An eye for an eye only leads to more blindness.
Interpretation
Seeking revenge only perpetuates harm and suffering.
This quote by Margaret Atwood highlights the futility of revenge and retribution. It suggests that responding to wrongdoing with further wrongdoing does not resolve conflicts but instead exacerbates the cycle of harm, leading to more suffering for all involved.
In practice
During a discussion about conflict resolution, this quote can emphasize the need for forgiveness.
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.
Poverty is not socialism. To be rich is glorious.
(M)aybe we too busy being flowers or fairies or strawberries instead of something honest and worthy of respect . . . you know . . . like being people.
There are millions of people living Thoreau's life of quiet desperation, and they do not have the language to escape from that desperation.
I know of no society in human history that ever suffered because its people became too desirous of evidence in support of their core beliefs.
You try to pull away the experiences until you get to the core of humanity, and you find that light that exists in everybody. It's that light that I'm searching for in all of my work - is that connective thing, that ether that enters all of us - you know what I mean? That's a part of God.
We are part of a symbiotic relationship with something which disguises itself as an extra-terrestrial invasion so as not to alarm us.
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