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There's More Than One Way To Skin A Cat, My Father Used To Say; It Bothered Me, I Didn't See Why They Would Want To Skin A Cat Even One Way.
-Margaret Atwood
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There's More Than One

Margaret Atwood
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There's More Than One Way To Skin A Cat, My Father Used To Say; It Bothered Me, I Didn't See Why They Would Want To Skin A Cat Even One Way.

Understanding the Quote: "there's more than one way to skin a cat, my father used..."

This quote by Margaret Atwood reflects deeply on the theme of father. It connects to the universal human journey of purpose, motivation, and reflection. Often categorized under Father, Cat, Skins, the quote offers insight, emotional clarity, and intellectual inspiration to readers worldwide.

Whether you’re a student exploring new ideas, a leader trying to motivate your team, or someone seeking direction in life — this quote provides value. It resonates because it’s more than words — it’s a bridge between experience and wisdom. It shows how Margaret Atwood interprets life's core challenges and triumphs.

Lessons From the Quote

This quote teaches resilience and focus. It reminds readers that no matter where they stand in life, reflection and self-awareness lead to growth. Each word has meaning, and when studied, it becomes clear how impactful thoughtful language can be.

About Margaret Atwood

Margaret Atwood is celebrated for insightful thoughts on father and cat. Their legacy lives on through writings that guide, comfort, and inspire. Discover more on their profile page.

Actionable Takeaways

  • Reflect on how this quote applies to your current life path.
  • Share the message with someone who needs inspiration.
  • Write your thoughts on this quote in a journal or blog post.
  • Use it as a daily affirmation or reminder.

Closing Thoughts

Quotes like this endure because they capture universal truths. They comfort us in solitude and empower us in groups. Carry this quote forward — live by its wisdom, share its message, and keep its essence alive.

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Topic
Father
Cat
Skins
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By Telling You Anything At All I'm At Least Believing In You, Believe You're There, I Believe You Into Being. Because I'm Telling You This Story I Will Your Existence. I Tell, Therefore You Are. So I Will Go On. So I Will Myself To Go On.
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Time Is Not A Line But A Dimension, Like The Dimensions Of Space. If You Can Bend Space You Can Bend Time Also, And If You Knew Enough And Could Move Faster Than Light You Could Travel Backwards In Time And Exist In Two Places At Once.
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Touch Comes Before Sight, Before Speech. It Is The First Language And The Last, And It Always Tells The Truth.
Philosophy
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For Years I Wanted To Be Older, And Now I Am.
Inspirational
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One Of The Gravestones In The Cemetery Near The Earliest Church Has An Anchor On It And An Hourglass, And The Words In Hope. In Hope. Why Did They Put That Above A Dead Person? Was It The Corpse Hoping, Or Those Still Alive?
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Church
Alive
I Grew Up With The Biologists. I Know How They Think.
Thinking
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As All Historians Know, The Past Is A Great Darkness, And Filled With Echoes.
Past
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Darkness
Romance Takes Place In The Middle Distance. Romance Is Looking In At Yourself Through A Window Clouded With Dew. Romance Means Leaving Things Out: Where Life Grunts And Shuffles, Romance Only Sighs.
Love
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Teaching Other People To Write Is Not Something I Can Do. The Only Kind Of Advice I Can Give Them Will Be Trite By Its Nature. Of Course, Read A Lot, Write A Lot. The Kind Of Advice I Wish I Had Been Given Is All Of A Practical Nature, Having To Do With Publishers And Agents.
Teaching
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But I Began Then To Think Of Time As Having A Shape, Something You Could See, Like A Series Of Liquid Transparencies, One Laid On Top Of Another.
Thinking
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The Beginning Of Canadian Cultural Nationalism Was Not 'am I Really That Oppressed?' But 'am I Really That Boring?'
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This Is How The Girl Who Couldn't Speak And The Man Who Couldn't See Fell In Love.
Girl
Men
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You Can Think Clearly Only With Your Clothes On.
Inspiring
Thinking
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These Things Sneak Up On Him For No Reason, These Flashes Of Irrational Happiness. It's Probably A Vitamin Deficiency.
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It Was Exciting To Work With Director Jennifer Baichwal, Who Made Manufactured Landscapes And Others, On The Film Of Payback: Debt And The Shadow Side Of Wealth. It's Called, Simply, Payback. Jennifer Didn't Want To Do A Transliteration Of The Book, A Kind Of Illustrated Version, But To Go Into The Core Of The Book: Owing And Being Owed, Paying And Paying Back, On All Sorts Of Levels. So She Found Real-life, Visceral Stories That Embodied The Themes Of The Book.
Real
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Somebody Has Been A Complete Ratbag All Their Life And They've Gotten Away With It, And They Die Happy And Rich, We So Much Want To Believe That They're Going Off To The Halls Of Judgment, That Their Heart Will Be Weighed Against The Feather Of Truth, That It Will Be Heavy With Sin And It Will Be Eaten By A Crocodile. It's Almost Essential To Our Well-being To Have A Fallback Position Like That. It May Appear As If You've Gotten Away With It, But You'll Pay For It Later.
Believe
Heart
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Blank Pages Inspire Me With Terror.
Writing
Inspire
Pages
Always Good To Take A Look At The Long List For The Mann Booker, For The Commonwealth. It Gives You An Overview.there Is So Much Going On All Over The World That It's Impossible For One Person To Keep Up. And I Can't.
