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.
Interpretation
Understanding others can create a sense of obligation that weakens your autonomy.
In this quote, Margaret Atwood suggests that knowing extensive details about the motivations and circumstances of others can make one vulnerable. When you comprehend why others act as they do, it can create a moral or emotional obligation towards them, thereby limiting your own freedom and decision-making ability. This idea highlights the potential downsides of empathy and the burdens that come with deep interpersonal connections.
In practice
In a discussion about the impacts of empathy in relationships.
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.
This is the middle of my life, I think of it as a place, like the middle of a river, the middle of a bridge, halfway across, halfway over. I'm supposed to have accumulated things by now: possessions, responsibilities, achievements, experience and wisdom. I'm supposed to be a person of substance.
Man, in spite of his fatal degradation, bears always the evident marks of his divine origin, in that every universal belief is always more or less true.
If you look at 'The Have and the Have Nots,' I didn't want to write a show where everyone is great and wonderful and perfect. I wanted to write it so that you're not really sure who the haves are. You look at Hanna, and you see that she doesn't have much, but she has great faith.
It is the fight alone that pleases us, not the victory.
It will be very interesting one day to follow the pattern of our life as it is spread out like a beautiful tapestry. As long as we live here we see only the reverse side of the weaving, and very often the pattern, with its threads running wildly, doesn't seem to make sense. Some day, however, we shall understand. In looking back over the years we can discover how a red thread goes through the pattern of our life: the Will of God.
When everyone is determined to present someone as a monster, there are two possibilities: either he’s a saint or they themselves are not telling the whole story.
A gastronomer who is not an environmentalis t is just stupid. Whereas an environmentalis t who is not a gastronomer is sad. It's possible to change the world even while preserving the concept of the right of pleasure.
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