The Tent Quotes

“A home filled with nothing but yourself. It's heavy, that lightness. It's crushing, that emptiness.”
― Margaret Atwood, The Tent

“Time folds you in its arms and gives you one last kiss, and then it flattens you out and folds you up and tucks you away until it's time for you to become someone else's past time, and then time folds again.”
― Margaret Atwood, The Tent

“Our heaven is their hell, said God. I like a balanced universe.”
― Margaret Atwood, The Tent

“No more photos. Surely there are enough. No more shadows of myself thrown by light onto pieces of paper, onto squares of plastic. No more of my eyes, mouths, noses, moods, bad angles. No more yawns, teeth, wrinkles. I suffer from my own multiplicity. Two or three images would have been enough, or four, or five. That would have allowed for a firm idea: This is she. As it is, I'm watery, I ripple, from moment to moment I dissolve into my other selves. Turn the page: you, looking, are newly confused. You know me too well to know me. Or not too well: too much.”
― Margaret Atwood, The Tent

“Perhaps its not the world that is soundless but we who are deaf.”
― Margaret Atwood, The Tent

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

“We want to get there faster. Get where? Wherever we are not. But a human soul can only go as fast as a man can walk, they used to say. In that case, where are all the souls? Left behind. They wander here and there, slowly, dim lights flickering in the marshes at night, looking for us. But they're not nearly fast enough, not for us, we're way ahead of them, they'll never catch up. That's why we can go so fast: our souls don't weigh us down.”
― Margaret Atwood, The Tent

“I'm working on my own life story. I don't mean I'm putting it together; no, I'm taking it apart.”
― Margaret Atwood, The Tent

“I could end this with a moral,
as if this were a fable about animals,
though no fables are really about animals.”
― Margaret Atwood, The Tent

“If you want what's in the package you should at least know how to get the string off, is what I say.”
― Margaret Atwood, The Tent

“I'm working on my own life story. I don't mean I'm putting it together; no, I'm taking it apart. If you'd wanted the narrative line you should have asked earlier, when I still knew everything and was more than willing to tell. That was before I discovered the virtues of scissors, the virtues of matches.”
― Margaret Atwood, The Tent

“It’s a good excuse, though, orphanhood. It explains everything—every mistake and wrong turn. As Sherlock Holmes declared. She had no mother to advise her. How we long for it, that lack of advice! Imprudence could have been ours. Passionate affairs. Reckless adventures. Of course we’re grateful for our stable upbringings, our hordes of informative relatives, our fleece-lined advantages, our lack of dramatic plots. But there’s a corner of envy in us all the same. Why doesn’t anything of interest happen to us, coddled as we are? Why do the orphans get all the good lines?”
― Margaret Atwood, The Tent

“Fear is synonymous with the future, and the future consists of forked roads, I should say forking roads, because the roads are forking all the time, like slow lightning. A road is a process, not a location.”
― Margaret Atwood, The Tent

“All observations of life are harsh, because life is.”
― Margaret Atwood, The Tent

“A road is a process, not a location.”
― Margaret Atwood, The Tent

“Life Stories: Why hunger for these? One, it fits a hunger. Maybe it is more like bossiness. Maybe we just want to be in charge of the life, no matter who lived it...”
― Margaret Atwood, The Tent

“I won't fatten them in cages, though. I won't ply them with poisoned fruit items. I won't change them into clockwork images or talking shadows. I won't drain out their life's blood. They can do all those things for themselves.”
― Margaret Atwood, The Tent

“I follow suit, said the lion,
vacating his coat of arms
and movie logos; and the eagle said,
Get me off this flag.”
― Margaret Atwood, The Tent

“You don’t understand much, he says. Why do you think I was lost in the impenetrable forest in the first place?”
― Margaret Atwood, The Tent

“Human beings- I've observed- are hot-wired for score keeping, and since they like to win, they're always going one better than the other fellow.”
― Margaret Atwood, The Tent

“No more photos. Surely there are enough. No more shadows of myself thrown by light onto pieces of paper, onto squares of plastic.”
― Margaret Atwood, The Tent

“At this dim season of the year we hunger for such tales. Winter's tales, they are. We want to huddle round them, as if around a small but cheerful fire... It was the right thing to do on the darkest day of the year.”
― Margaret Atwood, The Tent

“Walking was not fast enough, so we ran. Running was not fast enough, so we galloped. Galloping was not fast enough, so we sailed. Sailing was not fast enough, so we rolled merrily along on long metal tracks. Long metal tracks were not fast enough, so we drove. Driving was not fast enough, so we flew.
Flying isn't fast enough for us. We want to get there faster. Get where? Wherever we are not. But a human soul can only go as fast as a man can walk, they used to say. In that case, where are all the souls? Left behind.”
― Margaret Atwood, The Tent

“What are we do to? The child sex trade is not for us: our children are unattractive and rude, and - due to the knowledge of our history - have a bad habit of mugging prospective customers and shoving them over cliffs.”
― Margaret Atwood, The Tent

“You're not my real parents, every child has thought. I'm not your real child. But with orphans, it's true. What freedom, to thumb your nose authentically!”
― Margaret Atwood, The Tent

“Why do you think this writing of yours, this graphomania in a flimsy cave, this scribbling back and forth and up and down over the walls of what is beginning to seem like a prison, is capable of protecting anyone at all, yourself included? It’s an illusion—the belief that your doodling is a kind of armor, a kind of charm—because no one knows better than you do how fragile your tent really is. Already there’s a clomping of leather-covered feet, there’s a scratching, there’s a scrabbling, there’s a sound of rasping breath. Wind comes in. Your candle tips over and flares up and a loose tent flap catches fire, and through the widening black-edged gap, you can see the eyes of the howlers, red and shining, and the light from your burning paper shelter. But you keep writing anyway, because what else can you do?”
― Margaret Atwood, The Tent

“I suffer from my own multiplicity. Two or three images would have been enough, or four, or five. That would be allowed for a firm idea: This is she. As it is, I'm watery, I ripple, from moment to moment I dissolve into my other selves.”
― Margaret Atwood, The Tent

“Everyone believed him of course, but you always knew with Salome that if anyone’s head was going to roll it wouldn’t be hers.”
― Margaret Atwood, The Tent

“We miss you, Mom,
though you were reviled to great profit
in magazines and books
for ruining your children
– that would be us –
by not loving them enough,
by loving them too much,
by wanting too much love from them,
by some failure of love –”
― Margaret Atwood, The Tent

“Mom, who knew the dirt,
and hid the dirt, and did the dirty work,
and never saw herself
or us as clean enough –

and who believed
that there was other dirt
you shouldn’t tell to children,
and didn’t tell it,
which was dangerous only later.”
― Margaret Atwood, The Tent