Giving
Long
World
So That’s What Art Is, For The Artist,” Said Crake. “an Empty Drainpipe. An Amplifier. A Stab At Getting Laid.
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Empty
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Hunger Is A Powerful Reorganizer Of The Conscience.
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Hunger
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My Brother And I Were Both Teenage Writers, And He Was, I Have To Say, Better Than I Was, But He Went Into Science, And I Went Into Writing.
Brother
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Nature Full Strength Is More Than We Can Take, Adam One Used To Say. It's A Potent Hallucinogen, A Soporific, For The Untrained Soul. We're No Longer At Home In It. We Need To Dilute It. We Can't Drink It Straight. And God Is The Same. Too Much God And You Overdose. God Needs To Be Filtered.
Home
Soul
Needs
The Idea Of The Chickens With The Multiple Breasts And Thighs Came From An Urban Legend That Some Fast-food Places Had Developed Chickens With Four Thighs. It Wasn't True, But It Is A Suggestive Rumor.
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Nevertheless, Blood Is Thicker Than Water, As Anyone Knows Who Has Tasted Both.
Blood
Water
Nevertheless
If You're Not Annoying Somebody, You're Not Really Alive.
Alive
Annoying
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The Human Moral Keyboard Is Limited ... There's Nothing You Can Play On It That Hasn't Been Played Before. And, My Dear Friends, I Am Sorry To Say This, But It Has Its Lower Notes.
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I Write As If I've Lived A Lot Of Things I Haven't Lived.
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Better Not To Invent Her In Her Absence. Better To Wait Until She's Actually Here. Then He Can Make Her Up As She Goes Along.
Waiting
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We Thought We Had Such Problems. How Were We To Know We Were Happy?
Problem
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Extreme Good, Extreme Evil: The Abilities Required Are Similar.
Evil
Ability
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By Telling You Anything At All I'm At Least Believing In You, I Believe You're There, I Believe You Into Being.
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You Want The Truth, Of Course. You Want Me To Put Two And Two Together. But Two And Two Doesn’t Necessarily Get You The Truth. Two And Two Equals A Voice Outside The Window. Two And Two Equals The Wind. The Living Bird Is Not Its Labeled Bones.
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Kill What You Can't Save What You Can't Eat Throw Out What You Can't Throw Out Bury What You Can't Bury Give Away What You Can't Give Away You Must Carry With You, It Is Always Heavier Than You Thought.
Giving
Laughter May Instruct But It May Also Conceal, Defending The Joker Against Anger And Retaliation: A Game Is Only A Game.
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It's True That There Is A Rescue Thing In People, And Not Just Rescuing The Family, Which Is Kind Of Obvious From A Biological Point Of View. But Why Is It That Some People Will Jump Into A Freezing River And Swim Out To A Downed Plane For Total Strangers? What Is That About? And It Seems To Be That It's Part Of Your Concept Of Who You Are. That's Why Some People Run Into The Burning Buildings, Because If They Don't, Their Concept Of Who They Are Will Be Violated. They Wouldn't Be Who They Thought They Were.
Running
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The Use Of "religion" As An Excuse To Repress The Freedom Of Expression And To Deny Human Rights Is Not Confined To Any Country Or Time.
Country
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Stick A Shovel Into The Ground Almost Anywhere And Some Horrible Thing Or Other Will Come To Light. Good For Trade, We Thrive On Bones; Without Them There'd Be No Stories.
Light
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All It Takes,” Said Crake, “is The Elimination Of One Generation. One Generation Of Anything. Beetles, Trees, Microbes, Scientists, Speakers Of French, Whatever. Break The Link In Time Between One Generation And The Next, And It’s Game Over Forever.
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Forever
Some Bioengineering Is Good, Especially If It Results In Plants That Are More Drought-resistant Or Perennial Food Crops.
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I'm From The Generation That Had The Boys' Door And The Girls' Door When You Went To School, And You Got In Big Trouble If You Went In The Wrong One.
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How Furious She Must Be, Now That She's Been Taken At Her Word.
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And Each Of His Voices Left His Body In A Different Colored Soul And Floated Up Towards The Sun Still Singing.
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If It's All Instruction, You Get Annoyed With It And Bored, And You Stop Reading. If It's All Entertainment, You Read It Quite Quickly, Your Heart Going Pitty-pat, Pitty-pat. But When You Finish, That's It. You're Not Going To Think About It Much Afterward, Apart From The Odd Nightmare. You're Not Going To Read That Book Again.
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But Maybe Boredom Is Erotic, When Women Do It, For Men.
Men
Boredom
Erotic
Don't Eat Anything You Aren't Prepared To Kill. Don't Kill Anything You Aren't Prepared To Eat.
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We Should Take A Lesson From The Irish Potato Famine: Monocultures Are Vulnerable. Monocultures Of Any Kind Are Very Vulnerable, Because One Change And You're Cooked. So We Should Be Diversifying, Wouldn't You Say?
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Knowledge Is Power Only As Long As You Keep Your Mouth Shut.
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These Things You Did Were Like Prayers; You Did Them And You Hoped They Would Save You. And For The Most Part They Did. Or Something Did; You Could Tell By The Fact That You Were Still Alive.
