Life Before Man Quotes

“I wish I didn't have to think about you. You wanted to impress me; well, I'm not impressed, I'm disgusted...You wanted to make damn good and sure I'd never be able to turn over in bed again without feeling that body beside me, not there but tangible, like a leg that's been cut off. Gone but the place still hurts.”
― Margaret Atwood, Life Before Man

“They meet in church basements and offer bandages to those wounded by the shrapnel of exploding families.”
― Margaret Atwood, Life Before Man

“China does not exist. Nevertheless, she longs to be there.”
― Margaret Atwood, Life Before Man

“All she wants is for both of them to be different. Not very different, a little would do it. Same molecules, different arrangement. All she wants is a miracle, because anything else is hopeless.”
― Margaret Atwood, Life Before Man

“All she wants is a miracle, because anything else is hopeless.”
― Margaret Atwood, Life Before Man

“Pieces for Peace, rescue the Korean poet, ban the bomb. It’s just that he’s never agreed to do anything before. He wonders why, this time, he has. Not that this enterprise is any more likely to succeed than her other enterprises. But collecting signatures against RCMP Wrongdoing does not at the moment seem any more futile than most other things in his life.”
― Margaret Atwood, Life Before Man

“William sits opposite her, drinking water from a Murray’s glass with a trace of lipstick on the rim. His fingers hold the glass, his other hand lies on the table, his neck comes out of his shirt collar, which is light green, and on top of that is his head. His eyes are blue and he has two of them. This is the sum total of William in the present tense.”
― Margaret Atwood, Life Before Man

“But what if she discovers the truth? What he suspects is the truth. That he’s patchwork, a tin man, his heart stuffed with sawdust. He thinks of her waiting for him, somewhere else, an island, subtropical, not muggy, her long hair waving in the sea breeze, a red hibiscus tucked behind one ear. If he’s lucky she’ll wait till that happens, till he can get there to be with her.”
― Margaret Atwood, Life Before Man

“Look, I’m smiling at you, I’m smiling in you, I’m smiling through you. How can I be dead if I breathe in every quiver of your hand? — Abram Tertz (Andrei Sinyavsky), The Icicle”
― Margaret Atwood, Life Before Man

“China does not exist. Nevertheless she longs to be there.”
― Margaret Atwood, Life Before Man

“It’s the turnips in their innocent rows, ordinary, lit from within, the praise lavished on mere tomatoes, the bunches of grapes, painted in all their translucent hues. As if they are worth it.”
― Margaret Atwood, Life Before Man

“China is not paradise; paradise does not exist. Even the Chinese know it, they must know it, they live there. Like cavemen, they paint not what they see but what they want.”
― Margaret Atwood, Life Before Man

“Perhaps she’ll only be surprised, and possibly not even that. He anticipates this moment, which he cannot predict, which leaves room for hope and also for disaster.”
― Margaret Atwood, Life Before Man

“He thinks of Elizabeth, briefly, with detachment. For a moment she’s someone he once knew. He wonders what has become of her. It’s the walks they never took, the fields he could never convince her to enter he regrets now.”
― Margaret Atwood, Life Before Man

“Someday they may be grandmothers. It occurs to her, a new idea, that this tension between the two of them is a difficulty for the children. They ought to stop.”
― Margaret Atwood, Life Before Man

“But whatever his reaction is, she knows her final decision will not be based on it. Nate has been displaced, if only slightly, from the center of the universe.”
― Margaret Atwood, Life Before Man

“Still, this is the only place she wants to work. Once there had been nothing equally important to her, but there is still nothing more important. This is the only membership she values.”
― Margaret Atwood, Life Before Man

“STAFF ONLY. Then she’d seen their lab coats as badges, of nationality, membership of some kind.”
― Margaret Atwood, Life Before Man

“She isn’t doing lab work today but she wears the lab coat anyway. It makes her feel she belongs here. She does belong here.”
― Margaret Atwood, Life Before Man

“At four o’clock his replacement, a German Catholic theologian, he’s been told, will arrive and grip his hand earnestly as if he is indeed a kindred spirit. Nate, embarrassed, will leave the booth and join the walkers, those homeward bound, those merely wandering; he will lose himself among the apathetic, the fatalistic, the uncommitted, the cynical; among whom he would like to feel at home.”
― Margaret Atwood, Life Before Man

“Her house is not perfect; parts of it are in fact crumbling, most noticeably the front porch. But it’s a wonder that she has a house at all, that she’s managed to accomplish a house. Despite the wreckage. She’s built a dwelling over the abyss, but where else was there to build it? So far, it stands.”
― Margaret Atwood, Life Before Man

“she walks around, she holds down a job even. She has two children. Despite the rushing of wind, the summoning voices she can hear from underground, the dissolving trees, the chasms that open at her feet; and will always from time to time open. She has no difficulty seeing the visible world as a transparent veil or a whirlwind. The miracle is to make it solid.”
― Margaret Atwood, Life Before Man

“It’s long been her theoretical opinion that Man is a danger to the universe, a mischievous ape, spiteful, destructive, malevolent. But only theoretical. Really she believed that if people could see how they were acting they would act some other way. Now she knows this isn’t true.”
― Margaret Atwood, Life Before Man

“From everything you’ve told me,” Lesje said, “she hated that aunt.” Nate said that although this was true, the aunt had been important in Elizabeth’s life. In his opinion the importance of something to someone had nothing to do with its positive qualities but only with its impact, its force, and the aunt had been a force.”
― Margaret Atwood, Life Before Man

“Nevertheless he thinks: Soon they will be women, and that recognition runs through him like a needle. They will demand brassieres and then reject them, blaming both needs on him. They will criticize his clothes, his job, his turn of phrase. They’ll leave home to live with surly, scrofulous young men; or they’ll marry dentists and go in for white rugs and hanging sculptures made of wool. Either way they will judge him. Motherless, childless, he sits at the kitchen table, the solitary wanderer, under the cold red stars.”
― Margaret Atwood, Life Before Man

“This is what Elizabeth cannot forgive. She can’t forgive her own treachery. Auntie Muriel must not be allowed to get away with it. She must, for Elizabeth’s benefit, visibly suffer. At last.”
― Margaret Atwood, Life Before Man

“As for Nate, it’s simple. All she wants is for both of them to be different. Not very different, a little would do it. Same molecules, different arrangement. All she wants is a miracle, because anything else is hopeless.”
― Margaret Atwood, Life Before Man

“Now she wants these voices back; even the squabbling, even the rage. She wants to dance with flowers on her head, she wants to be endorsed, sanctified, she doesn’t care who by. She wants a mother’s blessing. Though she can’t imagine her own mother doing such a thing. This is the problem. She knows by now that people do not behave the way she wishes them to. So what should she do, change wishes?”
― Margaret Atwood, Life Before Man

“Perhaps, Lesje thinks, she should join a discussion group. She’s heard about such groups, she reads about them in the family sections of the papers Nate brings home every night. They meet in church basements and offer bandages to those wounded by the shrapnel of exploding families. Maybe she should go and drink cups of tea with such a group and eat cookies and bitch about Elizabeth. But she knows she can’t. She’s hopeless in groups, she’d be afraid of what she might say. In any gathering of the disabled she will always be the least disabled, or pretend to be.”
― Margaret Atwood, Life Before Man

“It isn’t Lesje she resents. Let him screw whatever he likes, why should she care? It’s his freedom she can’t take. Free as a goddamned bird, while she’s locked in this house, locked into this house while the roof leaks and the foundation crumbles and the earth revolves and leaves fall from the calendars like snow. In the centers of her bones dark metal smolders.”
― Margaret Atwood, Life Before Man