The Edible Woman Quotes

“What else can I do? Once you've gone this far you aren't fit for anything else. Something happens to your mind. You're overqualified, overspecialized, and everybody knows it. Nobody in any other game would be crazy enough to hire me. I wouldn't even make a good ditch-digger, I'd start tearing apart the sewer-system, trying to pick-axe and unearth all those chthonic symbols - pipes, valves, cloacal conduits... No, no. I'll have to be a slave in the paper-mines for all time.”
― Margaret Atwood, The Edible Woman

“What a moron I was to think you were sweet and innocent, when it turns out you were actually college-educated the whole time!”
― Margaret Atwood, The Edible Woman

“I always thought eating was a ridiculous activity anyway. I'd get out of it myself if I could, though you've got to do it to stay alive, they tell me.”
― Margaret Atwood, The Edible Woman

“...she was afraid of losing her shape, spreading out, not being able to contain herself any longer, beginning (that would be worst of all) to talk a lot, to tell everybody, to cry.”
― Margaret Atwood, The Edible Woman

“This afternoon held that special quality of mournful emptiness I've connected with late Sunday afternoons ever since childhood: the feeling of having nothing to do.”
― Margaret Atwood, The Edible Woman

“For an instant she felt them, their identities, almost their substance, pass over her head like a wave. At some time she would be — or no, already she was like that too; she was one of them, her body the same, identical, merged with that other flesh that choked the air in the flowered room with its sweet organic scent; she felt suffocated by this thick sargasso-sea of femininity.”
― Margaret Atwood, The Edible Woman

“We get along by a symbiotic adjustment of habits and with a minimum of that pale-mauve hostility you often find among women.”
― Margaret Atwood, The Edible Woman

“They had been pathetically eager to have the wedding in the family church. Their reaction though, as far as she could estimate the reactions of people who were now so remote from her, was less elated glee than a quiet, rather smug satisfaction, as though their fears about the effects of her university education, never stated but aways apparent, had been calmed at last. They had probably been worried she would turn into a high-school teacher or a maiden aunt or a dope addict or a female executive, or that she would undergo some shocking physical transformation, like developing muscles and a deep voice or growing moss.”
― Margaret Atwood, The Edible Woman

“Looking down, she became aware of the water, which was covered with a film of calcinous hard-water particles of dirt and soap, and of the body that was sitting in it, somehow no longer quite her own. All at once she was afraid that she was dissolving, coming apart layer by layer like a piece of cardboard in a gutter puddle.”
― Margaret Atwood, The Edible Woman

“I can tell you're admiring my febrility. I know it's appealing, I practice at it; every woman loves an invalid. But be careful. You might do something destructive: hunger is more basic than love. Florence Nightingale was a cannibal you know.”
― Margaret Atwood, The Edible Woman

“She's against it on principle, and life isn't run on principles but by adjustments”
― Margaret Atwood, The Edible Woman

“That’s what you get for being food.”
― Margaret Atwood, The Edible Woman

“Her metaphors for her children included barnacles encrusting a ship and limpets clinging to a rock.”
― Margaret Atwood, The Edible Woman

“What else can I do? Once you've gone this far you aren't fit for anything else. Something happens to your mind. You're overqualified, overspecialized, and everybody knows it.”
― Margaret Atwood, The Edible Woman

“I sort of like watching them," he said; "I watch laundromat washers the way other people watch television, it's soothing because you always know what to expect and you don't have to think about it. Except I can vary my programmes a little; if I get tired of watching the same stuff I can always put in a pair of green socks or something colourful like that.”
― Margaret Atwood, The Edible Woman

“What fiendishness went on in kitchens across the country, in the name of providing food!”
― Margaret Atwood, The Edible Woman

“I know I was alright on Friday when I got up; if anything I was feeling more stolid than usual.”
― Margaret Atwood, The Edible Woman

“The imprint left on her mind by the long famished body that had seemed in the darkness to consist of nothing by sharp crags and angles, the memory of its painfully-defined almost skeletal ribcage, a pattern of ridges like a washboard, was fading as rapidly as any other transient impression on a soft surface.”
― Margaret Atwood, The Edible Woman

“I wonder why trying to transcend time never even succeeds in stopping it...”
― Margaret Atwood, The Edible Woman

“That’s the nice thing about me. I’m very flexible, I’m the universal substitute.”
― Margaret Atwood, The Edible Woman

“It was true she had never specifically forbidden us to do anything - that would be too crude a violation of her law of nuance - but this only makes me feel I am actually forbidden to do everything.”
― Margaret Atwood, The Edible Woman

“They all say, Go on to graduate studies, and they give you a bit of money; so you do, and you think, Now I'm going to find out the real truth. But you don't find out, exactly, and things get pickier and pickier and more and more stale, and it all collapses in a welter of commas and shredded footnotes, and after a while it's like anything else: you've got stuck in it and you can't get out, and you wonder how you got there in the first place.”
― Margaret Atwood, The Edible Woman

“She had caught herself lately watching herself with an abstracted curiosity, to see what she would do.”
― Margaret Atwood, The Edible Woman

“I suppose you’re wondering what happened to the mirror,’ he said. ‘Well …’ ‘I smashed it. Last week. With the frying-pan.’ ‘Oh,’ she said.”
― Margaret Atwood, The Edible Woman

“Now young lady,’ he said to me, ‘I’m not going to chastize you personally because I can see you are a nice girl and only the innocent means to this abominable end. But you will be so kind as to give these tracts to your employers. Who can tell but that their hearts may yet be softened? The propagation of drink and of drunkenness to excess is an iniquity, a sin against the Lord.”
― Margaret Atwood, The Edible Woman

“What else can I do? Once you've gone this far you aren't fit for anything else. Something happens to your mind. You're overqualified, overspecialized, and everybody knows it. Nobody in any other game would be crazy enough to hire me. I wouldn't even make a good ditch-digger, I'd start tearing apart the sewer-system, trying to pick-axe and unearth all of those chthonic symbols - pipes, valves, cloacal conduits... No, no. I'll have to be a slave to the paper-mines for all time.”
― Margaret Atwood, The Edible Woman

“That’s the nice thing about me. I’m very flexible, I’m the universal substitute.” He reached up over her head and turned off the light.”
― Margaret Atwood, The Edible Woman

“Into the plastic basket went my selections, and off I set, step by step, sideways down the stairs, like Little Red Riding Hood on her way to Granny’s house via the underworld. Except that I myself am Granny, and I contain my own bad wolf. Gnawing away, gnawing away.”
― Margaret Atwood, The Edible Woman

“But such messages can be dangerous. Think twice before you wish, and especially before you wish to make yourself into the hand of fate.
(Think twice,said Reenie. Laura said,Why only twice? )”
― Margaret Atwood, The Edible Woman

“Words,” he said, looking in my direction finally but with his eyes strangely unfocussed, as though he was really looking at a point several inches beneath my skin, “are beginning to lose their meanings.”
― Margaret Atwood, The Edible Woman