You think I'm not a goddess? Try me. This is a torch song. Touch me and you'll burn.
Interpretation
The speaker declares their powerful seductive and artistic nature, inviting challenge while warning of the consequences.
In this quote, Margaret Atwood emphasizes the duality of strength and vulnerability in art and femininity. The metaphor of being a 'goddess' suggests divine power and allure, while the reference to a 'torch song' indicates deep emotional intensity. The invitation to 'try me' suggests confidence and resilience, while the warning of 'you'll burn' highlights the potential risks of engaging with such potent energy, reflecting the complexity of female identity and creative expression.
In practice
This quote would be powerful in a speech about female empowerment.
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 reason some portraits don't look true to life is that some people make no effort to resemble their pictures.
You have to be lonely to be a writer
To me, this acquirement of nervous, physical, and emotional concentration is the one element possessed to the highest degree by the truly great dancers of the world. Its acquirement is the result of discipline, of energy in the deep sense. That is why there are so few great dancers.
Art supplies constantly to contemplation what nature seldom affords in concrete experience - the union of life and peace.
Dancing is a very living art. It is essentially of the moment, although a very old art. A dancer's art is lived while he is dancing. Nothing is left of his art except the pictures and the memories--when his dancing days are over.
The office of poetry is not to make us think accurately, but feel truly.
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