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"Her metaphors for her children included barnacles encrusting a ship and limpets clinging to a rock."
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"Sometimes we're so concerned about giving our children what we never had growing up, we neglect to give them what we did have growing up."
"So that is marriage, Lily thought, a man and a woman looking at a girl throwing a ball."
"Like all feelings felt for oneself, Mrs. Ramsay thought, it made one sad. It was so inadequate, what one could give in return; and what Rose felt was quite out of proportion to anything she actually was."
"And like that, I said goodbye to my grandmother like we were two people who met in a coffee shop, shared a lifetime of stories and left wanting more, but knowing we'd meet there again."
"What thumbsuckers we all are...when it comes to mothers."
"Of course there are mothers,squeezing their breastsdry, pawning their bodies,shedding teeth for their children,or that's our fond belief.But remember - Hanseland Gretel were dumped in the forestbecause their parents were starving."
"One marvels why the middle classes still insist on so much discomfort for their children at such expense to themselves."
"Everybody has basically the same family, it's just reconfigured slightly differently from one to the next."
Explore more quotes by Margaret Atwood
"Heroes need monsters to establish their heroic credentials. You need something scary to overcome."
"No mother is ever, completely, a child's idea of what a mother should be, and I suppose it works the other way around as well. But despite everything, we didn't do too badly by one another, we did as well as most."
"Night falls. Or has fallen. 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, like a black sun behind cloud cover. Like smoke from an unseen fire, a line of fire just below the horizon, brushfire or a burning city. Maybe night falls because it's heavy, a thick curtain pulled up over the eyes. Wool blanket."
"I hope that people will finally come to realize that there is only one 'race' - the human race - and that we are all members of it."
"She would roll up her sleeves and dispense with sentimentality, and do whatever blood-soaked, bad-smelling thing had to be done. She would become adept with axes."
"Little girls are cute and small only to adults. To one another they are not cute. They are life-sized."
"They spent the first three years of school getting you to pretend stuff and then the rest of it marking you down if you did the same thing."
"Walking was not fast enough so we ran. Running was not fast enough, so we galloped. Galloping was not fast enough, so we sailed. Sailing was not fast enough, so we rolled merrily along on long metal tracks. Long metal tracks were not fast enough, so we drove. Driving was not fast enough, so we flew.Flying isn't fast enough, not fast enough for us. We want to get there faster. Get where? Wherever we are not. But a human soul can go only as fast as a man can walk, they used to say. In that case, where are all the souls? Left behind. They wander here and there, slowly, dim lights flickering in the marshes at night, looking for us. But they're not nearly fast enough, not for us, we're way ahead of them, they'll never catch up. That's why we can go so fast: our souls don't weigh us down."
"Ger says that Kat has a tendency to push things to extremes, to go over the edge, merely from a juvenile desire to shock, which is hardly a substitute for wit. One of these days, he says, she will go way too far. Too far for him, is what he means."
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