Alias Grace

by Margaret Atwood

but it’s not easy being quiet and good, it’s like hanging on to the edge of a bridge when you’ve already fallen over; you don’t seem to be moving, just dangling there, and yet it is taking all your strength.

They are like birdcages; but what is being caged in? Legs, the legs of ladies; legs penned in so they cannot get out and go rubbing up against the gentlemen’s trousers.

Oh I don’t blame you, there is only so far one can go in Christian charity, a leopard cannot change its spots and no one could say you have not done your duty and shown a proper feeling.

bruh

I don’t know why they are all so eager to be remembered. What good will it do them? There are some things that should be forgotten by everyone, and never spoken of again.

People dressed in a certain kind of clothing are never wrong. Also they never fart.

But when you go mad you don’t go any other place, you stay where you are. And somebody else comes in.

They can hardly object if it’s a hymn. A hymn to the morning. I have always been fond of sunrise.

If you have a need and they find it out, they will use it against you. The best way is to stop from wanting anything.

Help is what they offer but gratitude is what they want, they roll around in it like cats in the catnip.

He wishes to go home and say to himself, I stuck in my thumb and pulled out the plum, what a good boy am I. But I will not be anybody’s plum. I say nothing.

His father was self-made, but his mother was constructed by others, and such edifices are notoriously fragile.

He has tried imagining her as a prostitute—he often plays this private mental game with various women he encounters—but he can’t picture any man actually paying for her services. It would be like paying to be run over by a wagon, and would be, like that experience, a distinct threat to the health.

bruh??????

Her eyes were unusually large, it was true, but they were far from insane. Instead they were frankly assessing him. It was as if she were contemplating the subject of some unexplained experiment; as if it were he, and not she, who was under scrutiny. Remembering the scene, Simon winces. I was indulging myself, he thinks. Imagination and fancy. I must stick to observation, I must proceed with caution. A valid experiment must have verifiable results. I must resist melodrama, and an overheated brain.

she doesn’t mind me or care what I may have done, even if I killed a gentleman; she only nods, as if to say, So that’s one less of them.

She has the alarmed, slightly pop-eyed look that signals either an overly nervous disposition or a disease of the thyroid.

She fixes him with a deep and meaningful gaze, and Simon sighs inwardly. He is familiar with that expression: she is about to make him an unsolicited gift of her symptoms.

LMFAO

Thus he is one of the dark trio—the doctor, the judge, the executioner—and shares with them the powers of life and death. To be rendered unconscious; to lie exposed, without shame, at the mercy of others; to be touched, incised, plundered, remade—this is what they are thinking of when they look at him, with their widening eyes and slightly parted lips.

Coyly, as if displaying an ankle, she relates a symptom—agitated breathing, a constriction around the ribs—with a hint of more and richer ones to follow. She has a pain—well, she doesn’t like to say exactly where. Whatever could be the cause of it?

The woman must be a ghoul as well as a hypochondriac.

Me

It is always a mistake to curse back openly at those who are stronger than you unless there is a fence between.

At moments like this I envy those who have found a safe haven, in which to bestow their hearts; or perhaps I envy them for having a heart to bestow. I often feel that I myself am without one, and possess in its stead merely a heart-shaped stone; and am therefore doomed to “wander lonely as a cloud,” as Wordsworth has put it.

This puts him in an instructive mood, and I can see he is going to teach me something, which gentlemen are fond of doing.

said that some called it Eve’s curse but she thought that was stupid, and the real curse of Eve was having to put up with the nonsense of Adam, who as soon as there was any trouble, blamed it all on her.

For if the world treats you well, Sir, you come to believe you are deserving of it.

hindsight is always accurate.

and I cut a piece off the back of her hair to remember her by, and tied it together with a thread.

she remembered w whitney after forgetting to do it w her mom:(

She was buried in her best nightdress, and she didn’t look dead in the least, but only asleep and very pale; and laid out all in white like that, she was just like a bride.

Death from the promise of becoming a bride; looking like a bride in death

When you are in the middle of a story it isn’t a story at all, but only a confusion; a dark roaring, a blindness, a wreckage of shattered glass and splintered wood; like a house in a whirlwind, or else a boat crushed by the icebergs or swept over the rapids, and all aboard powerless to stop it. It’s only afterwards that it becomes anything like a story at all. When you are telling it, to yourself or to someone else.

In his student days, he used to argue that if a woman has no other course open to her but starvation, prostitution, or throwing herself from a bridge, then surely the prostitute, who has shown the most tenacious instinct for self-preservation, should be considered stronger and saner than her frailer and no longer living sisters. One couldn’t have it both ways, he’d point out: if women are seduced and abandoned they’re supposed to go mad, but if they survive, and seduce in their turn, then they were mad to begin with. He’d said that it seemed to him a dubious piece of reasoning; which got him the reputation either of a cynic or of a puritanical hypocrite, depending on his audience.

Kenneth MacKenzie must have looked middle-aged even as a five-year-old.

LOL

MacKenzie frowns at his cigar, which has gone out. It strikes Simon that the poor fellow doesn’t really enjoy smoking, but feels he ought to do it because it goes with the racehorse pictures.

He doesn’t understand yet that guilt comes to you not from the things you’ve done, but from the things that others have done to you.

I felt a Cleaving in my Mind— As if my Brain had split— I tried to match it—Seam by Seam— But could not make it fit. —EMILY DICKINSON, c. 1860.

Mr. Walsh’s beard was very large and red, but I assured myself that it could be altered in time.

I love how Grace always has her priorities in order