breathedout: Portrait of breathedout by Leontine Greenberg (bathtime)
Every ending is arbitrary, because the end is where you write The end. A period, a dot of punctuation, a point of stasis. A pin-prick in the paper: you could put your eye to it and see through, to the other side, to the beginning of something else. Or, as Tony says to her students, Time is not a solid, like wood, but a fluid, like water or the wind. It doesn’t come neatly cut into even-sized lengths, into decades and centuries. Nevertheless, for our purposes we have to pretend it does. The end of any history is a lie in which we all agree to conspire.


—Margaret Atwood, The Robber Bride
breathedout: Portrait of breathedout by Leontine Greenberg (bathtime)
There’s the story, then there’s the real story, then there’s the story of how the story came to be told. Then there’s what you leave out of the story. Which is part of the story too.


—Margaret Atwood, Maddaddam
breathedout: Portrait of breathedout by Leontine Greenberg (bathtime)
The true story is vicious
and multiple and untrue
after all. Why do you
need it? Don’t ever
ask for the true story.


—Margaret Atwood, True Stories
breathedout: Portrait of breathedout by Leontine Greenberg (bathtime)
We ate the birds. We ate them. We wanted their songs to flow up through our throats and burst out of our mouths, and so we ate them. We wanted their feathers to bud from our flesh. We wanted their wings, we wanted to fly as they did, soar freely among the treetops and the clouds, and so we ate them. We speared them, we clubbed them, we tangled their feet in glue, we netted them, we spitted them, we threw them onto hot coals, and all for love, because we loved them. We wanted to be one with them. We wanted to hatch out of clean, smooth, beautiful eggs, as they did, back when we were young and agile and innocent of cause and effect, we did not want the mess of being born, and so we crammed the birds into our gullets, feathers and all, but it was no use, we couldn’t sing, not effortlessly as they do, we can’t fly, not without smoke and metal, and as for the eggs we don’t stand a chance. We’re mired in gravity, we’re earthbound. We’re ankle-deep in blood, and all because we ate the birds, we ate them a long time ago, when we still had the power to say no.


—Margaret Atwood, The Tent

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