Moral Disorder and Other Stories Quotes

“In the end, we'll all become stories.”
― Margaret Atwood, Moral Disorder and Other Stories

“She wasn't ready to settle down, she told her friends. That was one way of putting it. Another was would have been that she had not found anyone to settle down with. There had been several men in her life, but they hadn't been convincing. They'd been somewhat like her table - quickly acquired, brightened up a little, but temporary. The time for that kind of thing was running out, however. She was tired of renting.”
― Margaret Atwood, Moral Disorder and Other Stories

“The objects I chose were designed to hold something, but I didn't fill them up. They remained empty. They were little symbolic shrines to thirst.”
― Margaret Atwood, Moral Disorder and Other Stories

“I thought everyone would be familiar with this figure: if I'd studied a thing in school I assumed it was general knowledge. I hadn't yet discovered that I lived in a sort of transparent balloon, drifting over the world without making much contact with it, and that the people I knew appeared to me at a different angle from the one at which they appeared to themselves; and that the reverse was also true. I was smaller to others, up there in my balloon, than I was to myself. I was also blurrier.”
― Margaret Atwood, Moral Disorder and Other Stories

“In the end, we'll all become stories. Or else we'll become entities. Maybe it's the same.”
― Margaret Atwood, Moral Disorder and Other Stories

“I've learned quite a lot, over the years, by avoiding what I was supposed to be learning.”
― Margaret Atwood, Moral Disorder and Other Stories

“In pictures like these there are always empty shoes. It's the shoes that get to me. Sad, that innocent daily task - putting your shoes on your feet, in the firm belief that you'll be going somewhere.”
― Margaret Atwood, Moral Disorder and Other Stories

“Dead was not an absolute concept to her. Some people were more dead than others, and finally it was a matter of opinion who was dead and who was alive, so it was best not to discuss such a thing.”
― Margaret Atwood, Moral Disorder and Other Stories

“I could do a good imitation of a competent young woman.”
― Margaret Atwood, Moral Disorder and Other Stories

“As any bank robber can tell you (Nell would say), the best thing to do when running away is not to run. Just walk. Just stroll. A combination of ease and purposefulness is desirable. Then no one will notice you're running. In addition to which, don't carry heavy suitcases, or canvas bags full of money, or packsacks with body parts in them. Leave everything behind you except what's in your pockets. Lightest is best.”
― Margaret Atwood, Moral Disorder and Other Stories

“She would roll up her sleeves and dispense with sentimentality, and do whatever blood-soaked, bad-smelling thing had to be done. She would become adept with axes.”
― Margaret Atwood, Moral Disorder and Other Stories

“That image - of a little child being suffocated, or almost suffocated, by others who thought the whole thing was a game - melded with the furtive nocturnal slugs, and my solitary pacing and singing, and the separate, claustrophobic stairway, and the charmless abstract painting, and the gold-framed mirror, and the slithery green satin bedspread, and became inseperable from them. It wasn't a cheerful composite. As a memory, it is more like a fog bank than a sunlit meadow.

Yet I think of that period as having been a happy time in my life.

Happy is the wrong word. Important.”
― Margaret Atwood, Moral Disorder and Other Stories

“That was all quite long ago. I see it in retrospect, indulgently, from the point I've reached now. But how else could I see it. We can't really travel to the past, no matter how we try. if we do, it's as tourists.”
― Margaret Atwood, Moral Disorder and Other Stories

“Breasts were one thing: they were in front, where you could have some control over them. Then there were bums, which were behind, and out of sight, and thus more lawless. Apart from loosely gathered skirts, nothing much could be done about them.”
― Margaret Atwood, Moral Disorder and Other Stories

“Once, I discovered it propped up on my sister's pillow, its neck wrapped in one of our mother's best linen dishtowels. Cookie fragments on dolls' plates were laid out around it, mixed with berries from the prickly-berry hedge, like offerings made to appease an idol. It was wearing a chaplet woven of carrot fronds and marigolds that my sister and Leonie had picked in the garden. The flowers were wilted, the garland was lopsided; the effect was astonishingly depraved, as if a debauched Roman emperor had arrived on the scene and had hacked off his own body in a maiden's chamber as the ultimate sexual thrill.”
― Margaret Atwood, Moral Disorder and Other Stories

“I thought of myself as an itinerant brain--the equivalent of a strolling player of Elizabethan times, or else a troubadour, clutching my university degree like a cheap lute.”
― Margaret Atwood, Moral Disorder and Other Stories

“But all doors used regularly are doors to the afterlife.”
― Margaret Atwood, Moral Disorder and Other Stories

“bye-bye love, as in songs. All alone now. It was so sad. Why did such things have to disintegrate like that? Why did longing and desire, and friendliness and goodwill too, have to shatter into pieces? Why did they have to be so thoroughfully over?

