Fourteen Days Quotes

“Wait until you’re seventy like me, and your brain is packed full of stories and people and loves - all those precious memories you don’t want to lose, especially when you see death approaching to take them all away.”
― Margaret Atwood, Fourteen Days

“Unsolved mysteries, especially those that linger from childhood, just stick with you.”
― Margaret Atwood, Fourteen Days

“But when others said I had talent, I had enough sense to question it. Others could be well-intentioned liars too.”
― Margaret Atwood, Fourteen Days

“I’ve often thought about the process of being forgotten,” Ramboz said. “First you die. Then the people who knew you and can tell your stories die. Then those people die. When your stories die with them - that’s when you’re finally and truly gone.”
― Margaret Atwood, Fourteen Days

“That’s how it gets with names for dogs, for every kind of thing you love, names abound.”
― Margaret Atwood, Fourteen Days

“I mean, everyone who tells a ghost story starts by saying it’s true, but I want to know if it’s really true.”
― Margaret Atwood, Fourteen Days

“In every age,” said Ramboz, “the stupid and ignorant outnumber the enlightened and educated a hundred to one. And they invented a perfect economic system to nurture it, called capitalism.” I”
― Margaret Atwood, Fourteen Days: An Unauthorized Gathering

“He able, but not willing? Then He is malevolent. —Epicurus.”
― Margaret Atwood, Fourteen Days: An Unauthorized Gathering

“They consulted a psychiatrist friend of theirs, and between them, they cooked up something based upon the Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders, which deems every act of behavior an expression of a mental illness, and placed him in one of these country-club assisted-living homes. He seems to like it there.”
― Margaret Atwood, Fourteen Days: An Unauthorized Gathering

“Find something you love to do, Pardi, and you will never work a day in your life.”
― Margaret Atwood, Fourteen Days: An Unauthorized Gathering

“I sometimes feel my mother near me, sometimes summoned, sometimes not. She isn’t always there when I call, but always comes again, sometime.”
― Margaret Atwood, Fourteen Days: An Unauthorized Gathering

“We were poor but the kind of poor where you don’t know you’re poor because everyone else is just as down and out as you are.”
― Margaret Atwood, Fourteen Days: An Unauthorized Gathering

“When we are confronted with war, violence, terror—or a pandemic—we tell stories to sort things out and push back against a frightening and incomprehensible world. Stories tell us where we’ve been and where we’re going. They make sense of the senseless and bring order to disorder.”
― Margaret Atwood, Fourteen Days: An Unauthorized Gathering

“Schnauzers,” Priscilla said. “Those awful jumpy dogs that bite you if you look at them.” […] “Give me a retriever,” Priscilla said. She talked rapidly and with absolute certitude. “Or a sheep dog. Not some jittery creature that barks incessantly, and when they’re not barking they’re biting.”
― Margaret Atwood, Fourteen Days

“Our people have been tested while you have become soft and flabby. Even if this coronavirus takes root here in America, let’s be realistic. Sacrifice never comes to American shores. In a global pandemic, you will continue to enjoy life in restaurants and taverns and crowd the beaches while swapping breaths filled with bat fluids. Could you have taken high casualties as we did during World War II, our cities surrounded by enemy troops during a cold winter at Leningrad, where we stood fast for over eight hundred days? No, for you Americans, nothing should interfere with your right to party. To observe one of your sacred Capitalist holidays like Black Friday, a perfect image for your society, where, if you are not fast or greedy enough, you get trampled. You Americans don’t know hardship. You’ve become bloated. The airlines have had to create bigger seats to accommodate your fat asses, yet you’re always telling pollsters the country is moving in the wrong direction. Slothful. Pampered. Life has never been a spring break for us Russians. Life was not a social for Marina, yet she produced four-to-six liners that were like little jewels. Her Palm Sunday poem, “1920” for example.’ Reciting the poem, he closed his eyes like Andrei Voznesensky when reciting a poem. He had Voznesensky’s tight, intense face.”
― Margaret Atwood, Fourteen Days: An Unauthorized Gathering

“And then there was the story of the Sultana, the worst nautical disaster in American history. The doomed steamship had passed Memphis early on the morning of April 27, 1865, with nearly twenty-five hundred passengers, many of whom were Union troops newly freed from various Confederate prisoner-of-war camps. A few miles upstream, at around two a.m., the Sultana’s boilers exploded. Hundreds were instantly scalded to death.”
― Margaret Atwood, Fourteen Days: An Unauthorized Gathering