Frases de Margaret Atwood

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“Um homem é apenas a estratégia de uma mulher para fazer outras mulheres.”

“A sanidade é um bem valioso; eu a amealho e guardo escondida como as pessoas antigamente amealhavam e escondiam dinheiro. Economizo sanidade, de maneira a vir a ter o suficiente, quando chegar a hora.”

“Melhor nunca significa melhor para todo mundo, (…). Sempre significa pior, para alguns.”

“Escrever é deixar uma marca. É impor ao papel em branco um sinal permanente, é capturar um instante em forma de palavra.”

“Lembro-me de andar por galerias de arte, em meio a obras do século XIX: a obsessão que eles tinham por haréns. Dúzias de pinturas de haréns, mulheres gordas deitadas à toa em divãs, com turbantes na cabeça ou barretes de veludo, sendo abanadas com rabos de penas de pavão, um eunuco ao fundo montando guarda. Estudos de carne sedentária pintados por homens que nunca tinham estado lá. Aquelas pinturas deveriam ser eróticas e eu achava que eram, na época; mas vejo agora o que realmente retratavam. Eram pinturas que retratavam animação suspensa, retratavam espera, retratavam objetos que não estavam em uso. Eram pinturas que retratavam o tédio. Mas talvez o tédio seja erótico, quando mulheres o fazem, por homens.”

“Eu nunca entendi porque as pessoas consideram a juventude como um tempo de liberdade e prazer. Provavelmente porque elas esqueceram as suas próprias.”

“As pessoas esquecem-se sempre das profecias a menos que se realizem.”

“Escrever é uma maneira de a voz sobreviver à pessoa”

“- Axioma: uma doença não é produtiva. Em si mesma, não cria quaisquer produtos de consumo e, consequentemente, não gera dinheiro. Embora seja uma desculpa para muitas actividades, em termos económicos só permite que o dinheiro troque de mãos. Dos doentes para os saudáveis. Dos pacientes para os médicos, dos clientes para os curandeiros. Podemos chamar-lhe uma osmose financeira.
[…]
- Agora, supõe que és uma empresa chamada SábiaSaúde. Supõe que ganhas dinheiro com as drogas e as técnicas que curam pessoas doentes ou, melhor ainda, que tornam impossível que as pessoas cheguem a ficar doentes.
[…]
- Então, de que é que vais precisar mais tarde ou mais cedo?
- De mais curas?
- Depois disso?
O que queres dizer com "depois disso"?
- Depois de curares tudo o que existe para ser curado.
[…]
- Lembras-te da má situação financeira em que ficaram os dentistas depois de aquele novo colutório ter entrado no mercado? Aquele que substituía as bactérias nocivas da placa dentária por outras benéficas que preenchiam o mesmo nicho ecológico, nomeadamente a tua boca? Nunca mais ninguém precisou de chumbar um dente e muitos dentistas foram à falência.
- E então?
- Então, precisarias de mais doentes. Ou… o que ia dar no mesmo… de mais doenças. Novas e diferentes, certo?
- É plausível - admitiu Jimmy depois de uma breve pausa. De facto era. - Mas não estão constantemente a ser descobertas novas doenças?
- A ser descobertas, não - retorquiu Crex. - A ser criadas.”

“O ser humano tem esperança de passar sua alma para outra pessoa, uma nova versão de si mesmo, e viver para sempre.”

“Nolite te bastardes carborundorum' - 'Não permita que os bastardos reduzam você a cinzas'.”

“Viva no presente, aproveite-o ao máximo, isso é tudo que você tem.”

“Vivíamos, como de costume, por ignorar. Ignorar não é a mesma coisa que ignorância, você tem de se esforçar para fazê-lo.”

“Mas quem pode se lembrar da dor, uma vez que passa? Tudo o que dela resta é uma sombra, não na mente nem isso sequer, na carne. A dor marca você, mas de maneira profunda demais para que se possa ver. Longe dos olhos, longe do pensamento.”

“Nada muda instantaneamente: numa banheira que se aquece gradualmente, você seria fervida até a morte antes de se dar conta.”