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Even In The Tragedies, Shakespeare Always Put In Parts For The Comic Actors Because His Audience Was Mixed. He Puts In People Who Talk Like Aristocrats. He Puts In Idiots And Fools. He Puts In Certain Middle-range Characters. And When You Go To The Globe, You Realize How That All Works. The People Who Paid More Sat In Seats Around The Edge. Everybody Else Paid A Penny. They Put It Into A Tin Box - That's Why We Call It The "box Office." They Stood In The Pit, But They Were Very Close, So When Hamlet Was Doing His Soliloquy, It Was Addressed To You, The Audience - Right There.
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A Prison Does Not Only Lock Its Inmates Inside, It Keeps All Others Out. Her Strongest Prison Is Of Her Own Construction.
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Inmates
It's Doors I'm Afraid Of Because I Can't See Through Them, Its The Door Opening By Itself In The Wind I'm Afraid Of.
Doors
Wind
Because I Can
You Need A Certain Amount Of Nerve To Be A Writer, An Almost Physical Nerve, The Kind You Need To Walk A Log Across A River.
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But Who Can Remember Pain, Once It’s Over? All That Remains Of It Is A Shadow, Not In The Mind Even, In The Flesh. Pain Marks You, But Too Deep To See. Out Of Sight, Out Of Mind.
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Sight
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Being Edited Is Like Falling Face Down Into A Threshing Machine.
Fall
Machines
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Imagine A Famine. Now Imagine A Piece Of Bread. Both Of These Things Are Real But You Happen To Be In The Same Room With Only One Of Them. Put Yourself Into A Different Room, That’s What The Mind Is For.
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Mind
Different
No Luck Was Dumb Because Luck Was Just Another Name For Miracle.
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Creativity
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Things Might Have Been Different If She Hadn't Been Able To Drift; If She'd Had To Concentrate On Her Next Meal, Instead Of Dwelling On All The Injuries She Felt We'd Done Her. An Unearned Income Encourages Self-pity In Those Already Prone To It.
Self
Dwelling
Meals
I Don't Want To See Anyone. I Lie In The Bedroom With The Curtains Drawn And Nothingness Washing Over Me Like A Sluggish Wave. Whatever Is Happening To Me Is My Own Fault. I Have Done Something Wrong, Something So Huge I Can't Even See It, Something That's Drowning Me. I Am Inadequate And Stupid, Without Worth. I Might As Well Be Dead.
Depression
Lying
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The Answers You Get From Literature Depend On The Questions You Pose.
Reality
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Literature
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About No Subject Are Poets Tempted To Lie So Much As About Their Own Lives.
Lying
Writing
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When Women Let Their Hair Down, It Means Either Sexiness Or Craziness Or Death, The Three By Victorian Times Having Become Virtually Synonymous.
Women
Mean
Hair
Walter Turned On The Radio: Electric Violins Wailing, Twisted Romance, The Four-square Beat Of Heartbreak. Trite Suffering, But Suffering Nonetheless. The Entertainment Business. What Voyeurs We Have All Become.
Music
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As Soon As You Have A Language That Has A Past Tense And A Future Tense You're Going To Say, 'where Did We Come From, What Happens Next?' The Ability To Remember The Past Helps Us Plan The Future.
Past
Next
Helping
That Was When They Suspended The Constitution. They Said It Would Be Temporary. There Wasn't Even Any Rioting In The Streets. People Stayed Home At Night, Watching Television, Looking For Some Direction. There Wasn't Even An Enemy You Could Put Your Finger On.
Home
Night
People
If I Love You, Is That A Fact Or A Weapon?
Love
Romantic
Loving Someone
The Newspaper Stories Were Like Dreams To Us, Bad Dreams Dreamt By Others. How Awful, We Would Say, And They Were, But They Were Awful Without Being Believable. They Were Too Melodramatic, They Had A Dimension That Was Not The Dimension Of Our Lives. We Were The People Who Were Not In The Papers. We Lived In The Blank White Spaces At The Edges Of Print. It Gave Us More Freedom. We Lived In The Gaps Between The Stories.
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Space
A Man Is Just A Woman's Strategy For Making Other Women.
Men
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Hope Drives Us To Invent New Fixes For Old Messes, Which In Turn Create Ever More Dangerous Messes. Hope Elects The Politician With The Biggest Empty Promise; And As Any Stockbroker Or Lottery Seller Knows, Most Of Us Will Take A Slim Hope Over Prudent And Predictable Frugality. Hope, Like Greed, Fuels The Engine Of Capitalism.
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Keep The Faith. Whatever That May Be. Don't Get Too Depressed Yet, Because I Have A Belief In America Being Very Diverse And Ornery, And Containing A Lot Of People Who Are Not Going To Roll Over Very Easily For A Totalitarian Dictatorship. That Is What I Think.
Thinking
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Belief
Writing Is Very Improvisational. It's Like Trying To Fix A Broken Sewing Machine With Safety Pins And Rubber Bands. A Lot Of Tinkering.
Writing
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Broken
Jimmy Had Been Full Of Himself Back Then, Thinks Snowman With Indulgence And A Little Envy. He’d Been Unhappy Too, Of Course. It Went Without Saying, His Unhappiness. He’d Put A Lot Of Energy Into It.
Thinking
Envy
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The Past Is A Closed Door.
