Quotes – Page 239 | Just Great DataBase

There was nothing left of Earth. They had leeched away the last atoms of its substance. It had nourished them, through the fierce moments of their inconceivable metamorphosis, as the food stored in a grain of wheat feeds the infant plant while it climbs towards the Sun.

There is a lot of time between now and the fall term. There is a lot of time between now and the day after tomorrow if you want to put it that way …

Some people, says Bloom, can see the mote in others’ eyes but they can’t see the beam in their own.

But are there not many fascists in your country?””There are many who do not know they are fascists but will find it out when the times comes.

I obscenity in the milk of my shame.

…there was little that was truly original or indigenous to Gilead. Its genius was synthesis.

Maybe it’s about who can do what to whom and can be forgiven for it. Never tell me it amounts to the same thing.

If you worked out enough, maybe the man would too. Maybe you would be able to work it out together, as if the two of you were a puzzle that could be solved; otherwise, one of you, most likely the man, taking his addictive body with him and leaving you with bad withdrawal, which you could counteract by exercise. If you didn’t work it out it was because one of you had the wrong attitude.

The past is a great darkness, and filled with echos. Voices may reach us from it; but what they say to us is imbued with the obscurity of the matrix out of which they come; and, try as we may, we cannot always decipher them precisely in the clearer light of our own day.

Now the flesh arranges itself differently. I’m a cloud, congealed around a center object, the shape of a pear, which is hard and more real than I am and glows red within its translucent wrapping. Inside it is a space, huge as the sky at night and dark and curved like that, though black-red rather than black. Pinpoints of light swell, sparkle, burst and shrivel within it, countless as stars. Every month there is a moon, gigantic, round, heavy, an omen.

Sanity is a valuable possession.

There are to be no toeholds for love. We are two-legged wombs, that’s all: sacred vessels, ambulatory chalices.

And sometimes it happened, for a time. That kind of love comes and goes and is hard to remember afterwards, like pain. You would look at the man one day and you would think, I loved you, and the tense would be past, and you would be filled with a sense of wonder, because it was such an amazing and precarious and dumb thing to have done; and you would know too why your friends had been evasive about it, at the time. There is a good deal of comfort, now, in remembering this.

In reduced circumstances the desire to live attaches itself to strange objects. I would like a pet: a bird, say, or a cat. A familiar. Anything at all familiar.

Perhaps he’s reached that state of intoxication which power is said to inspire, the state in which you believe you are indispensable and can therefore do anything, absolutely anything you feel like, anything at all.

The breaking of so great a thing should makeA greater crack. The round worldShould have shook lions into civil streetsAnd citizens to their dens. The death of AnthonyIs not a single doom, in the name layA moiety of the world.

It’s like there was a fellow in every man that’s done a-past the sanity or the insanity, that watches the sane and the insane doings of that man with the same horror and the same astonishment.

The innocent must not suffer.

I said You don’t know what worry is. I don’t know what it is. I don’t know whether I am worrying or not. Whether I can or not . I don’t know whether I can cry or not. I don’t know whether I have tried to or not. I feel like a wet seed wild in the hot blind earth.

I have them, these attacks of the past, like faintness, a wave sweeping over my head.