Маргарет Этвуд цитаты

страница 12

„Мы все еще думаем о сильном мужчине, как о прирождённом лидере и о сильной женщине, как об аномалии.“

„Мужчина может написать роман без единого женского персонажа, если не считать квартирной хозяйки или лошади; но женский роман без мужчин невозможен.“

„Ответы, которые дают тебе книги, зависят от вопросов, которые ты задаёшь.“

„Людям почему—то нравится сваливать мусор в такие места, где еще сохранилась природа…“

„Из всех прочитанных мною книг наибольшее влияние на меня оказали «Сказки братьев Гримм».“

„Ручной труд способствовал исцелению духа. Он вычистил комнаты, вымел всю паутину, забрал со склада, где хранил вещи, свои немногочисленные пожитки и перевез их в новый дом.“

„….Меня не занимает шкатулка с красивым рисунком на крышке, - отвечает Дюпон. - Для меня важна лишь музыка. Её извлекает физический предмет, но музыка не является самим предметом. Как сказано в Писании: "Дух дышит где хочет".“

„Чаще всего она будто хотела защитить его от собственного образа, от прошлой себя, чтобы он видел в ней только лучшее. Ей нравилось сиять.“

„Развод, как ампутация: ты остаёшься в живых, но тебя стало меньше.“

„Соединённые Штаты страдают национальной мегаломанией, Канада — шизофреническим раздвоением личности.“

„Каждый миф есть одна из версий правды.“

„Издатели думают лишь о том, чтобы заработать деньги, и если вы пишете хорошо, им наплевать, кто вы — мужчина, женщина, или слон.“

„Я была хорошей машинисткой. В моем колледже умение печатать на машинке считалось вторичным половым признаком, вроде женской груди.“

„Я не думаю, что поэзия выражает чувства. Она пробуждает чувства в читателе, а это совсем другое дело. Как кто-то сказал: «Хочешь выразить свои чувства — плачь».“

„Мы были людьми, о которых не писали в газетах. Мы жили в пробелах и на полях листа. Это давало нам больше свободы. Мы жили в промежутках между историями.“

„Интересоваться жизнью писателя, потому что вам нравиться его книга — все равно что интересоваться жизнью уток, потому что вам нравится фуа-гра.“

“As for my birth month, a detail of much interest to poets, obsessed as they are with symbolic systems of all kinds: I was not pleased, during my childhood, to have been born in November, as there wasn't much inspiration for birthday party motifs. February children got hearts, May ones flowers, but what was there for me? A cake surrounded by withered leaves? November was a drab, dark and wet month, lacking even snow; its only noteworthy festival was Remembrance Day. But in adult life I discovered that November was, astrologically speaking, the month of sex, death and regeneration, and that November First was the Day of the Dead. It still wouldn't have been much good for birthday parties, but it was just fine for poetry, which tends to revolve a good deal around sex and death, with regeneration optional.”

“"Well, maybe I'm a latent homosexual." He considered that for a moment. "Or maybe I'm a latent heterosexual. Anyway, I'm pretty latent. I don't know why. Of course, I've taken a number of stabs at it, but then I start thinking about the futility of it all and I give up. Maybe it's because you're expected to do something and after a certain point all I want to do is lie there and stare at the ceiling."”

“After I wrote Handmaid’s Tale, people came up to me and asked why weren’t there any protests. And I said, “You don’t understand totalitarianism.” A real totalitarianism doesn’t fool around with protests in the streets.”

“In the interests of research
I have walked on many battlefields
that once were liquid with pulped
men’s bodies and spangled with exploded
shells and splayed bone.
All of them have been green again
by the time I got there.
Each has inspired a few good quotes in its day.
Sad marble angels brood like hens
over the grassy nests where nothing hatches.”

“I’m just as human as you. But it’s no use asking me for a final statement.
As I say, I deal in tactics.
Also statistics:
for every year of peace there have been four hundred
years of war.”

“You must cultivate poverty of spirit. Blessed are the meek. She didn’t go on to say anything about inheriting the earth.”

“NOTES: Jean Cololère, a drummer in the colonial troops at Québec, was imprisoned for duelling in 1751. In the cell next to his was Françoise Laurent, who had been sentenced to hang for stealing. Except for letters of pardon, the only way at the time for someone under sentence of death to escape hanging was, for a man, to become a hangman, or, for a woman, to marry one. Françoise persuaded Cololère to apply for the vacant (and undesirable) post of executioner, and also to marry her.
—Condensed from the Dictionary of Canadian Biography, Volume III, 1741-1770”

“If I roll my eyes and mutter,
if I clutch at my heart and scream in horror
like a third-rate actress chewing up a mad scene,
I do it in private and nobody sees
but the bathroom mirror.”

“In order to avoid her death, her particular death, with
wrung neck and swollen tongue, she must marry the
hangman.”

“The one good thing to be said about announcing yourself as a writer in the colonial Canadian fifties is that nobody told me I couldn't do it because I was a girl. They simply found the entire proposition ridiculous. Writers were dead and English, or else extremely elderly and American; they were not sixteen years old and Canadian. It would have been worse if I'd been a boy, though. Never mind the fact that all the really stirring poems I'd read at that time had been about slaughter, mayhem, sex and death — poetry was thought of as existing in the pastel female realm, along with embroidery and flower arranging. If I'd been male I would probably have had to roll around in the mud, in some boring skirmish over whether or not I was a sissy.”

“When you hear me singing
you get the rifle down
and the flashlight, aiming for my brain,
but you always miss and when you set out the poison
I piss on it
to warn the others.”

“A lot of poets published their own work then; unlike novels, poetry was short, and therefore cheap to do. We had to print each poem separately, and then disassemble it, as there were not enough a's for the whole book; the cover was done with a lino-block. We printed 250 copies, and sold them through bookstores, for 50 cents each. They now go in the rare book trade for eighteen hundred dollars a pop. Wish I'd kept some.”

“As I was writing about Grace Marks, and about her interlude in the Asylum, I came to see her in context — the context of other people's opinions, both the popular images of madness and the scientific explanations for it available at the time. A lot of what was believed and said on the subject appears like sheer lunacy to us now. But we shouldn't be too arrogant — how many of our own theories will look silly when those who follow us have come up with something better? But whatever the scientists may come up with, writers and artists will continue to portray altered mental states, simply because few aspects of our nature fascinate people so much. The so-called mad person will always represent a possible future for every member of the audience — who knows when such a malady may strike? When "mad," at least in literature, you aren't yourself; you take on another self, a self that is either not you at all, or a truer, more elemental one than the person you're used to seeing in the mirror. You're in danger of becoming, in Shakespeare's works, a mere picture or beast, and in Susanna Moodie's words, a mere machine; or else you may become an inspired prophet, a truth-sayer, a shaman, one who oversteps the boundaries of the ordinarily visible and audible, and also, and especially, the ordinarily sayable. Portraying this process is deep power for the artist, partly because it's a little too close to the process of artistic creation itself, and partly because the prospect of losing our self and being taken over by another, unfamiliar self is one of our deepest human fears.”

“My friends, who are both women, tell me their stories,
which cannot be believed and which are true. They
are horror stories and they have not happened to me,
they have not yet happened to me, they have
happened to me but we are detached, we watch our
unbelief with horror.”

“The sitting room is subdued, symmetrical; it’s one of the shapes money takes when it freezes.”

“Everybody knew. Nobody admitted to knowing. If other people began to discuss it, you tuned them out, because what they were saying was both so obvious and so unthinkable. We are using up the Earth. It is almost gone.”

“Furthermore, I believe that in order to have civil and human rights for women there have to be civil and human rights, period …”