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Margaret Atwood
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„What Elizabethan playwrights learned from the Greek classics was not theories of insanity, but dramatic practice — that is, madness is a dandy theatrical element. It focuses the audience’s attention and increases suspense, since you never know what a mad person may get up to next; and Shakespeare himself makes use of it in many forms. In King Lear, there’s a scene in which one man pretending to be mad, another who has really gone mad, and a third who has probably always been a little addled, are brought together for purposes of comparison, irony, pathos, and tour de force acting. In Hamlet, there are two variations — Hamlet himself, who assumes madness, and Ophelia, who really does go winsomely bonkers. In MacBeth, it’s Lady MacBeth who snaps.“
„It must be said at the outset that the field of mental illness has always been debatable ground. Who is sane, who isn’t, and who is qualified to judge? Standards have fluctuated wildly, and abuses have been numerous. In the last century, in the United States, a wife could be committed to an asylum on the say-so of her husband and two easily-paid-off doctors alone, and there are cases on record of wives who were “put away” for holding theological opinions that differed from those of the husband, or for refusing to have as much sex as he would like.“
„When women let their hair down, it means either sexiness or craziness or death, the three by Victorian times having become virtually synonymous.“
„A movie about the past is not the same as the past.“
„Time is not a line but a dimension, like the dimensions of space.“
„Freedom, like everything else, is relative.“
„I plunged in, and set up a Twitter account. My first problem was that there were already two Margaret Atwoods on Twitter, one of them with my picture. This grew; I gave commands; then all other Margaret Atwoods stopped together. I like to think they were sent to a nunnery, but in any case they disappeared. The Twitterpolice had got them. I felt a bit guilty.“
„For every age there is a popular idea about what madness is, what causes it, and how a mad person should look and behave; and it’s usually these popular ideas, rather than those of medical professionals, that turn up in songs and stories and plays and books.“
„A lot of people facing fascism didn’t become fascists. I don’t happen to believe that we are all monsters.“
„He had that faint sick look in his eyes, as if he wanted to give her something, charity for instance.“
„As for my birth month, a detail of much interest to poets, obsessed as they are with symbolic systems of all kinds: I was not pleased, during my childhood, to have been born in November, as there wasn’t much inspiration for birthday party motifs. February children got hearts, May ones flowers, but what was there for me? A cake surrounded by withered leaves? November was a drab, dark and wet month, lacking even snow; its only noteworthy festival was Remembrance Day. But in adult life I discovered that November was, astrologically speaking, the month of sex, death and regeneration, and that November First was the Day of the Dead. It still wouldn’t have been much good for birthday parties, but it was just fine for poetry, which tends to revolve a good deal around sex and death, with regeneration optional.“
„You must cultivate poverty of spirit. Blessed are the meek. She didn’t go on to say anything about inheriting the earth.“
„In order to avoid her death, her particular death, withwrung neck and swollen tongue, she must marry thehangman.“
„The one good thing to be said about announcing yourself as a writer in the colonial Canadian fifties is that nobody told me I couldn’t do it because I was a girl. They simply found the entire proposition ridiculous. Writers were dead and English, or else extremely elderly and American; they were not sixteen years old and Canadian. It would have been worse if I’d been a boy, though. Never mind the fact that all the really stirring poems I’d read at that time had been about slaughter, mayhem, sex and death — poetry was thought of as existing in the pastel female realm, along with embroidery and flower arranging. If I’d been male I would probably have had to roll around in the mud, in some boring skirmish over whether or not I was a sissy.“
„A lot of poets published their own work then; unlike novels, poetry was short, and therefore cheap to do. We had to print each poem separately, and then disassemble it, as there were not enough a’s for the whole book; the cover was done with a lino-block. We printed 250 copies, and sold them through bookstores, for 50 cents each. They now go in the rare book trade for eighteen hundred dollars a pop. Wish I’d kept some.“
„The sitting room is subdued, symmetrical; it’s one of the shapes money takes when it freezes.“
„The fabric of democracy is always fragile everywhere because it depends on the will of citizens to protect it, and when they become scared, when it becomes dangerous for them to defend it, it can go very quickly.“
„He was not condemned to death, freedom awaitedhim. What was the temptation, the one that worked?Perhaps he wanted to live with a woman whose lifehe had saved, who had seen down into the earth buthad nevertheless followed him back up to life. It washis only chance to be a hero, to one person at least,for if he became the hangman the others woulddespise him. He was in prison for wounding anotherman, on one finger of the right hand, with a sword.This too is history.“
„In general I might agree with you:women should not contemplate war,should not weigh tactics impartially,or evade the word enemy,or view both sides and denounce nothing.Women should march for peace,or hand out white feathers to arouse bravery,spit themselves on bayonetsto protect their babies,whose skulls will be split anyway,or, having been raped repeatedly,hang themselves with their own hair.These are the functions that inspire general comfort.That, and the knitting of socks for the troopsand a sort of moral cheerleading.Also: mourning the dead.Sons, lovers, and so forth.All the killed children.“
„Everyone said he was a fool.Everyone said she was a clever woman.They used the word ensnare.“
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