Past
Doors
Closed Doors
I'm A Fool, To Confuse This With Goodness. I Am Not Good. I Know Too Much To Be Good. I Know Myself. I Know Myself To Be Vengeful, Greedy, Secretive And Sly.
Too Much
Fool
Greedy
Canada Was Built On Dead Beavers.
Canada
Beavers
Built
We're Facing Growing Climate Change, More Floods, More Droughts, More Crisis On A Planetary Level, And The Systems We Put In Place In The Twentieth Century Are Just Not Going To Work. We've Run Out Of Stuff. Our Big Problems Are Going To Be Energy Supplies And Food Supplies. This Is Not A Right-left Issue.
Running
Issues
Growing
You Can't Keep A Cool Head When You're Drowning In Love. You Just Trash Around A Lot And Scream, And Wear Yourself Out.
Heartbreak
Love You
Scream
All Fiction Is About People, Unless It's About Rabbits Pretending To Be People. It's All Essentially Characters In Action, Which Means Characters Moving Through Time And Changes Taking Place, And That's What We Call 'the Plot'.
Moving
Character
Mean
The Problem Is Huge. We've Just Added Seventy-five Million People To The Already Large Proportion Of People In The World Who Are Malnourished All The Time, Whose Bodies Are Being Starved.
People
World
Body
Fear Has A Smell, As Love Does.
Fear
Smell
Doe
Glenn Used To Say The Reason You Can't Really Imagine Yourself Being Dead Was That As Soon As You Say, 'i'll Be Dead,' You've Said The Word I, And So You're Still Alive Inside The Sentence. And That's How People Got The Idea Of The Immortality Of The Soul - It Was A Consequence Of Grammar.
Ideas
People
Soul
Craziness Was Considered Funny, Like All Other Things That Were In Reality Frightening And Profoundly Shameful.
Reality
Craziness
Frightening
Men Are Not To Be Told Anything They Might Find Too Painful; The Secret Depths Of Human Nature, The Sordid Physicalities, Might Overwhelm Or Damage Them. For Instance, Men Often Faint At The Sight Of Their Own Blood, To Which They Are Not Accustomed. For This Reason You Should Never Stand Behind One In The Line At The Red Cross Donor Clinic.
Pain
Men
Sight
No Matter How Much You've Been Warned, Death Always Comes Without Knocking. Why Now? Is The Cry. Why So Soon? It's The Cry Of A Child Being Called Home At Dusk.
Death
Children
Home
What’s With Her?” Says The Painter. “she’s Mad Because She’s A Woman,” Jon Says. This Is Something I Haven’t Heard For Years, Not Since High School. Once It Was A Shaming Thing To Say, And Crushing To Have It Said About You, By A Man. It Implied Oddness, Deformity, Sexual Malfunction. I Go To The Living Room Doorway. “i’m Not Mad Because I’m A Woman,” I Say. “i’m Mad Because You’re An Asshole.
Crush
School
Men
God Is Not The Voice In The Whirlwind, God Is The Whirlwind.
Voice
Whirlwind
You Will Always Have Partial Points Of View, And You'll Always Have The Story Behind The Story That Hasn't Come Out Yet. And Any Form Of Journalism You're Involved With Is Going To Be Up Against A Biased Viewpoint And Partial Knowledge.
Views
Stories
Viewpoints
It's Rather Useless To Write A Gripping Narrative With Nothing In It But Climate Change Because Novels Are Always About People Even If They Purport To Be About Rabbits Or Robots.
Writing
People
Climate
Publishing A Book Is Like Stuffing A Note Into A Bottle And Hurling It Into The Sea. Some Bottles Drown, Some Come Safe To Land, Where The Notes Are Read And Then Possibly Cherished, Or Else Misinterpreted, Or Else Understood All Too Well By Those Who Hate The Message. You Never Know Who Your Readers Might Be.
Hate
Book
Sea
We Have Been Shark To One Another, But Also Lifeboat.
Sharks
Lifeboats
Has Beens
I Want, I Don’t Want. How Can One Live With Such A Heart?
Heart
Want
Yelling Is A Form Of Publishing
Business
Yelling
Management
It Had Helped To Keep Her Sane, That Writing. Then, When Time Had Begun Again And Real People Had Entered It, She'd Abandoned It Here. Now It's A Whisper From The Past. Is That What Writing Amounts To? The Voice Your Ghost Would Have, If It Had A Voice?
Real
Writing
Past
Old Lovers Go The Way Of Old Photographs, Bleaching Out Gradually As In A Slow Bath Of Acid: First The Moles And Pimples, Then The Shadings. Then The Faces Themselves, Until Nothing Remains But The General Outlines.
Moles
Way
Faces
The Genesis Of A Poem For Me Is Usually A Cluster Of Words. The Only Good Metaphor I Can Think Of Is A Scientific One: Dipping A Thread Into A Supersaturated Solution To Induce Crystal Formation. I Don't Think I Solve Problems In My Poetry; I Think I Uncover The Problems.
Thinking
Crystals
Problem
In Theory I Can Do Almost Anything; Certainly I Have Been Told How. In Practice I Do As Little As Possible. I Pretend To Myself That I Would Be Quite Happy In A Hermit's Cave, Living On Gruel, If Someone Else Would Make The Gruel. Gruel, Like So Many Other Things, Is Beyond Me.
Practice
Littles
Would Be
You Think I'm Not A Goddess? Try Me. This Is A Torch Song. Touch Me And You'll Burn.
