“I go to sleep alone, and wake up alone. I take walks. I work until I'm tired. I watch the wind play with the trash that's been under the snow all winter. Everything seems simple until you think about it. Why is love intensified by abscence?”
“I'm sorry. I didn't know you were coming or I'd have cleaned up a little more. My life, I mean, not just the apartment.”
❤2
“Think for a minute, darling: in fairy tales it's always the children who have the fine adventures. The mothers have to stay at home and wait for the children to fly in the window.”
❤2
“Chaos is more freedom; in fact, total freedom. But no meaning. I want to be free to act, and I also want my actions to mean something.”
❤3
"The moment when, after many years
of hard work and a long voyage
you stand in the centre of your room,
house, half-acre, square mile, island, country,
knowing at last how you got there,
and say, I own this,
is the same moment when the trees unloose
their soft arms from around you,
the birds take back their language,
the cliffs fissure and collapse,
the air moves back from you like a wave
and you can't breathe.
No, they whisper. You own nothing.
You were a visitor, time after time
climbing the hill, planting the flag, proclaiming.
We never belonged to you.
You never found us.
It was always the other way round."
- Margaret Atwood
#poem
of hard work and a long voyage
you stand in the centre of your room,
house, half-acre, square mile, island, country,
knowing at last how you got there,
and say, I own this,
is the same moment when the trees unloose
their soft arms from around you,
the birds take back their language,
the cliffs fissure and collapse,
the air moves back from you like a wave
and you can't breathe.
No, they whisper. You own nothing.
You were a visitor, time after time
climbing the hill, planting the flag, proclaiming.
We never belonged to you.
You never found us.
It was always the other way round."
- Margaret Atwood
#poem
❤5
Margaret Atwood (Canadian author)
______________
Born : November 18, 1939
______________
is a Canadian writer best known for her prose fiction and for her feminist perspective.
She began writing at age five and resumed her efforts, more seriously, a decade later. In her early poetry collections, Double Persephone (1961), The Circle Game (1964, revised in 1966), and The Animals in That Country (1968), Atwood ponders human behaviour, celebrates the natural world, and condemns materialism. Role reversal and new beginnings are recurrent themes in her novels, all of them centred on women seeking their relationship to the world and the individuals around them.
The Handmaid’s Tale (1985; film 1990; opera 2000) is constructed around the written record of a woman living in sexual slavery in a repressive Christian theocracy of the future that has seized power in the wake of an ecological upheaval; a TV series based on the novel premiered in 2017 and was cowritten by Atwood.
______________
Born : November 18, 1939
______________
is a Canadian writer best known for her prose fiction and for her feminist perspective.
She began writing at age five and resumed her efforts, more seriously, a decade later. In her early poetry collections, Double Persephone (1961), The Circle Game (1964, revised in 1966), and The Animals in That Country (1968), Atwood ponders human behaviour, celebrates the natural world, and condemns materialism. Role reversal and new beginnings are recurrent themes in her novels, all of them centred on women seeking their relationship to the world and the individuals around them.
The Handmaid’s Tale (1985; film 1990; opera 2000) is constructed around the written record of a woman living in sexual slavery in a repressive Christian theocracy of the future that has seized power in the wake of an ecological upheaval; a TV series based on the novel premiered in 2017 and was cowritten by Atwood.
“I would like to be the air that inhabits you for a moment only. I would like to be that unnoticed and that necessary.”
❤4
“Men are afraid that women will laugh at them. Women are afraid that men will kill them.”
👍2
“Male fantasies, male fantasies, is everything run by male fantasies? Up on a pedestal or down on your knees, it's all a male fantasy: that you're strong enough to take what they dish out, or else too weak to do anything about it. Even pretending you aren't catering to male fantasies is a male fantasy: pretending you're unseen, pretending you have a life of your own, that you can wash your feet and comb your hair unconscious of the ever-present watcher peering through the keyhole, peering through the keyhole in your own head, if nowhere else. You are a woman with a man inside watching a woman. You are your own voyeur.”
“Ignoring isn’t the same as ignorance, you have to work at it.”
― The Handmaid's Tale
― The Handmaid's Tale
👍1
“Love blurs your vision; but after it recedes, you can see more clearly than ever. It's like the tide going out, revealing whatever's been thrown away and sunk: broken bottles, old gloves, rusting pop cans, nibbled fishbodies, bones. This is the kind of thing you see if you sit in the darkness with open eyes, not knowing the future.”
― Cat’s Eye
― Cat’s Eye
❤3
“But who can remember pain, once it’s over? All that remains of it is a shadow, not in the mind even, in the flesh. Pain marks you, but too deep to see. Out of sight, out of mind.”
― The Handmaid’s Tale
― The Handmaid’s Tale
❤1
“When we think of the past it's the beautiful things we pick out. We want to believe it was all like that.”
― The Handmaid’s Tale
― The Handmaid’s Tale
❤1👍1
"I'm waiting for the first lawsuit. I'm waiting, you know, for the lawsuit in which the family of the dead woman sues the state… And I'm also waiting for a lawsuit that says if you force me to have children I cannot afford, you should pay for the whole process. They should pay for my prenatal care. They should pay for my, otherwise, very expensive delivery. You should pay for my health insurance. You should pay for the upkeep of this child after it is born. That's where the concern seems to cut off with these people. Once you take your first breath, it's out the window with you. And, it is really a form of slavery to force women to have children that they cannot afford and then to say that they have to raise them… People have to decide what kind of world they want to live in. Are we in favor of forced childbirth? Because that’s the world that we are going to get if we shut down reproductive rights. Right to life is one way of putting it. Forced childbirth is another way."
❤2
“Why do men feel threatened by women? I asked a male friend of mine. 'They're afraid women will laugh at them,' he said. 'Undercut their world view.' Then I asked some women... ‘Why do women feel threatened by men?’ 'They're afraid of being killed,' they said.”
❤5
Arundhati Roy (Indian author, actress, and activist)
__________
Born : November 24, 1961
__________
is an Indian author and political activist who is best known for the award-winning novel The God of Small Things (1997) and for her involvement in environmental and human rights causes, which resulted in various legal problems for her.
In 1997 Roy published her debut novel, The God of Small Things to wide acclaim. The semiautobiographical work departed from the conventional plots and light prose that had been typical among best-sellers at the time. Composed in a lyrical language about Indian themes and characters in a narrative that wandered through time, Roy’s novel became the biggest-selling book by a nonexpatriate Indian author and won the 1997 Booker Prize for Fiction.
__________
Born : November 24, 1961
__________
is an Indian author and political activist who is best known for the award-winning novel The God of Small Things (1997) and for her involvement in environmental and human rights causes, which resulted in various legal problems for her.
In 1997 Roy published her debut novel, The God of Small Things to wide acclaim. The semiautobiographical work departed from the conventional plots and light prose that had been typical among best-sellers at the time. Composed in a lyrical language about Indian themes and characters in a narrative that wandered through time, Roy’s novel became the biggest-selling book by a nonexpatriate Indian author and won the 1997 Booker Prize for Fiction.
👍1
“To love. To be loved. To never forget your own insignificance. To never get used to the unspeakable violence and the vulgar disparity of life around you. To seek joy in the saddest places. To pursue beauty to its lair. To never simplify what is complicated or complicate what is simple. To respect strength, never power. Above all, to watch. To try and understand. To never look away. And never, never to forget.”
― The Cost of Living
― The Cost of Living
❤3