“É bom ter pequenas metas que podem ser facilmente alcançadas.”

“O que você não souber, não lhe trará sofrimento.”

“A noite cai. Ou caiu a noite. Por que a noite cai, em vez de subir como o raiar do dia? Contudo, se você olhar para o leste, ao pôr-do-sol, pode ver a noite subindo, não caindo; a escuridão se eleva em direção ao céu, subindo do horizonte, como um sol negro atrás de uma coberta de nuvem. Como fumaça de chamas que não se vê, uma linha de fogo pouco abaixo do horizonte, um fogo em meio à mata ou uma cidade em chamas. Talvez a noite caia porque é pesada, uma cortina espessa puxada sobre os olhos. Cobertor de lã. Eu gostaria de poder ver no escuro, melhor do que vejo.”

“Quem tudo economiza tem tudo que precisa.”

“Nessas ocasiões leio depressa, vorazmente, quase saltando trechos, tentando botar o máximo possível dentro de minha cabeça antes do próximo longo período de fome. Se estivéssemos comendo seria a glutonaria dos famintos, se fosse sexo seria uma trepada rápida de pé em um beco em algum lugar.”

“te bastardes carborundorum.”

“Ignorar não é o mesmo que ignorância, exige esforço da nossa parte.”

“Vai correr tudo bem, eu disse, supliquei em minha cabeça. Ah, permita que sim. Permita que atravessemos. Só desta vez e eu farei qualquer coisa. O que pensei que pudesse fazer por quem quer que estivesse ouvindo aquilo que fosse de alguma utilidade ou sequer de algum interesse jamais saberei”

“Escolhi o arrependimento com o qual poderia viver melhor, só isso. Escolhi a vida à qual pertencia.”

“Roughing it builds a boy's character, but only certain kinds of roughing it.”

“What Elizabethan playwrights learned from the Greek classics was not theories of insanity, but dramatic practice — that is, madness is a dandy theatrical element. It focuses the audience's attention and increases suspense, since you never know what a mad person may get up to next; and Shakespeare himself makes use of it in many forms. In King Lear, there's a scene in which one man pretending to be mad, another who has really gone mad, and a third who has probably always been a little addled, are brought together for purposes of comparison, irony, pathos, and tour de force acting. In Hamlet, there are two variations — Hamlet himself, who assumes madness, and Ophelia, who really does go winsomely bonkers. In MacBeth, it's Lady MacBeth who snaps.”

“It must be said at the outset that the field of mental illness has always been debatable ground. Who is sane, who isn't, and who is qualified to judge? Standards have fluctuated wildly, and abuses have been numerous. In the last century, in the United States, a wife could be committed to an asylum on the say-so of her husband and two easily-paid-off doctors alone, and there are cases on record of wives who were "put away" for holding theological opinions that differed from those of the husband, or for refusing to have as much sex as he would like.”

“Like all twenty-one-year-old poets, I thought I would be dead by thirty, and Sylvia Plath had not set a helpful example. For a while there, you were made to feel that, if a poet and female, you could not really be serious about it unless you'd made a least one suicide attempt. So I felt I was running out of time.”

“I am yours. If you feed me garbage,
I will sing a song of garbage.
This is a hymn.”

“When women let their hair down, it means either sexiness or craziness or death, the three by Victorian times having become virtually synonymous.”

“Blessed are they that mourn, for they shall be comforted.
Nobody said when.”

“The fact is there are no stories I can tell my friends that will make them feel better. History cannot be erased, although we can soothe ourselves by speculating about it.”

“I will pass over my flirtation with journalism as a way of making a living, an idea I dropped when I discovered that in the fifties — unlike now — female journalists always ended up writing the obituaries and the ladies' page. But how was I to make a living? There was not a roaring market in poetry, there, then. I thought of running away and being a waitress, which I later tried, but got very tired and thin; there's nothing like clearing away other people's mushed-up dinners to make you lose your appetite”

“A divorce is like an amputation; you survive, but there’s less of you.”

