Truly amazing, what people can get used to, as long as there are a few compensations.
Interpretation
People can adapt to various situations if they receive some benefits to offset any difficulties.
Margaret Atwood's quote suggests that human beings possess an extraordinary capacity for adaptation. Regardless of the challenges or hardships they face, individuals can become accustomed to their circumstances if there are certain compensatory factors that provide comfort or rewards. This highlights the resilience of the human spirit and the ability to find balance in life, even in less than ideal situations.
In practice
In a motivational speech about overcoming adversity, one could use this quote to illustrate resilience.
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 personal vocabulary, the individual melody whose metre is one's biography, joins in that sound, with any luck, and the body moves like a walking, a waking island.
Our faith is an astounding thing-astounding that I should believe him to be the Son of God who is suspended on the cross, whom I have never seen, with whom I have never become acquainted.
I'm like a book you have to read. A book can't read itself to you. It doesn't even know what it's about. I don't know what I'm about.
The human race is in the best condition when it has the greatest degree of liberty.
The spirit of man is more important than mere physical strength, and the spiritual fiber of a nation than its wealth.
Mankind invented the atomic bomb, _x000D_ but no mouse would ever construct _x000D_ a mousetrap.
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