Some days I do appreciate things more, eggs, flowers, but then I decide I'm only having an attack of sentimentality, my brain going pastel Technicolor, like a beautiful-sunset greeting cards they used to make so many of in California. High-gloss hearts. The danger is grayout.
Interpretation
This quote reflects on the fleeting nature of appreciation and sentimentality in life.
Margaret Atwood captures the essence of transient moments of appreciation that can sometimes overwhelm us with a sentimentality that feels both beautiful and risky. It suggests that while it is wonderful to find joy and beauty in everyday things like eggs and flowers, there is a thin line between genuine appreciation and a more superficial, momentary nostalgia that can fade away, potentially leading to a sense of loss or emptiness when the excitement wanes.
In practice
Using this quote in a speech about appreciating life's small moments.
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.
Pools of sorrow. Waves of joy.
The problem was money and the indignities of life without it. Every stroller, cell phone, Yankees cap, and SUV he saw was a torment. He wasn't covetous, he wasn't envious. But without money he was hardly a man.
I wasn't prepared for death. Nobody is. You lose someone you love more than you love yourself, and you get a crash course in mortality. You lie awake night after night, wondering if you really believe in heaven and hell and finding all kinds of reasons to cling to faith, because you can't bear to believe they aren't out there somewhere, a few whispered words of a prayer away.
All men have a sweetness in their life. That is what helps them go on. It is towards that they turn when they feel too worn out.
The emotionally sound person should be able to take risks, to ask himself what he really would like to do in life, and then to try to do this, even though he has to risk defeat or failure. He should be adventurous (though not necessarily foolhardy); be willing to try almost anything once, just to see how he likes it; and look forward to some breaks in his usual life routines.
She makes life over, he realized. She controls life, whereas I just sit on my can and let it happen to me.
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