Morning in the Burned House (1995), The Loneliness of the Military Historian
Context: Instead of this, I tell
what I hope will pass as truth.
A blunt thing, not lovely.
The truth is seldom welcome,
especially at dinner,
though I am good at what I do.
My trade is courage and atrocities.
I look at them and do not condemn.
I write things down the way they happened,
as near as can be remembered.
I don’t ask why, because it is mostly the same.
Wars happen because the ones who start them
think they can win.
Margaret Atwood: Doing
Margaret Atwood is Canadian writer. Explore interesting quotes on doing.
Margaret Atwood:
696
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“Do not let the bastards grind you down.”
Nolite te bastardes carborundorum.
Variant: Do not let the bastards grind you down.
Source: The Handmaid’s Tale (1985), Chapter 9 (p. 52)
Source: The Handmaid's Tale
The Progressive interview (2010)
Context: There were a lot of utopias in the nineteenth century, wonderful societies that we might possibly construct. Those went pretty much out of fashion after World War I. And almost immediately one of the utopias that people were trying to construct, namely the Soviet Union, threw out a writer called Zamyatin who wrote a seminal book called We, which contains the seeds of Orwell and Huxley. Writers started doing dystopias after we saw the effects of trying to build utopias that required, unfortunately, the elimination of a lot of people before you could get to the perfect point, which never arrived. … I don’t believe in a perfect world. I don’t believe it’s achievable, and I believe the people who try to achieve it usually end up turning it into something like Cambodia or something very similar because purity tests set in. Are you ideologically pure enough to be allowed to live? Well, it turns out that very few people are, so you end up with a big powerful struggle and a mass killing scene.
Margaret Atwood
book
Cat's Eye
Source: Cat's Eye
Source: The Handmaid’s Tale (1985), Chapter 30 (pp. 192-193)
Source: The Handmaid's Tale
Context: I'll take care of it, Luke said. And because he said it instead of her, I knew he meant kill. That is what you have to do before you kill, I thought. You have to create an it, where none was before. You do that first, in your head, and then you make it real.