Song
Thinking
Trying
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.
Real
Believe
Needs
Once A Month I Wake In The Night, Slippery With Terror. I'm Afraid, Not Because There's Someone In The Room, In The Dark, In The Bed, But Because There Isn't. I'm Afraid Of The Emptiness, Which Lies Beside Me Like A Corpse.
Lying
Dark
Night
I Look Up At The Ceiling, Tracing The Foliage Of The Wreath. Today It Makes Me Think Of A Hat, The Large-brimmed Hats Women Used To Wear At Some Period During The Old Days: Hats Like Enormous Halos, Festooned With Fruit And Flowers, And The Feathers Of Exotic Birds; Hats Like An Idea Of Paradise, Floating Just Above The Head, A Thought Solidified.
Flower
Thinking
Ideas
I Tried To Visualize My Jealousy As A Yellowy-brown Cloud Boiling Around Inside Me, Then Going Out Through My Nose Like Smoke And Turning Into A Stone And Falling Down Into The Ground. That Did Work A Little. But In My Visualization A Plant Covered With Poison Berries Would Grow Out Of The Stone, Whether I Wanted It To Or Not.
Fall
Clouds
Poison
But People Will Do Anything Rather Than Admit That Their Lives Have No Meaning. No Use, That Is. No Plot.
People
Use
Plot
All Stories Are About Wolves. All Worth Repeating, That Is. Anything Else Is Sentimental Drivel.
Wolf Packs
Stories
Sentimental
He's Lost Something, Some Illusion I Used To Think Was Necessary To Him. He's Come To Realize He Too Is Human. Or Is This A Performance, For My Benefit, To Show Me He's Up-to-date? Maybe Men Shouldn't Have Been Told About Their Own Humanity. It's Only Made Them Uncomfortable. It's Only Made Them Trickier, Slier, More Evasive, Harder To Read.
Men
Thinking
Humanity
A Reader Can Never Tell If It's A Real Thimble Or An Imaginary Thimble, Because By The Time You're Reading It, They're The Same. It's A Thimble. It's In The Book.
Real
Book
Reading
All Fat Women Look The Same; They All Look 42.
Looks
Fats
Fat Women
Under The Old System - Which Is Now So Archaic That A Lot Of People Can't Remember It - If You Wanted Money You Had To Go To The Bank And Take The Money Out In Cash Form, And You Couldn't Take Out Money That You Didn't Have. But With The Credit Card You Can Spend Money You Don't Have, And That Is Just So Tempting.
People
Cards
Credit
Water Does Not Resist. Water Flows. When You Plunge Your Hand Into It, All You Feel Is A Caress.
Patience
Hands
Water
I Didn't Want Him To Become Gray And Multi-dimensional And Complicated Like Everyone Else. Was Every Heathcliff A Linton In Disguise?
Want
Complicated
Heathcliff
My Own View Of Myself Was That I Was Small And Innocuous, A Marshmallow Compared To The Others. I Was A Poor Shot With A 22, For Instance, And Not Very Good With An Ax. It Took Me A Long Time To Figure Out That The Youngest In A Family Of Dragons Is Still A Dragon From The Point Of View Of Those Who Find Dragons Alarming.
Dragons
Views
Long
But Most Hearts Say, I Want, I Want, I Want, I Want. My Heart Is More Duplicitous, Though No Twin As I Once Thought. It Says, I Want, I Don't Want, I Want, And Then A Pause. It Forces Me To Listen.
Heart
Want
Twins
What A Moron I Was To Think You Were Sweet And Innocent, When It Turns Out You Were Actually College-educated The Whole Time!
Sweet
College
Thinking
In The Spring, At The End Of The Day, You Should Smell Like Dirt.
Nature
Spring
Garden
Women Are Human Beings, And Human Beings Are A Very Mixed Lot. I've Always Been Against The Idea That Women Were Victorian Angels, That They Could Do No Wrong. I've Always Thought It Was Horseshit And Does Nobody Any Good. Remember, Lizzie Borden Got Off Largely Because The Cultural Agenda Had Convinced People That Women Were Morally Superior To Men, So Lizzie Borden Was "incapable" Of Taking The Ax And Giving Her Mother 40 Whacks.
Mother
Angel
Men
The Weapons That Were Once Outside Sharpening Themselves On War Are Now Indoors There, In The Fortress, Fragile In Glass Cases; Why Is It (i'm Thinking Of The Careful Moulding Round The Stonework Archways) That In This Time, Such Elaborate Defences Keep Things That Are No Longer (much) Worth Defending?
War
Thinking
Glasses
It Is My Contention That The Process Of Reading Is Part Of The Process Of Writing, The Necessary Completion Without Which Writing Can Hardly Be Said To Exist.
Reading
Writing
Process
People Cry At Weddings For The Same Reason They Cry At Happy Endings: Because They So Desperately Want To Believe In Something They Know Is Not Credible.
Believe
People
Want
I Exist In Two Places, Here And Where You Are.
Two
Where You Are
To Live In Prison Is To Live Without Mirrors. To Live Without Mirrors Is To Live Without The Self.
Mirrors
Self
Prison
You Can Only Be Jealous Of Someone Who Has Something You Think You Ought To Have Yourself.
Jealousy
Thinking
Being Jealous
The Thing About Delirium Is You Think It's Great, But It Actually Isn't.
