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"This murdered girl troubles me. After the first shock, nobody at school says much about her. Even Cordelia does not want to talk about her. It's as if this girl has done something shameful, herself, by being murdered."
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"Rage and revenge sat in his heart fanned by time and silence. Before he could realise anything, he was engulfed in flames. Everything he touched, lost its existence in his life. Turning him into a monster, who destroys everything in a daylight but cries in dark and silence."

"But was the woman's death the tragedy, or her life?"

"Malphas surveyed the women's bodies with utter disgust and sorrowuntil he realized Tabitha was still alive. He knelt by her side and cradled her head tenderly. "Tabby... I'm so sorry"Grimacing she opened her eyes as she labored to breathe. She laughed bitterly, exposing a set of bleeding teeth. "there are some things that sorry doesn't fix, Caleb.""Shhh, don't speak. I can--""you failed us," She went limp in his arms. Her eyes went Dull.Wincing, Caleb held her close to his heart and stroked her bloody hair. "No, Tabby. I failed myself.""Most of all, I failed Nick."

"There are cancers so insidious in their nature that their very pulsation is invisible. Such cancers leave the ivory whiteness of the skin untouched, and marble not the firm, fair flesh, with their blue tints; the physician who bends over the patient's chest hears not, through he listens, the insatiable teeth of the disease grinding its onward progress through the muscles, as the blood flows freely on; the knife has never been able to destroy, and rarely even, temporarily, to discern the rage of these mortal scourges; their home is in the mind, which they corrupt; they fill the whole heart until it breaks. Such, madame, are the cancers, fatal to queens; are you, too, free from their scourge?"

"She prayed to God to give him at least a moment so that he would not go without knowing how much she had loved him despite all their doubts, and she felt an irresistible longing to begin life with him over again so that they could say what they had left unsaid and do everything right that they had done badly in the past. But she had to give in to the intransigence of death."

"They burnt down the whole palace and they laughed menacingly. The shadows of the dreams and memories they burnt alive walked all over the ruins, trying to hold on to the charred pieces of their body."

"She was the most beautiful thing I had ever seen, a tiny, bloody angel in the snow, and they were going to destroy her."
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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