You can wipe your feet on me, twist my motives around all you like, you can dump millstones on my head and drown me in the river, but you can’t get me out of the story. I’m the plot, babe, and don’t ever forget it.
Interpretation
This quote expresses resilience in the face of adversity, asserting one's integral role in their own narrative.
Margaret Atwood's quote highlights the importance of self-identity and the unshakeable nature of one's personal story. Despite the challenges and adversities that may be thrown at an individual, it emphasizes that one cannot be removed from their own life narrative or purpose, underscoring a sense of empowerment and self-assertion.
In practice
This quote could be used during a motivational speech about overcoming challenges.
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.
Too many athletes are living in a tiny window. They have no vision for themselves - what they can be outside of football and what they can mean to a community. They just don't know any better. My hopes and dreams are unlimited.
I cleave the heavens and soar to the infinite. And while I rise from my own globe to others and penetrate ever further through the eternal field. That which others saw from afar, I leave far behind me.
If you want to reach every person in the audience, it's not about being bigger, it's about going deeper.
My greatest mistake is that my dreams were too small.
You have to recover the capacity to imagine yourself as an ideal and figure out how to project that into the world.
Hope transforms pessimism into optimism. Hope is invincible.
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