Wilderness Tips Quotes

“Knowledge is power only as long as you keep your mouth shut.”
― Margaret Atwood, Wilderness Tips

“Setting fire to the roofs, getting away with the loot, suiting herself. She studied modern philosophy, read Sartre on the side, smoked Gitanes, and cultivated a look of bored contempt. But inwardly, she was seething with unfocused excitement, and looking for someone to worship.”
― Margaret Atwood, Wilderness Tips

“Once in a while, though, he went on binges. He would sneak into bookstores or libraries, lurk around the racks where the little magazines were kept; sometimes he'd buy one. Dead poets were his business, living ones his vice. Much of the stuff he read was crap and he knew it; still, it gave him an odd lift. Then there would be the occasional real poem, and he would catch his breath. Nothing else could drop him through space like that, then catch him; nothing else could peel him open.”
― Margaret Atwood, Wilderness Tips

“She would be invisible, of course. No one would hear her. And nothing has happened, really, that hasn't happened before.”
― Margaret Atwood, Wilderness Tips

“What she read was a series of short connected lyrics, “Isis in Darkness.” The Egyptian Queen of Heaven and Earth was wandering in the Underworld, gathering up pieces of the murdered and dismembered body of her lover Osiris. At the same time, it was her own body she was putting back together; and it was also the physical universe. She was creating the universe by an act of love.”
― Margaret Atwood, Wilderness Tips

“Ger says that Kat has a tendency to push things to extremes, to go over the edge, merely from a juvenile desire to shock, which is hardly a substitute for wit. One of these days, he says, she will go way too far. Too far for him, is what he means.”
― Margaret Atwood, Wilderness Tips

“It's simple,' Kat told them. 'You bombard them with images of what they ought to be, and you make them feel grotty for being the way they are. You're working with the gap between reality and perception. That's why you have to hit them with something new, something they've never seen before, something they aren't. Nothing sells like anxiety.”
― Margaret Atwood, Wilderness Tips

“The lock splits. The iron gate swings open. She emerges, raises her arms towards the suddenly chilled moon. The world changes.”
― Margaret Atwood, Wilderness Tips

“By the time she was sixteen, Jane had heard enough about this to last her several lifetimes. In her mother’s account of the way things were, you were young briefly and then you fell. You plummeted downwards like an overripe apple and hit the ground with a squash; you fell, and everything about you fell too. You got fallen arches and a fallen womb, and your hair and teeth fell out. That’s what having a baby did to you. It subjected you to the force of gravity.”
― Margaret Atwood, Wilderness Tips

“She had loved him, uselessly.”
― Margaret Atwood, Wilderness Tips

“Time is going faster and faster; the days of the week whisk by like panties.”
― Margaret Atwood, Wilderness Tips

“It's the forties look," she says to George, hand on her hip, doing a pirouette. "Rosie the Riveter. From the war. Remember her?"

George, whose name is not really George, does not remember. He spent the forties rooting through garbage bag heaps and begging, and doing other things unsuitable for a child. He has a dim memory of some film star posed on a calendar tattering on a latrine wall. Maybe this is the one Prue means. He remembers for an instant his intense resentment of the bright, ignorant smile, the well-fed body. A couple of buddies had helped him take her apart with the rusty blade from a kitchen knife they'd found somewhere in the rubble. He does not consider telling any of this to Prue.”
― Margaret Atwood, Wilderness Tips

“I no longer think that anything can happen. I no longer want to think that way. Happen is what you wait for, not what you do; and anything is a large category.”
― Margaret Atwood, Wilderness Tips

“She rents herself a large, empty apartment on the top floor of a house. She has no long-term plans. At night she listens to the radio and cooks subsistence meals, and cries onto her plate.”
― Margaret Atwood, Wilderness Tips

“Sex and violence, he thinks now. A lot of the songs were about that. We didn't even notice. We thought it was art.”
― Margaret Atwood, Wilderness Tips

“He can see the point of venison, of killing to eat, but to have a cut-off head on your wall? What does it prove, except that a deer can't pull a trigger?”
― Margaret Atwood, Wilderness Tips

“I will never be that old, thinks Joanne. I will die before I'm thirty. She knows this absolutely. It's a tragic but satisfactory thought. If necessary, if some wasting disease refuses to carry her off, she'll do it herself, with pills. She is not at all unhappy but she intends to be, later. It seems required.”
― Margaret Atwood, Wilderness Tips

“Roughing it builds a boy's character, but only certain kinds of roughing it.”
― Margaret Atwood, Wilderness Tips

“He held a knife against her breast,
As into his arms she pressed,
sang the girl. I could just leave, thought Richard. But he didn't want to do that.
Oh Willy Willy, don't you murder me,
I'm not prepared for eternity.
Sex and violence, he thinks now. A lot of the songs were about that. We didn't even notice. We thought it was art.”
― Margaret Atwood, Wilderness Tips

“But Molly didn't hate men. With men, Molly was a toad-kisser. she thought any toad could be turned into a prince if he was only kissed enough, by her. I was different. I knew a toad was a toad and would remain so. The thing was to find the most congenial among the toads and learn to appreciate their finer points. You had to develop an eye for warts.
I called this compromise. Molly called it cynicism”
― Margaret Atwood, Wilderness Tips

“She lived with several men, but in each of the apartments there were always cardboard boxes, belonging to her, that she never got around to unpacking; just as well, because it was that much easier to move out. When she got past thirty she decided it might be nice to have a child, some time, later. She tried to figure out a way of doing this without becoming a mother.”
― Margaret Atwood, Wilderness Tips

“It was what they both wanted: freedom from the world of mothers, the world of precautions, the world of burdens and fate and heavy female constraints upon the flesh. They wanted a life without consequences.”
― Margaret Atwood, Wilderness Tips

“Jane resented him for it, but she didn't blame him. Her mother inspired in almost everyone who encountered her a vicious desire for escape.”
― Margaret Atwood, Wilderness Tips

“the wife was as old as her own mother, almost, and women like that did not really have lives.”
― Margaret Atwood, Wilderness Tips

“He will exist for her at least, he will be created by her, he will have a place in her mythology after all.”
― Margaret Atwood, Wilderness Tips

“He'd forgotten what delight felt like.”
― Margaret Atwood, Wilderness Tips

“She was something of his own that he had lost.”
― Margaret Atwood, Wilderness Tips

“Part of the life she should have had is just a gap, it isn't there, it's nothing.”
― Margaret Atwood, Wilderness Tips

“Her life began to seem long. Her adrenalin was running out. Soon she would be thirty, and all she could see ahead was more of the same.”
― Margaret Atwood, Wilderness Tips

“Sex has been domesticated, stripped of the promised mystery, added to the category of the merely expected. It's just what is done, mundane as hockey. It's celibacy these days that would raise eyebrows.”
― Margaret Atwood, Wilderness Tips