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The Edible Woman Quotes

The Edible Woman by Margaret Atwood

The Edible Woman Quotes
"You might do something destructive: hunger is more basic than love."
"Florence Nightingale was a cannibal, you know."
"I practise at it; every woman loves an invalid."
"Life isn't run by principles but by adjustments."
"People who aren't married get funny in middle age, embittered or addled or something."
"You can't continue to run around indefinitely."
"I'm stuck. Besides, they sort of take care of me, you know."
"We're all graduate students. In English. All of us."
"I can’t let my whole afternoon dribble away, relaxing though it is to sit in this quiet room gazing up at the empty ceiling with my back against the cool wall."
"Marian sighed, drew a small spider in one corner of the maze of lines, and turned to her typewriter."
"She could get away with doing less, everyone else was in such a state, skittering about and screeching, that they didn’t have time to lounge around and peer over her shoulder."
"I’ll have thrown him out of the window. And leaped out myself."
"I’m terribly sorry darling, but something really unavoidable has come up; can we put it off?"
"It makes me feel a lot safer. Because really, I don’t want you to think that all this means anything. It never sort of does, for me."
"But most of the time you never thought about it."
"Sometimes you wonder how conscious old Lewis was, anyway she’s neither aware nor interested; and right after that you’ll recall she goes to talk with the Mock Turtle, enclosed in his shell and his self-pity, a definitely pre-adolescent character."
"She sat fidgeting with a piece of roll, feeling as though she had made an indecent joke and nobody had laughed."
"She was glad they were dining by candlelight: it would be easier to dispose of things if necessary."
"I think eating well is awfully important, why eat just to stay alive as most people do?"
"I’ve always thought eating was a ridiculous activity anyway. I’d get out of it myself if I could, though you’ve got to do it to stay alive, they tell me."
"The sauce is my own, do you like it? I can’t stand these bottled things, they’re so standardized."
"She wondered whether she really thought so. Under the surface of the glass the form had a peculiar floating drowned look."
"The extent to which he could ignore her point of view was amazing."
"I think it’s supposed to be a man," Duncan said. He had wandered over to the next case. "Sometimes I think I’d like to live forever."
"I mean I don’t care, I’d just as soon eat hamburger any day, but he’ll be insulted if you don’t eat at least some of what’s on your plate."
"No human thought is ever wasted; anyway it's publish or perish these days."
"People get much too narrow, they're specializing too much, that makes you lose sight of a lot of things."
"The poet was pregnant with his work, the poem went through a period of gestation, often a long one."
"What we have now, I say, is a society in which all the values are anti-birth."
"We need a new Venus, big-bellied, teeming with life, potential, about to give birth to a new world in all its plenitude."
"Well, now you know what it's like for me at home."
"Oh, they're immortal," he said, "and sort of shapeless and flexible."
"Sometimes I wonder whether it goes on and on, maybe you're woollen all the way through."
"Her feminine role and her core are really in opposition, her feminine role demands passivity from her."
"You're even handsomer than you sound on the phone."
"The real Peter, the one underneath, was nothing surprising or frightening, only this bungalow-and-double-bed man."
"No, she thought, this has to be the wrong room. It can’t be the last one."
"She was still safe then. She had to get out before it was too late."
"She couldn’t believe it. She stood, confronted only by the long white row of machines, not knowing where to move."
"You aren’t an escape any more, you’re too real."
"I don’t care," she said. She reached up and began to unscrew one of the earrings."
"I guess now I’m supposed to crush you in my manly arms," Duncan said out of the darkness."
"You could at least have told me where you were."
"You’ve been trying to destroy me, haven’t you."