are."
"Satan is never your well-wisher. Get the pleasure of making him annoyed on you by doing good deeds."
"Life is indeed terribly complicated-to a man who has lost his principles."
"If there is something to pardon in everything, there is also something to condemn."
"For when once people have begun to believe that prosperity is the reward of virtue, their next calamity is obvious. If prosperity is regarded as the reward of virtue it will be regarded as the symptom of virtue. Men will leave off the heavy task of making good men successful. He will adopt the easier task of making out successful men good."
"Fearlessness is the first requisite of spirituality. Cowards can never be moral."
Explore more quotes by Margaret Atwood
"A Paradox, the doughnut hole. Empty space, once, but now they've learned to market even that. A minus quantity; nothing, rendered edible. I wondered if they might be used-metaphorically, of course-to demonstrate the existence of God. Does naming a sphere of nothingness transmute it into being?"
"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."
"Thinking he knows can be a trap. An ex-professor once told him he had a diamond-hard intellect and he'd been flattered at the time. Now he considers the nature of diamonds. Although sharp and glittering and useful for cutting glass, they shine with reflected light only. They're no use at all in the dark."
"This is what I miss, Cordelia: not something that's gone, but something that will never happen. Two old women giggling over their tea."
"Happiness is a garden walled with glass: there's no way in or out. In Paradise there are no stories, because there are no journeys. It's loss and regret and misery and yearning that drive the story forward, along its twisted road."
"Then sail, my fine lady, on the billowing wave -The water below is as dark as the grave,And maybe you'll sink in your little blue boat -It's hope, and hope only, that keeps us afloat."
"You believed you could transcend the body as you aged, she tells herself. You believed you could rise above it, to a serene, nonphysical realm. But it's only through ecstasy you can do that, and ecstasy is achieved through the body itself. Without the bone and sinew of wings, no flight. Without that ecstasy you can only be dragged further down by the body, into its machinery. Its rusting, creaking, vengeful, brute machinery."
"Those who live alone slide into the habit of vertical eating: why bother with the niceties when there's no one to share or censure? But laxity in one area may lead to derangement in all."
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