I could make myself cry even more by repeating the key word: love,alone, sad, over. I did it on purpose.”
― Margaret Atwood, Moral Disorder and Other Stories

“One boy had drawn a perfect isosceles triangle on every single page- meticulously, it was emphasized. Meticulously was a chilling touch: meticulousness, we knew, was just one step away from full-blown lunacy.”
― Margaret Atwood, Moral Disorder and Other Stories

“You can't lead if no one will follow.”
― Margaret Atwood, Moral Disorder and Other Stories

“Stories are no good, not even the short ones, because by the time you get to the second page he's forgotten the beginning.
Where are we without our plots?”
― Margaret Atwood, Moral Disorder and Other Stories

“I felt I should respond in some emphatic way, declare a firm position, reach out a helping hand. My eventual murmur of “That’s terrible” didn’t seem nearly enough. Worse: I had a shameful desire to laugh, because the thing was so grotesque, as near-tragedies often are. Surely I lacked empathy, or even simple kindness.
Owen must have felt so too, because after that evening he never came back. Or possibly he’d done what he’d wanted to do: dropped off his anguish, left it with me like a package, in the mistaken belief that I would know what to do with it.”
― Margaret Atwood, Moral Disorder and Other Stories

“I would have to go into the tunnel whether I wanted to or not - the tunnel was the road of going on, and there was more of the road on the other side of it - but the entrance was where [my teacher] had to stop. Inside the tunnel was what I was meant to learn”
― Margaret Atwood, Moral Disorder and Other Stories

“Después de tanto tiempo juntos, ambos tenemos la cabeza atiborrada de esas advertencias menores, esas pistas útiles sobre la otra persona: lo que le gusta y lo que le disgusta, sus preferencias y sus tabúes. No te pongas detrás de mí cuando estoy leyendo. No uses mis cuchillos de cocina. No desordenes. Cada cual cree que el otro debería respetar esa serie frecuentemente repetida de instrucciones de uso, pero el caso es que se anulan las unas a las otras: si Tig debe respetar mi necesidad de remolonear sin pensar en nada, libre de malas noticias, antes de la primera taza de café ¿no debería yo respetar su necesidad de escupir catástrofes para librarse cuanto antes de ellas?
-Oh, lo siento- dice, y me dirige una mirada de reproche.
¿Por qué tengo que decepcionarlo de ese modo? ¿No sé acaso que si no puede contarme las malas noticias de inmediato, alguna glándula biliar o alguna úlcera de las malas noticias estallará en su interior y le producirá una peritonitis del alma? Entonces quien lo sentirá seré yo.
Tiene razón, debería sentirlo. No me queda nadie más cuyo pensamiento pueda leer.”
― Margaret Atwood, Moral Disorder

“I didn't want any phase of my life to be gone forever, to be over and done with. I preferred beginnings to endings in books, as well - it was exciting not to know what was lying in store for me on the unread pages - but, perversely, I couldn't resist sneaking a look at the final chapter of any book I was reading.”
― Margaret Atwood, Moral Disorder and Other Stories

“She was terrified, but also she was curious. Curiosity has gotten her through a lot.”
― Margaret Atwood, Moral Disorder and Other Stories

“I've noticed that most retired old men feel like that: the world simply cannot function minus their services. It's not that they feel useless; they feel unused.”
― Margaret Atwood, Moral Disorder and Other Stories

“(...), but I never liked these girls very much. Their gaze slid over you, smile and all, usually coming to rest on some boy. Still, they were only doing what the women’s magazines said they should do.”
― Margaret Atwood, Moral Disorder and Other Stories

“She wouldn’t go to the house-warming parties, though. She couldn’t manage parties. They made her feel sad.”
― Margaret Atwood, Moral Disorder and Other Stories

“The babies grew up, they were fine children, you couldn’t ask for better, they spoiled her, and then the husband died. Lillie didn’t speak of him, but she kept his suits in the closet; she couldn’t bear to give them away. Dead was not an absolute concept to her. Some people were more dead than others, and finally it was a matter of opinion who was dead and who was alive, so it was best not to discuss such a thing. Similarly she did not speak of the camp she’d been put into, nor of the lost baby. Why speak? What difference would it make? Who’d want to hear? Anyway she’d been luckier than most. She’d been so lucky.”
― Margaret Atwood, Moral Disorder and Other Stories