Thinking
Delirium
It's Evening, One Of Those Gray Water-color Washes, Like Liquid Dust.
Dust
Color
Water
Every Habit He's Ever Had Is Still There In His Body, Lying Dormant Like Flowers In The Desert. Given The Right Conditions, All His Old Addictions Would Burst Into Full And Luxuriant Bloom.
Lying
Flower
Recovery
I'm A Person Of Whim, And Easily Distracted. I Don't Like Multitasking. When I'm Doing One Thing, I Like To Do Just That Thing.
Multitasking
Whim
Distracted
Like Many Modern Poets, I Tend To Conceal Rhymes By Placing Them In The Middle Of Lines, And To Avoid Immediate Alliteration And Assonance In Favor Of Echoes Placed Later In The Poems.
Echoes
Lines
Favors
When I Finally Went To School I Had To Adjust To Other Girls And Learn Their Fiendish Ways. Having Learnt Them, I Turned Them On All And Sundry.
Girl
School
Way
Every Budding Dictatorship Begins By Muzzling The Artists, Because They're A Mouthy Lot And They Don't Line Up And Salute Very Easily.
Artist
Lines
Dictatorship
Even An Obvious Fabrication Is Some Comfort When You Have Few Others.
Comfort
Obvious
Fabrication
The Only Way You Can Write The Truth Is To Assume That What You Set Down Will Never Be Read.
Writing
Way
Assuming
Our Heaven Is Their Hell, Said God. I Like A Balanced Universe.
Heaven
Balance
Hell
Some People Mistakenly Think Nature Is Very Nice And Benevolent And Never Betrays.
Nice
Thinking
People
The Three Of Them Were Beautiful, In The Way All Girls Of That Age Are Beautiful. It Can't Be Helped, That Sort Of Beauty, Nor Can It Be Conserved; It's A Freshness, A Plumpness Of The Cells, That's Unearned And Temporary, And That Nothing Can Replicate. None Of Them Was Satisfied With It, However; Already They Were Making Attempts To Alter Themselves Into Some Impossible, Imaginary Mould, Plucking And Pencilling Away At Their Faces. I Didn't Blame Them, Having Done The Same Once Myself.
Beautiful
Girl
Cells
I Always Thought Eating Was A Ridiculous Activity Anyway. I'd Get Out Of It Myself If I Could, Though You've Got To Do It To Stay Alive, They Tell Me.
Food
Alive
Ridiculous
I Was Unfair To Him, Of Course, But Where Would I Have Been Without Unfairness? In Thrall, In Harness. Young Women Need Unfairness, It's One Of Their Few Defenses. They Need Their Callousness, They Need Their Ignorance. They Walk In The Dark, Along The Edges Of High Cliffs, Humming To Themselves, Thinking Themselves Invulnerable.
Ignorance
Dark
Thinking
The Reason They Invented Coffins, To Lock The Dead In, Preserve Them, They Put Makeup On Them; They Didn't Want Them Spreading Or Changing Into Anything Else. The Stone With The Name And Date Was On Them To Weight Them Down.
Makeup
Names
Want
We're Facing Growing Climate Change, More Floods, More Droughts, More Crisis On A Planetary Level, And The Systems We Put In Place In The Twentieth Century Are Just Not Going To Work. We've Run Out Of Stuff. Our Big Problems Are Going To Be Energy Supplies And Food Supplies. This Is Not A Right-left Issue. It's A People Issue, And It Cuts Across All Our Categories.
Running
Cutting
Issues
Love Was Like A Steamroller. There Was No Avoiding It; It Went Over You And You Came Out Flat.
Broken Heart
Over You
Avoiding
I Was Warped Early By Ray Bradbury And Edgar Allan Poe. I Was Very Fond Of Franz Kafka.
Rays
Allan Poe
Bradbury
Men Are Afraid That Women Will Laugh At Them. Women Are Afraid That Men Will Kill Them.
Relationship
Women
Laughing
I Am Afraid Of Falling Into Hopeless Despair, Over My Wasted Life, And I Am Still Not Sure How It Happened.
Fall
Despair
Hopeless
Farewells Can Be Shattering, But Returns Are Surely Worse. Solid Flesh Can Never Live Up To The Bright Shadow Cast By Its Absence. Time And Distance Blur The Edges; Then Suddenly The Beloved Has Arrived, And It's Noon With Its Merciless Light, And Every Spot And Pore And Wrinkle And Bristle Stands Clear.
Life
Distance
Farewell
But Nothing Is More Opaque Than Absolute Transparency.
Opaque
Transparency
Absolutes
Snowman Wakes Before Dawn.
Dawn
Snowman
He’d Developed A Strangely Tender Feeling Towards Such Words, As If They Were Children Abandoned In The Woods And It Was His Duty To Rescue Them.
Children
Feelings
Woods
So Much Better To Travel Than To Arrive.
Menopause. A Pause While You Reconsider Men.
Men
Menopause
Pauses
Science Never Makes Things That Do Not Have To Do With What We Feel, By Which I Mean What We Want And What We Fear.
Mean
Want
Feels
Things Musicals Taught Me: All Your Problems Will Go Away If You Sing About It.
Writing
Going Away
Taught
Modesty Is Invisibility... Never Forget It. To Be Seen - To Be Seen - Is To Be... Penetrated. What You Must Be Girls, Is Impenetrable.
