The Blind Assassin (who took my heart)

I just finished reading Margaret Atwood’s “The Blind Assassin”. To be honest, I felt it quite boring at the beginning but as I kept on reading I discovered one of the best books ever, 637 pages of pure beauty. I have a defect: my books are a disaster as I love underline interesting quotations. And this one is full of them, so let me share some with you. No spoilers, I promise.

He had never known a woman to bruise so easily. It came from being so young and delicate.

He favoured thighs, where it wouldn’t show. Anything overt might get in the way of his ambitions.

I sometimes felt as if these marks on my body were a kind of code, which blossomed, then faded, like invisible ink held to a candle. But if they were a code, who held the key to it?

I was sand, I was snow – written on, rewritten, smoothed over.

An odd thing, souvenir-hunting: now becomes then even while it is still now. You don’t really believe you’re there, and so you nick the proof, or something you mistake for it.(This is for you, Andrea)

 

A fist is more than the sum of its fingers.

Should is a futile word. It’s about what didn’t happen. It belongs in a parallel universe. It belongs in another dimension of space.

 

But who knows where they get those things [organs for transplants]? Street children in Latin America is my guess; or so goes the most paranoid rumour. Stolen hearts, black-market hearts, wrenched from between broken ribs, warm and bleeding, offered up to the false god. What is the false god? We are. Us and our money. That’s what Laura would say. Don’t touch that money, Reenie would say. You don’t know where it’s been.

Happiness is a garden walled with glass: there’s no way in or out. In Paradise there are no stories, because there are no journeys. It’s loss and regret and misery and yearning that drive the story forward, along its twisted road.

I’ll cry a few tears, but only a few, because the eyes of the elderly are arid.