“Cleverness is a quality a man likes to have in his wife as long as she is some distance away from him. Up close, he'll take kindness any day of the week, if there's nothing more alluring to be had.”

Source: The Penelopiad

Last update June 3, 2021. History

Help us to complete the source, original and additional information

Do you have more details about the quote "Cleverness is a quality a man likes to have in his wife as long as she is some distance away from him. Up close, he'll …" by Margaret Atwood?

Margaret Atwood348

Canadian writer 1939

Related quotes

“His wife had held him in her arms as if she could keep death away from him.
He had cried out, "My God, I am a dead man!"”

Philip José Farmer (1918–2009) American science fiction writer

Source: The Riverworld series, To Your Scattered Bodies Go (1971), Chapter 1 (p. 1; First lines, depicting the death of Sir Richard Francis Burton).

“Ask a man how much a dollar is worth, and he'll tell you, 'Almost nothing.' Try to take a dollar away from him, and you'll get yourself a fight.”

Ilona Andrews American husband-and-wife novelist duo

Source: Fate's Edge

“He (Khizr M. Khan) was, you know, very emotional and probably looked like a nice guy to me. His wife, if you look at his wife, she was standing there. She had nothing to say. She probably, maybe she wasn't allowed to have anything to say. You tell me. But plenty of people have written that. She was extremely quiet. And it looked like she had nothing to say. A lot of people have said that. And personally, I watched him. I wish him the best of luck.”

Donald J. Trump (1946) 45th President of the United States of America

2010s, 2016, July, This Week Interview (July 30, 2016)

“She missed him the days when some pretext served to take him away from her, just as one misses the sun on a cloudy day without having thought much about the sun when it was shining.”

Kate Chopin (1850–1904) American author

Source: The Awakening and Selected Stories

“He had been a handsome man, when they married, fourteen years ago. A handsome, happy man, proud and kind, very good at his work. There had been a splendor to him, a wholeness.
That was gone. There was no more room in the world for whole people, they took up too much space. What she had done to him was only a part of the general program for cutting him and people like him down to size, for chopping and paring and breaking up, so that in the texture of life nothing large, nothing hard, nothing grand should remain.”

Ursula K. Le Guin (1929–2018) American writer

The House (p. 176)
Short fiction, Orsinian Tales (1976)

“There is nothing to take a man's freedom away from him, save other men. To be free, a man must be free of his brothers.”

Ayn Rand book Anthem

Source: Anthem (1937)

“Just like his wife before she freezed on him,
Just like his wife when she was beautiful.”

Kate Bush (1958) British recording artist; singer, songwriter, musician and record producer

Song lyrics, Never for Ever (1980)

“Man was matter, that was Snowden's secret. Drop him out a window, and he'll fall. Set fire to him and he'll burn. Bury him and he'll rot, like other kinds of garbage. The spirit gone, man is garbage. That was Snowden's secret. Ripeness was all.”

Joseph Heller book Catch-22

Source: Catch-22 (1961)
Context: Yossarian was cold, too, and shivering uncontrollably.... It was easy to read the message in his entrails. Man was matter, that was Snowden's secret. Drop him out a window and he'll fall. Set fire to him and he'll burn. Bury him and he'll rot, like other kinds of garbage. The spirit gone, man is garbage. That was Snowden's secret. Ripeness was all.

“She was beautiful, but she was beautiful in the way a forest fire was beautiful: something to be admired from a distance, not up close.”

Terry Pratchett (1948–2015) English author

Source: Good Omens: The Nice and Accurate Prophecies of Agnes Nutter, Witch

“But you must give him some sign, some sign that you love him… or he'll never be a man. All his life he'll feel guilty and alone unless you release him.”

John Steinbeck book East of Eden

Source: East of Eden

“Cleverness is a quality a man likes to have in his wife as long as she is some distance away from him. Up close, he'll take kindness any day of the week, if there's nothing more alluring to be had.”

Help us to complete the source, original and additional information

Margaret Atwood348

Related quotes

Related topics