Because you are never here but always there, I forget not you but what you look like You drift down the street in the rain, your face dissolving, changing shape, the colours running together My walls absorb you, breathe you forth again, you resume yourself, I do not recognize you You rest on the bed watching me watching you, we will never know each other any better than we do now
Interpretation
The quote reflects the complexity of intimacy and the idea that true understanding between individuals is often elusive.
In this quote, Margaret Atwood explores the nature of relationships and the challenges of truly knowing another person. She suggests that despite being physically close, the essence of understanding and recognition may be lost over time, as identities shift and change, much like colors running together in the rain. The repeated notion of seeing yet not recognizing indicates a deeper struggle with intimacy, where emotional bonds may not equate to genuine comprehension of each other.
In practice
This quote would resonate well in a discussion about the challenges of maintaining connections in a fast-changing world.
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.
Don't keep a man guessing too long - he's sure to find the answer somewhere else.
When you listen to other women's stories you begin to understand your own better and you begin to find ways back through and with each other.
The first time you marry for love, the second for money, and the third for companionship.
As if to build a fence around the fatal emptiness inside her, she had to create a sunny person that she became. But if you peeled away the ornamental egos that she had built, there was only an abbys of nothingness and the intense thirst that came with it. Though she tried to forget it, the nothingness would visit her periodically - on a lonely rainy afternoon, or at dawn when she woke up from a nightmare. What she needed at such times was to be held by someone, anyone.
She could see that to lose a sibling was hard: it could only seem unnatural:out of time, out of order, a vicious re-run of your own departure into nothingness.
Sharing food with another human being is an intimate act that should not be indulged in lightly.
Subscribe for the occasional hand-picked quote. No noise.