Deborah Kasner > Deborah's Quotes

“I would like to be the air that inhabits you for a moment only. I would like to be that unnoticed and that necessary.”
― Margaret Atwood

“I don't want to see anyone. I lie in the bedroom with the curtains drawn and nothingness washing over me like a sluggish wave. Whatever is happening to me is my own fault. I have done something wrong, something so huge I can't even see it, something that's drowning me. I am inadequate and stupid, without worth. I might as well be dead.”
― Margaret Atwood, Cat's Eye

“And she finds it difficult to believe—that a person would love her even when she isn't trying. Trying to figure out what other people need, trying to be worthy.”
― Margaret Atwood

“Gone mad is what they say, and sometimes Run mad, as if mad is a different direction, like west; as if mad is a different house you could step into, or a separate country entirely. But when you go mad you don't go any other place, you stay where you are. And somebody else comes in.”
― Margaret Atwood, Alias Grace

“Knowing too much about other people puts you in their power, they have a claim on you, you are forced to understand their reasons for doing things and then you are weakened.”
― Margaret Atwood, Cat’s Eye

“A truth should exist,
it should not be used
like this. If I love you

is that a fact or a weapon?”
― Margaret Atwood

“But some people can't tell where it hurts. They can't calm down. They can't ever stop howling.”
― Margaret Atwood

“I look at him with the nostalgic affection men are said to feel for their wars, their fellow veterans. I think, I once threw things at this man. I threw a glass ashtray, a fairly cheap one which didn't break. I threw a shoe (his) and a handbag (mine), not even snapping the handbag shut first, so that he was showered with a metal rain of keys and small change. The worst thing I threw was a small portable television set, standing on the bed and heaving it at him with the aid of the bouncy springs, although the instant I let fly I thought, Oh God, let him duck! I once thought I was capable of murdering him. Today I feel only a mild regret that we were not more civilized with each other at the time. Still, it was amazing, all those explosions, that recklessness, that Technicolor wreckage. Amazing and agonizing and almost lethal.”
― Margaret Atwood, Cat's Eye

“If I love you, is that a fact or a weapon?”
― Margaret Atwood, Power Politics: Poems

“You aren't sick & unhappy
only alive & stuck with it.”
― Margaret Atwood, Power Politics: Poems

“All observations of life are harsh, because life is. I lament that fact, but I cannot change it.”
― Margaret Atwood, The Tent

“The greatest feminists have also been the greatest lovers. I'm thinking not only of Mary Wollstonecraft and her daughter Mary Shelley, but of Anais Nin, Edna St. Vincent Millay, and of course Sappho. You cannot divide creative juices from human juices. And as long as juicy women are equated with bad women, we will err on the side of being bad.”
― Erica Jong

“I know, but I do not approve. And I am not resigned.”
― Edna St. Vincent Millay

“War is what happens when language fails.”
― Margaret Atwood

“They will not let you have peace, they don't want you to have anything they don't have themselves.”
― Margaret Atwood, Surfacing

“It's impossible to say a thing exactly the way it was, because of what you say can never be exact, you always have to leave something out, there are too many parts, sides, crosscurrents, nuances; too many gestures, which could mean this or that, too many shapes which can never be fully described, too many flavors, in the air or on the tongue, half-colors, too many.”
― Margaret Atwood, The Handmaid’s Tale

“Friendship ... is born at the moment when one man says to another "What! You too? I thought that no one but myself . . .”
― C.S. Lewis, The Four Loves

“Each friend represents a world in us, a world possibly not born until they arrive, and it is only by this meeting that a new world is born.”
― Anais Nin, The Diary of Anaïs Nin, Vol. 1: 1931-1934

“Your task is not to seek for love, but merely to seek and find all the barriers within yourself that you have built against it.”
― Rumi