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.
Adapting a novel is not really about being faithful to every word and every moment the author has created. It's more about that same story being filtered through somebody else's sensibility.
An artist is someone who can hold two opposing viewpoints and still remain fully functional.
Do your art. But don't wreck your art if it doesn't lend itself to paying the bills. That would be a tragedy.
Roaming through the jungle of "Ohs" and "Ahs", searching for a more agreeable noise, I live a life of primitivity with the mind of a child and an unquenchable thirst for sharps and flats.
An essential portion of any artist’s labor is not creation so much as invocation. Part of the work cannot be made, it must be received; and we cannot have this gift except, perhaps, by supplication, by courting, by creating within ourselves that ‘begging bowl’ to which the gift is drawn.
Good architecture should be a projection of life itself, and that implies an intimate knowledge of biological, social, technical, and artistic problems.
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