This afternoon held that special quality of mournful emptiness I've connected with late Sunday afternoons ever since childhood: the feeling of having nothing to do.
Interpretation
The quote reflects on the profound sense of emptiness that can accompany the end of a weekend.
In this quote, Margaret Atwood expresses a nostalgic and contemplative feeling associated with late Sunday afternoons. She connects this time to a sense of mournful emptiness, highlighting how moments of stillness and idleness can evoke a deeper reflection on one's life and experiences, suggesting that such moments are both meaningful and melancholic.
In practice
In a speech about the importance of self-care, I might say, 'As Margaret Atwood reflects, sometimes the emptiness of a Sunday afternoon allows for personal reflection.'
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.
I think it can be shown that the law makes ten criminals where it restrains one.
Doctrine is not an affair of the tongue but of the life.
We must reserve a back shop all our own entirely free, in which to establish our real liberty and our principal retreat and solitude.
Peace is liberty in tranquillity.
During our dreams we do not know we are dreaming. We may even dream of interpreting a dream. Only on waking do we know it was a dream. Only after the great awakening will we realize that this is the great dream.
I was raised as an Orthodox Jew in a major neighborhood specializing in that, in Brooklyn. And somewhere when I was about 14, something changed. And that change probably involved updating every molecule in my body, in that I sort of realized: this is nonsense, there's no God, there's no free will, there is no purpose.
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