Women have curious ways of hurting someone else. They hurt themselves instead; or else they do it so the guy doesn’t even know he’s been hurt until much later. Then he finds out. Then his dick falls off.
The Blind Assassin by Margaret Atwood (page 282)
Finally finished reading the book. You should totally finish it. I loved it.
How could I have been so ignorant? she thinks. So stupid, so unseeing, so given over to carelessness. But without such ignorance, such carelessness, how could we live? If you knew what was going to happen, if you knew everything that was going to happen next - if you knew in advance the consequences of your own actions - you’d be doomed. You’d be as ruined as God. You’d be a stone. You’d never eat or drink or laugh or get out of bed in the morning. You’d never love anyone, ever again. You’d never dare to.
“Laura will have money, when she’s twenty-one,” I said.
“Not enough,” said Winifred.
“Maybe it will be enough for Laura. Maybe she just wants to lead her own life,” I said.
“Her own life!” said Winifred. “Just think what she’d do with it!”
You have a lot of friends, she says.
Not a lot, he says. You don’t need many if there’s no rotten apples.
Fuck vegetarians - “All Gods are canrivorous” - Laura Chase.
Even if love was underneath it all, there was a great deal piled on top, and what would you find when you dug down> Not a simple gift, pure gold and shining; instead, something ancient and possibly baleful, like an iron charm rusting among old bones. A talisman of sorts, this love, but a heavy one; a heavy thing for me to carry around with me, slung on its iron chain around my neck.
Why is it we want so badly to memorialize ourselves? Even while we’re still alive. We wish to assert our existence, like dogs peeing on fire hydrants. We put on display our framed photographs, our parchment diplomas, our silver-plated cups; we monogram our linen, we carve our names on trees, we scrawl them on bathroom walls. It’s all the same impulse. What do we hope from it? Applause? Envy? Respect? Or simply attention, of any kind we can get?
At the very least we want a witness. We can’t stand the idea of our own voices falling silent finally, like a radio running down.
But some people can’t tell where it hurts. They can’t calm down. They can’t ever stop howling.
Nevertheless she feels that the two of them are alone; as if the apple tree they’re sitting under is not a tree but a tent; as if there’s a line drawn around them with chalk. Inside this line, they’re invisible.