Girl
Fear
Invisibility
History, As I Recall, Was Never This Winsome, And Especially Not This Clean, But The Real Thing Would Never Sell: Most People Prefer A Past In Which Nothing Smells.
Real
Past
Smell
I'm Working On My Own Life Story. I Don't Mean I'm Putting It Together; No, I'm Taking It Apart. If You'd Wanted The Narrative Line You Should Have Asked Earlier, When I Still Knew Everything And Was More Than Willing To Tell. That Was Before I Discovered The Virtues Of Scissors, The Virtues Of Matches.
Mean
Should Have
Together
You Always Think, 'oh, If Only I Had A Little Chalet In The Mountains! How Great That Would Be And I'd Do All This Writing' Except, No, I Wouldn't. I'd Do The Same Amount Of Writing I Do Now And The Rest Of The Time I'd Go Stir Crazy. If You're Waiting For The Perfect Moment You'll Never Write A Thing Because It Will Never Arrive. I Have No Routine. I Have No Foolproof Anything. There's Nothing Foolproof.
Crazy
Writing
Thinking
I Lie On The Floor, Washed By Nothing And Hanging On. I Cry At Night. I Am Afraid Of Hearing Voices, Or A Voice. I Have Come To The Edge, Of The Land. I Could Get Pushed Over.
Fear
Lying
Night
In The Animal World Individuals Cheat, As Do We.
Animal
World
Cheat
But Maybe, Underneath, She Loves Him Too Much. Maybe It's Her Excessive Love That Pushes Him Away.
Too Much
Excessive Love
When Any Civilization Is Dust And Ashes," He Said, "art Is All That's Left Over. Images, Words, Music. Imaginative Structures. Meaning—human Meaning, That Is—is Defined By Them. You Have To Admit That.
Art
Dust
Civilization
Faith Is Only A Word, Embroidered.
Soon It Will Be Daybreak. Soon The Day Will Break. I Can't Stop It From Breaking In The Same Way It Always Does, And Then From Lying There Broken; Always The Same Day, Which Comes Around Again Like Clockwork. It Begins With The Day Before The Day Before, And Then The Day Before, And Then It's The Day Itself. A Saturday. The Breaking Day. The Day The Butcher Comes.
Lying
Broken
Doe
In Heaven, There Are No Debts - All Have Been Paid, One Way Or Another - But In Hell There's Nothing But Debts, And A Great Deal Of Payment Is Exacted, Though You Can't Ever Get All Paid Up. You Have To Pay, And Pay, And Keep On Paying. So Hell Is Like An Infernal Maxed-out Credit Card That Multiplies The Charges Endlessly.
Heaven
Way
Cards
There's A Difference Between Describing And Evoking Something. You Can Describe Something And Be Quite Clinical About It. To Evoke It, You Call It Up In The Reader. That's What Writers Do When They're Good.
Differences
Evoke
Reader
There's More Private Security In The United States Than There Are Publicly Funded Forces, Like Police. What You Don't Want Is A Meld Of Government And Commerce - You Really Want To Keep Those Two Things Separate - Because Once You Have That Meld, You've Got Megacorruption, And You Have No Third Force To Whom You Can Say This Stuff Is Poisoning Our Kids.
Kids
Two
Government
I Don't Know Why They Are All So Eager To Be Remembered. What Good Will It Do Them? There Are Some Things That Should Be Forgotten By Everyone, And Never Spoken Of Again.
Forgotten
Should
Remembered
I'm Bad At Picking Heroes.
Hero
I Stand On The Corner, Pretending I Am A Tree.
Tree
Pretending
Corners
When People In My Generation Started To Write, We Did Not Actually Have Much Of A Movie Industry, Much Of A Theater Scene, Much Of A Television Industry Or Other Creative Outlets. But We Had A Lot Of Aspiring Writers. All That Has Changed. We Now Have A Movie Industry, Television Industry And Lots Of Theater. But We Have Retained A Large Contingent Of Writers And A Dedicated Readership. The Larger Number Of People In Society Who Value Writing, The Larger Number Of Good Writers Will Be Produced. That's My Belief. It Raises The Bar.
Writing
People
Creative
When Faced With The Inevitable, You Always Have A Choice... As I Learned During My Liberal Arts Education, Any Symbol Can Have, In The Imaginative Context, Two Versions, A Positive And A Negative... If You Spill Your Milk You're Left With A Glass Which Is Either Half Empty Or Half Full... You May Not Be Able To Alter Reality, But You Can Alter Your Attitude Towards It, And This, Paradoxically, Alters Reality. Try It And See.
Inspirational
Graduation
Art
Books Are Frozen Voices, In The Same Way That Musical Scores Are Frozen Music. The Score Is A Way Of Transmitting The Music To Someone Who Can Play It, Releasing It Into The Air Where It Can Once More Be Heard. And The Black Alphabet Marks On The Page Represent Words That Were Once Spoken, If Only In The Writer's Head. They Lie There Inert Until A Reader Comes Along And Transforms The Letters Into Living Sounds. The Reader Is The Musician Of The Book: Each Reader May Read The Same Text, Just As Each Violinist Plays The Same Piece, But Each Interpretation Is Different.
