Old Babes in the Wood Quotes

“I used to believe that having a good memory was a blessing, but I’m no longer so sure. Maybe forgetting is the blessing.”
― Margaret Atwood, Old Babes in the Wood: Stories

“I became quite discouraged at moments, I must admit. What's the point of telling the truth if nobody wants to hear it?”
― Margaret Atwood, Old Babes in the Wood: Stories

“You'll be interested to know that the rewriting of history is still being attempted, especially in the United States.

I'm not surprised. The way they tried to paper over slavery, and then the Jim Crow laws... you can't have those kinds of inequities in a democracy. If indeed that country is one, or ever was.”
― Margaret Atwood, Old Babes in the Wood: Stories

“Many things get broken in a war.”
― Margaret Atwood, Old Babes in the Wood: Stories

“Holiness is a form of monstrosity”
― Margaret Atwood, Old Babes in the Wood: Stories

“Satire in extreme times is risky. Choose any excess, think you’re wildly exaggerating, and it’s most likely to have been true.

(Sympathetic murmur) I know.”
― Margaret Atwood, Old Babes in the Wood: Stories

“Poet by its nature is minor, and award-winning is now a common adjective: it might be applied to a beer or a cow. Many”
― Margaret Atwood, Old Babes in the Wood

“The late 1960s was a time of big domestic breakups: the so-called sexual revolution, post-pill, pre-AIDS.”
― Margaret Atwood, Old Babes in the Wood: Stories

“I was demolishing a lettuce leaf, my oval raspy-toothed mouth opening and closing like a flesh valve as I oozed along on my own self-generated glistening slime highway. The lovely green blur all around me, the lacework I was creating, the scent of chlorophyll, the juiciness—it was pure bliss. Live in the moment, humans are often told, but snails don’t need to be told. We’re in the moment all the time, and the moment is in us.”
― Margaret Atwood, Old Babes in the Wood: Stories

“…she performed the expected neighborly duties: presenting tuna-noodle casseroles to the sick, taking in the mail and newspapers of those on vacations so their houses wouldn’t be targeted by burglars, babysitting the occasional dog or cat. Though not the occasional baby: even when my mother offered, parents of babies hesitated. Could they have picked up on her invisible but slightly alarming aura? (Invisible to others; she claimed that she herself could see it. Purple, according to her.) Maybe they were afraid they’d return to find their infant in a roasting pan with an apple in its mouth. My mother would never have done such a thing, however. She was evil, but not that evil.”
― Margaret Atwood, Old Babes in the Wood: Stories

“I have lived nine lives, and that which I have done
May Cat within Himself make fur! But thou,
If thou shouldst never see my face again,
Purr for my soul. More things are wrought by purrs
Than this world dreams of…
But now farewell. I am going a long way…”
― Margaret Atwood, Old Babes in the Wood: Stories

“Better to preserve the illusion of safety. Better to improvise. Better to march along through the golden autumn woods, not very well prepared, poking icy ponds with your hiking pole, snacking on chocolate, sitting on frozen logs, peeling hard-boiled eggs with cold fingers as the early snow sifts down and the day darkens. No one knows where you are.”
― Margaret Atwood, Old Babes in the Wood

“So we face today and smile For fear that tears will start.”
― Margaret Atwood, Old Babes in the Wood

“Lists procreate; they give rise to other lists. Nell wonders if there's a special therapy for excessive list-making. But if the two of them don't make lists, how will they remember what they need? Anyway, they like crossing things off. It makes them feel that they are getting somewhere.”
― Margaret Atwood, Old Babes in the Wood: Stories

“My heart is broken, Nell thinks. But in our family we don't say, "My heart is broken." We say, "Are there any cookies?" One must eat. One must keep busy. One must distract oneself. But why? What for? For whom?”
― Margaret Atwood, Old Babes in the Wood: Stories

“Then there had been the slowdown; an accumulation, as in sluggish rivers. Things ended up in this house that hadn't been needed in their city life but that they couldn't simply throw out. Layers of sediment, over thirty years of it, had sifted in during springs and summers and falls and springs and summers, and now Nell must dig down through these layers, excavate them, as if the house has been buried under the ash from a volcanic eruption.”
― Margaret Atwood, Old Babes in the Wood: Stories

“It seems to her that most of what she's done in her life has been of this ilk. Projects, ultimately inconsequential. Who have they helped?”
― Margaret Atwood, Old Babes in the Wood: Stories

“We're bad luck, of course, we widows. We know it. Awkward silences occur around us. People tiptoe. Should we be invited to dinner, or will we cast a pall? We certainly try not to cast palls: palls are unpleasant.”
― Margaret Atwood, Old Babes in the Wood: Stories

“You asked me how I was doing, another social pleasantry. No one wants an honest answer to that one.”
― Margaret Atwood, Old Babes in the Wood: Stories

“They wouldn't want you to mope, would they? Those who didn't make it. Not after all they did for you, even if they did nothing but die, and unwillingly, and not for you.”
― Margaret Atwood, Old Babes in the Wood: Stories

“Darlene told me that the hormones women have in them when they've got PMS, men have in them all the time," says Myrna.

"That would account for world leaders," says Leonie.”
― Margaret Atwood, Old Babes in the Wood: Stories

“Did she just use totally as a modifier? Horrid locution! How easy it is to get sucked down the verbal drain into the bottomless pit of word fashions.”
― Margaret Atwood, Old Babes in the Wood: Stories

“Why must I suffer? The ultimate puzzle. That is what it is to be human, I suppose: to question the terms of existence.”
― Margaret Atwood, Old Babes in the Wood: Stories

“Many obscure women have been done to death merely for existing.”
― Margaret Atwood, Old Babes in the Wood: Stories

“What interested these painters was evidently the fact that my clothes were torn off, which allowed them to paint a naked woman in distress, always of interest to a certain kind of man.”
― Margaret Atwood, Old Babes in the Wood: Stories

“Many in your world have the idea that there has been progress since my day, that people have become more humane, that atrocities were rife back then but have diminished in your era, though I don't know how anyone who has been paying attention can hold such a view.”
― Margaret Atwood, Old Babes in the Wood: Stories

“Rigidity is the symptom of a limited mind, and was far too typical of many in the so-called intelligentsia of my day. They mistook fixed ideas for thought.”
― Margaret Atwood, Old Babes in the Wood: Stories

“How helpless the dead are, Nell thinks. What humiliations occur to them. Not that they care.”
― Margaret Atwood, Old Babes in the Wood: Stories

“Why was she being this idiotic about him? He was only a cat.

There is no "only a," she told herself. Nothing and no one is "only a.”
― Margaret Atwood, Old Babes in the Wood: Stories

“...isn't everyone with any degree of self-knowledge an insignificant person?...”
― Margaret Atwood, Old Babes in the Wood: Stories