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“All she wants is a miracle, because anything else is hopeless.” (Life Before Man Quotes)
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
“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
“Both grandmothers spoke as if they personally had been through the war, had been gassed, raped, run through with bayonets, shot, starved, bombed and cremated, and had by a miracle survived; which wasn’t true.”
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
“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
“China does not exist. Nevertheless, she longs to be there.”
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
“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
“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
“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.” (Life Before Man Quotes)
Margaret Atwood
Life Before Man
“Nate hasn’t yet frightened her by asking her to tell him about herself, though he’s been talking since they sat down. She ordered the cheapest thing on the menu, a grilled cheese sandwich and a glass of milk. She listens, eating in small bites, concealing her teeth.”
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
“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
“They meet in church basements and offer bandages to those wounded by the shrapnel of exploding families.”
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
“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
