Which of us can resist the temptation of being thought indispensable?
Interpretation
The quote reflects on the human desire to feel essential and valued in relationships or roles.
Margaret Atwood's quote explores the notion of indispensability and how it is a tempting idea for many people. It suggests that the desire to be seen as crucial or necessary can lead individuals to cling to certain positions or relationships, often blinding them to the reality of their situation and the nature of their interactions with others. This highlights the complexities of human ego and our need for validation.
In practice
In a leadership seminar to discuss the importance of teamwork over individual roles.
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.
How many emperors and how many princes have lived and died and no record of them remains, and they only sought to gain dominions and riches in order that their fame might be ever-lasting.
Just because it's on the radio doesn't mean we have to suspend belief in the evidence of our senses.
When any system has for its goal the advancement of the system over the betterment of its individual members, such a system is embedded in slavery.
An ugliness unfurled in the moonlight and soft shadow and suffused the whole world. If I were an amoeba, he thought, with an infinitesimal body, I could defeat ugliness. A man isn’t tiny or giant enough to defeat anything.
There is no fundamental difference in the ways of thinking of primitive and civilized man. A close connection between race and personality has never been established.
Nor shall derision prove powerful against those who listen to humanity or those who follow in the footsteps of divinity, for they shall live forever. Forever.
Subscribe for the occasional hand-picked quote. No noise.