“We tend to think of Freud as a great innovator, but the truth is that he himself rested, like a ship on an iceberg, on a huge body of theory and knowledge which had accumulated before his time. Even the famous Unconscious had made its appearance at least seven decades earlier. As for such supposedly modern phenomena as multiple personalities, the vogue for them began in the first half of the nineteenth century; and the first case in which the perpetrator of a murder pleaded amnesia, and got off, was in the eighteen eighties.”

“However, there are all sorts of behaviours in the Bible that might be called mad now, but aren't designated as insanity by the text itself. People see visions — of angels going up and down ladders, of fiery chariots — and, like Moses, who hears a bush talking, and Balaam the prophet who has a conversation with his donkey, they hear voices of those who cannot be said to be present in any usual sense of the word. They also speak in tongues, as the disciples do at Pentecost. Like madness, the visions, the voices and the speaking in tongues are due to external and usually divine agencies. In a world so permeated with supernatural powers, there are no accidents, and in one so riddled with prophets — who went into a frenzy while prophesying — many more kinds of behaviour were accepted as normal, at least for a prophet or an inspired person, than would be the case now. John the Baptist, dressed in animal skins and wandering around in the wilderness denouncing his social superiors, was not thought of as a de-institutionalized street person who's gone off his medications, but as a saint. And this was the pattern for mediaeval views of aberrant behaviour — if you were acting crazy it was a divine punishment, or else you were possessed, by powers either divine or demonic — perhaps aided, in the latter case, by witches.”

“A movie about the past is not the same as the past.”

“He wants only the simple things: a chair,
someone to pull off his shoes, someone to watch him
while he talks, with admiration and fear, gratitude if
possible, someone in whom to plunge himself for rest
and renewal. These things can best be had by marrying
a woman who has been condemned to death by other
men for wishing to be beautiful. There is a wide
choice.”

“She has been condemned to death by hanging. A man
may escape this death by becoming the hangman, a
woman by marrying the hangman. But at the present
time there is no hangman; thus there is no escape.
There is only a death, indefinitely postponed. This is
not fantasy, it is history.”

“Time is not a line but a dimension, like the dimensions of space.”

“She must
transform his hands so they will be willing to twist
the rope around throats that have been singled out
as hers was, throats other than hers. She must marry
the hangman or no one, but that is not so bad. Who
else is there to marry?”

“Freedom, like everything else, is relative.”

“You wonder about her crime. She was condemned
to death for stealing clothes from her employer, from
the wife of her employer. She wished to make herself
more beautiful. This desire in servants was not legal.”

“I plunged in, and set up a Twitter account. My first problem was that there were already two Margaret Atwoods on Twitter, one of them with my picture. This grew; I gave commands; then all other Margaret Atwoods stopped together. I like to think they were sent to a nunnery, but in any case they disappeared. The Twitterpolice had got them. I felt a bit guilty.”

“I became a poet at the age of sixteen. I did not intend to do it. It was not my fault.”

“Adam named the living animals, MaddAddam names the dead ones.”

“For every age there is a popular idea about what madness is, what causes it, and how a mad person should look and behave; and it's usually these popular ideas, rather than those of medical professionals, that turn up in songs and stories and plays and books.”

“Confess: it’s my profession
that alarms you.
This is why few people ask me to dinner,
though Lord knows I don’t go out of my way to be scary.”

“An eye for an eye only leads to more blindness.”

“The policemen's faces glisten too, they're holding themselves back, they love this, it's a ceremony, they're implementing a policy.”

“In restaurants we argue
over which of us will pay for your funeral though the real question is
whether or not I will make you immortal.”

“A lot of people facing fascism didn’t become fascists. I don’t happen to believe that we are all monsters.”

“That old standby of melodrama, the rich uncle shoved into the bin so the greedy relatives could get their hands on his estate, had a sound basis in fact. The Victorians cleaned up the straw and the chains of the old Bedlam-like institutions of the eighteenth century, but they didn't always clean up the practices. Patients were drugged, starved, drained of vast quantities of blood, beaten up, swung from ropes, immersed in cold water and whirled around in the air upside-down, all in the belief that it would improve their mental states. Ask yourself whether this is likely to have been true.”