Time in dreams is frozen. You can never get away from where you've been.
Interpretation
This quote reflects on the nature of time and memory, suggesting that our past experiences are always with us.
Margaret Atwood's quote reveals a profound understanding of how our dreams and memories interact with our perception of time. The notion that 'time in dreams is frozen' suggests an escape from the linear progression of reality, allowing us to revisit our past without the constraints that govern our waking lives. However, the second part of the quote emphasizes that our history and experiences are inescapable, influencing who we are in the present. It speaks to the complexities of memory and the lingering impact of our past on our present selves.
In practice
In a discussion about how our childhood shapes our current identity.
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.
In mountaineering, there is not only the activity, but the philosophy behind it. Some say a moral, but I am against that because all morality is dangerous.
Don't search for heaven and hell in the future. Both are now present. Whenever we manage to love without expectations, calculations, negotiations, we are indeed in heaven. Whenever we fight, hate, we are in hell.
What is man without the beasts? For if all the beast were gone, man would die of a great loneliness of the spirit.
For the saddest epitaph which can be carved in memory of a vanished freedom is that it was lost because its possessors failed to stretch forth a saving hand while there was still time.
The great nations have always acted like gangsters, and the small nations like prostitutes.
If the freedom of speech is taken away then dumb and silent we may be led, like sheep to the slaughter.
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