Norn Cutson > Norn's Quotes

“The CorpSeCorps always substituted rumour for action, if action would cost them anything. They believed in the bottom line.”
― Margaret Atwood, The Year of the Flood

“Potential has a shelf life.”
― Margaret Atwood, Cat's Eye

“I knew what love was supposed to be: obsession with undertones of nausea. ”
― Margaret Atwood, Cat’s Eye

“What we share may be a lot like a traffic accident but we get one another. We are survivors of each other. We have been shark to one another, but also lifeboat. That counts for something.”
― Margaret Atwood, Cat’s Eye

“This is what I miss, Cordelia: not something that’s gone, but something that will never happen. Two old women giggling over their tea.”
― Margaret Atwood, Cat’s Eye

“And yet it disturbs me to learn I have hurt someone unintentionally. I want all my hurts to be intentional.”
― Margaret Atwood, Cat’s Eye

“The world is being run by people my age, men my age, with falling-out hair and health worries, and it frightens me. When the leaders were older than me I could believe in their wisdom, I could believe they had transcended rage and malice and the need to be loved. Now I know better. I look at the faces in newspapers, in magazines, and wonder: what greeds, what furies drive them on?”
― Margaret Atwood, Cat’s Eye

“I did not know how to paint or even what to paint, but I knew I had to begin.”
― Margaret Atwood, Cat's Eye

“Little girls are cute and small only to adults. To one another they are not cute. They are life sized.”
― Margaret Atwood, Cat’s Eye

“I see that there will be no end to imperfection, or to doing things the wrong way. Even if you grow up, no matter how hard you scrub, whatever you do, there will always be some other stain or spot on your face or stupid act, somebody frowning.”
― Margaret Atwood, Cat’s Eye

“This is the middle of my life, I think of it as a place, like the middle of a river, the middle of a bridge, halfway across, halfway over. I'm supposed to have accumulated things by now: possessions, responsibilities, achievements, experience and wisdom. I'm supposed to be a person of substance.”
― Margaret Atwood, Cat’s Eye

“There are things I need to ask her. Not what happened, back then in the time I lost, because now I know that. I need to ask her why.

If she remembers. Perhaps she’s forgotten the bad things, what she said to me, what she did. Or she does remember them, but in a minor way, as if remembering a game, or a single prank, a single trivial secret, of the kind girls tell and then forget.

She will have her own version. I am not the centre of her story, because she herself is that. But I could give her something you can never have, except from another person: what you look like from outside. A reflection. This is part of herself I could give back to her.

We are like the twins in old fables, each of whom has been given half a key.”
― Margaret Atwood, Cat’s Eye

“The alcohol smell is on my fingers, cold and remote, piercing like a steel pin going in. It smells like white enamel basins. When I look up at the stars in the nighttime, cold and white and sharp, I think they must smell like that.”
― Margaret Atwood, Cat’s Eye

“We have begun to slam doors, and to throw things. I throw my purse, an ashtray, a package of chocolate chips, which breaks on impact. We are picking up chocolate chips for days. Jon throws a glass of milk, the milk, not the glass: he knows his own strength, as I do not. He throws a box of Cheerios, unopened.
The things I throw miss, although they are worse things. The things he throws hit, but are harmless.
I begin to see how the line is crossed, between histrionics and murder.”
― Margaret Atwood, Cat’s Eye

“I walk away from him. It's enormously pleasing to me, this walking away. It's like being able to make people appear and vanish, at will.”
― Margaret Atwood, Cat’s Eye

“Everything is post these days, as if we're all just a footnote to something earlier that was real enough to have a name of its own.”
― Margaret Atwood, Cat’s Eye

“Time is not a line but a dimension, like the dimensions of space. If you can bend space you can bend time also, and if you knew enough and could move faster than light you could travel backward in time and exist in two places at once.”
― Margaret Atwood, Cat’s Eye

“I am not mad because I'm a woman... I'm mad because you're an asshole.”
― Margaret Atwood, Cat’s Eye

“Now, it's full night, clear, moonless and filled with stars, which are not eternal as we once thought, which are not where we think they are. If they were sounds, they would be echoes, of something that happened millions of year ago: a word made of numbers. Echoes of light, shining out of the midst of nothing.
It's old light, and there's not much of it. But it's enough to see by.”
― Margaret Atwood, Cat’s Eye