A Quote by Margaret Atwood

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 washroom 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.

Margaret Atwood

Quote Topics

Alive Any Applause Assert Attention Badly Carve Cups Display Dogs Down Envy Even Existence Falling Finally Fire Framed Get Hope Idea Impulse Kind Least Like Linen Names Our Ourselves Own Photographs Put Radio Respect Running Same Silent Silver Simply Stand Still Them Trees Very Voices Walls Want While Why Wish Witness

Quote Author

Margaret Atwood
Canadian - Novelist
Born: November 18, 1939

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.

Margaret Atwood

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.

Margaret Atwood

Our bodies and our minds have their own timing that pay little attention to our cerebral desires. We can't force or expect things to change as fast as we want, but when we put our efforts in the direction of our intention and drop everything else like snow falling, things unfold with ease.

Tara Stiles

We are constantly telling ourselves what we most want to know, and at the same time are deaf to it. Why does envy have such a fierce bite? Why do we fall silent or get worried just as our story is about to spring out of our control and into its own life? Whose shadow falls across the page?

Bonnie Friedman

Our mistake is that we want God to send revival on our terms. We want to get the power of God into our hands, to call it to us that it may work for us in promoting and furthering our kind of Christianity. We want still to be in charge, guiding the chariot through the religious sky in the direction we want it to go, shouting "Glory to God," but modestly accepting a share of the glory for ourselves in a nice inoffensive sort of way. We are calling on God to send fire on our altars, completely ignoring the fact that they are OUR altars and not God's.

Aiden Wilson Tozer

We've sweated and torn out our hair trying to reconstruct our chosen lives, to fashion them like literary sculptures, at once monumental and yet human. We've applied all of our intelligence, our empathy, our critical faculties, our compassion - and we think, in our delusion, that it's still 1960, and our work is going to get noticed.

Nigel Hamilton

Self-awareness is our capacity to stand apart from ourselves and examine our thinking, our motives, our history, our scripts, our actions, and our habits and tendencies.

Stephen Covey

We cannot bank our hopes on possibilities. We must put our trust in ourselves, in our capabilities and efforts and strength and preparations not only for our success but even to avoid our own defeat.

Aung San

Our focus must be on what we need to change about ourselves-our attitudes, our words, our actions-even if our circumstances and the other people in our lives remain the same.

Robin Lee

Our actual enemy is not any force exterior to ourselves, but our own crying weaknesses, our cowardice, our selfishness, our hypocrisy, our purblind sentimentalism.

Sri Aurobindo

Our globe is under new dramatic environmental pressure: our globe is warming, our ice caps melting, our glaciers receding, our coral is dying, our soils are eroding, our water tables falling, our fisheries are being depleted, our remaining rainforests shrinking. Something is very, very wrong with our eco-system.

Richard Lamm

The Three Wiseman: The weather has been awful, The countryside is dreary, Marsh, jungle, rock; and echoes mock, Calling our hope unlawful; But a silly song can help along Yours ever and sincerely: At least we know for certain that we are three old sinners, that this journey is much too long, that we want our dinners, and miss our wives, our books, our dogs, but have only the vaguest idea why we are what we are. To discover how to be human now Is the reason we follow this star.

W. H. Auden

A moral character is attached to autumnal scenes; the leaves falling like our years, the flowers fading like our hours, the clouds fleeting like our illusions, the light diminishing like our intelligence, the sun growing colder like our affections, the rivers becoming frozen like our lives--all bear secret relations to our destinies.

François-René de Chateaubriand

Our world does not exist from its own side--like a dream world, it is a mere appearance to our mind. In dreams we can see and touch our dream world, but when we wake up we realize that it is simply a projection of our mind and had no existence outside our mind. In the same way, the world we see when we are awake is simply a projection of our mind and has no existence outside our mind.

Geshe Kelsang Gyatso

Recognize that the great majority of us aren't trained actors and entertainers. Usually, it's not our faces, our bodies, our personas or our stage presence that sells our books. It's our stories, our visions and our voices.

M. J. Rose

There's nothing in your life or in our collective problems that does not require our ability to put our attention where we care about. At the end of our lives, all we have is our attention and our time.

Tristan Harris

A Quote by Margaret Atwood

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