A Quote by Margaret Atwood

But I began then to think of time as having a shape, something you could see, like a series of liquid transparencies, one laid on top of another. — © Margaret Atwood
But I began then to think of time as having a shape, something you could see, like a series of liquid transparencies, one laid on top of another.
I didn't know what to think, but what I felt was magnetic and so big it ached like the moon had entered my chest and filled it up. The only think I could compare it to was the feeling I got one time when I walked from the peach stand and saw the sun spreading across the late afternoon, setting the top of the orchard on fire while darkness collected underneath. Silence had hovered over my head, beauty multiplying in the air, the trees so transparent I felt like I could see through to something pure inside them. My chest ached then, too, this very same way.
You try and imagine what it must have been like to first see something moving on a screen. It must have blown your mind, because up to then life went by and there was no way to capture it. You could only get one instant and you didn't get the movement. So it's like having a bit of control over time really, because it's happening in real time or what seems to be real time, and then you can play it backwards and you can watch things again and again.
I realize at one point, that I was being followed, and then I began to see the surveillance that was going past the road on my house. And so, these cars began to surveil me. People began to follow me around, and it did, it was very disrupting to think that your privacy was being violated, and for no reason that I could come up with.
Fate is a shape-shifter. It is the kindest and most generous entity imaginable, laying out more goodness than a person deserves, and then it shrinks and curls and forms into something grotesque. You think something is one thing, but then it´s another.
Then a dog began to howl somewhere in a farmhouse far down the road, a long, agonized wailing, as if from fear. The sound was taken up by another dog, and then another and another, till, borne on the wind which now sighed softly through the Pass, a wild howling began, which seemed to come from all over the country, as far as the imagination could grasp it through the gloom of the night.
I don't think the ebbs and flows - get in great shape and then get out of shape and then see if you can get back into shape - is a good thing. So I prefer to keep my arm always ready to go.
I'm always in this shape, that shape, whatever shape you like the most. I am always in various stages of shapes. If the woman needs to be more soft I'll gain weight and then I'll lose weight for another film that I did where I wanted her to be more wiry. I enjoy using my body as something that helps me get to a character.
If taxes are laid upon us in any shape without our having a legal representation where they are laid, are we not reduced from the character of free subjects to the miserable state of tributary slaves? We claim British rights not by charter only! We are born to them.
I always see something for sure one time and then I make myself see it a second time. Because second time is like, 'OK, I'm not that bad. I'm not that horrible.' But the first time I just think I'm god-awful.
I studied Comparative Literature at Cornell. Structuralism was real big then. The idea of reading and writing as being this language game. There's a lot of appeal to that. It's nice to think of it as this playful kind of thing. But I think that another way to look at it is "Look, I just want to be sincere. I want to write something and make you feel something and maybe you will go out and do something." And it seems that the world is in such bad shape now that we don't have time to do nothing but language games. That's how it seems to me.
If you embrace a project that will require time and patience, then you need something to work on. So the first step of the project is to create an identity. If you don't have an identity, then today you want this player and tomorrow another one. If you have an idea and a shape, then this is how you develop an identity.
Even actresses that you really admire, like Reese Witherspoon, you think, 'Another romantic comedy?' You see her in something like 'Walk the Line' and think, 'God, you're so great!' And then you think, 'Why is she doing these stupid romantic comedies?' But of course, it's for money and status.
The nineteenth century, especially the second half of it, was a time of restatement in Ireland. After the famine, after the failed rebellions of the Forties and Sixties, the cultural and political desires for self-determination began to shape each other in a series of riffs on independence and identity.
You think you're in another civilization, another time, and then you see antennas coming out of these hovels, and your mouth falls open when you see the descendants of the Incas shouting 'Columbo! Columbo!'
I never knew I could suffer so much. And then, at the same time, you think, now I'm ready to open myself up to life in another way, to make it worth something and make it about the right things and not waste time.
Bubbles are incredibly basic. We think of them in that way just because they're a kid's toy. But I think it's more basic than childhood, something primal - the liquid, the flow, the shapes. We were liquid at one point in our development.
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