I am afraid of falling into hopeless despair, over my wasted life, and I am still not sure how it happened.
Interpretation
The quote expresses a fear of despondency over life's perceived wasted potential.
In this quote, Margaret Atwood reflects on the fear of succumbing to a profound sense of hopelessness regarding one's life choices and the feeling that time might have been squandered. It highlights the existential dread that can accompany self-reflection, especially when one is unsure of how they arrived at such a point of despair, suggesting a deep internal struggle with purpose and fulfillment.
In practice
This quote can be used as a conversation starter in a philosophical debate about life's purpose.
If I am good enough and quiet enough, perhaps after all they will let me go; but it’s not easy being quiet and good, it’s like hanging on to the edge of a bridge when you’ve already fallen over; you don’t seem to be moving, just dangling there, and yet it is taking all your strength.
I would like to believe this is a story I’m telling. I need to believe it. I must believe it. Those who can believe that such stories are only stories have a better chance. If it’s a story I’m telling, then I have control over the ending. Then there will be an ending, to the story, and real life will come after it. I can pick up where I left off.
What else can I do? Once you've gone this far you aren't fit for anything else. Something happens to your mind. You're overqualified, overspecialized, and everybody knows it. Nobody in any other game would be crazy enough to hire me. I wouldn't even make a good ditch-digger, I'd start tearing apart the sewer-system, trying to pick-axe and unearth all those chthonic symbols - pipes, valves, cloacal conduits... No, no. I'll have to be a slave in the paper-mines for all time.
We love each other, that’s true whatever it means, but we aren’t good at it; for some it’s a talent, for others only an addiction.
I've learned quite a lot, over the years, by avoiding what I was supposed to be learning.
Knowing too much about other people puts you in their power, they have a claim on you, you are forced to understand their reasons for doing things and then you are weakened.
The world is what it is; men who are nothing, who allow themselves to become nothing, have no place in it.
We humans are more concerned with having than with being.
Our constitutional system is defined by a balance between the public's need for transparency and the government's need to have a zone of secrecy around decision making. Both are important, yet they are mutually exclusive.
All that you think is rain is not. Behind the veil angels sometimes weep.
Darkness has completely descended onto the landscape and I stood up and stretched my arms above my head and I wondered what it would be like if it were a perfect world. Only god knows. And he is dead.
The surest mark of true conversion is humility.
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