Lying
Book
Air
When I Was 16 I Started Publishing All Kinds Of Things In School Magazines. My Main Feedback Came From My English Teacher, Miss Bessie B. Billings, Who Said, 'i Can't Understand This At All, Dear, So It Must Be Good.
Teacher
Encouragement
School
A Non-event ... Is Better To Write About Than An Event, Because With A Non-event You Can Make Up The Meaning Yourself, It Means Whatever You Say It Means.
Writing
Mean
Events
The World Is Being Run By People My Age, Men My Age, With Falling-out Hair And Health Worries, And It Frightens Me. When The Leaders Were Older Than Me I Could Believe In Their Wisdom, I Could Believe They Had Transcended Rage And Malice And The Need To Be Loved. Now I Know Better. I Look At The Faces In Newspapers, In Magazines, And Wonder: What Greeds, What Furies Drive Them On?
Running
Believe
Fall
There May Not Be One Truth - There May Be Several Truths - But Saying That Is Not To Say That Reality Doesn't Exist.
Reality
May
An Eye For An Eye Only Leads To More Blindness.
Inspirational
Life
Eye
Well. Then We Had The Irises, Rising Beautiful And Cool On Their Tall Stalks, Like Blown Glass, Like Pastel Water Momentarily Frozen In A Splash, Light Blue, Light Mauve, And The Darker Ones, Velvet And Purple, Black Cat's Ears In The Sun, Indigo Shadow, And The Bleeding Hearts, So Female In Shape It Was A Surprise They'd Not Long Since Been Rooted Out. There Is Something Subversive About This Garden Of Serena's, A Sense Of Buried Things Bursting Upwards, Wordlessly, Into The Light, As If To Point, To Say: Whatever Is Silenced Will Clamor To Be Heard, Though Silently.
Beautiful
Cat
Heart
Time Rises And Rises, And When It Reaches The Level Of Your Eyes You Drown.
Eye
Levels
Human Reason Is A Pin Dancing On The Head Of An Angel, So Small Is It In Comparison To The Divine Vastness That Encircles Us.
Angel
Dancing
Vastness
After Everything That's Happened, How Can The World Still Be So Beautiful? Because It Is.
Beautiful
World
Stills
We Are A Society Dying, Said Aunt Lydia, Of Too Much Choice.
Aunt
Choices
Dying
Publishing A Book Is Like Stuffing A Note Into A Bottle And Hurling It Into The Sea.
Book
Sea
Bottles
We Pulled The Seeds Out And Scattered Them On Their Flossy Parachutes, Leaving Only The Leathery Brownish Yellow Tongue, Soft As The Inside Of An Elbow.
Yellow
Leaving
Elbows
Despite Their Cool Poses They Wear Their Cravings On The Outside, Like The Suckers On A Squid. They Want It All.
Squids
Want
Sucker
Anaesthesia, That's One Technique: If It Hurts, Invent A Different Pain.
Hurt
Pain
Numbness
As Charles Darwin Said,'the Economy Shown By Nature In Her Resources Is Striking,'' Says The Spirit. 'all Wealth Comes From Nature. Without It, There Wouldn't Be Any Economics. The Primary Wealth Is Food, Not Money. Therefore Anything That Concerns The Handling Of The Land Also Concerns Me.
Land
Spirit
Wealth
I Tend To Feel If People Say They're Going To Do Something, They Will, If Given The Chance.
People
Chance
Given
A Wave Of Blood Goes Up To My Head, My Stomach Shrinks Together, As If Something Dangerous Has Just Missed Hitting Me. It's As If I've Been Caught Stealing, Or Telling A Lie; Or As If I've Heard Other People Talking About Me, Saying Bad Things About Me, Behind My Back. There's The Same Flush Of Shame, Of Guilt And Terror, And Of Cold Disgust With Myself. But I Don't Know Where These Feelings Have Come From, What I've Done.
Lying
Blood
Talking
The Road To Death Is A Lonely Highway, And Longer Than It Apears, Even When It Leads Straight Down From The Scaffold, By Way Of A Rope; And It's A Dark Road, With Never Any Moon Shining On It, To Light Your Way.
Death
Lonely
Dark
The Proper Study Of Mankind Is Everything.
Study
Mankind
It's His Word Against The Commander's, Unless He Wants To Head A Posse. Kick In The Door, And What Did I Tell You? Caught In The Act, Sinfully Scrabbling. Quick, Eat Those Words.
Doors
Want
Posse
What We Share May Be A Lot Like A Traffic Accident But We Get One Another. We Are Survivors Of Each Other. We Have Been Shark To One Another, But Also Lifeboat. That Counts For Something.
Sharks
Survivor
May
There Are Some Women Who Seem To Be Born Without Fear, Just As There Are People Who Are Born Without The Ability To Feel Pain. The Painless Ones Go Around Putting Their Hands On Hot Stoves, Freezing Their Feet To The Point Of Gangrene, Scalding The Lining Of Their Throats With Boiling Coffee, Because There Is No Warning Anguish. Evolution Does Not Favour Them. So Too Perhaps With The Fearless Women, Because There Aren't Very Many Of Them Around. ... Providence Appears To Protect Such Women, Maybe Out Of Astonishment.
Pain
Fear
Coffee
Why Are We Designed To See The World As Supremely Beautiful Just As We're About To Be Snuffed? Do Rabbits Feel The Same As The Fox Teeth Bite Down On Their Necks? Is It Mercy?
Beautiful
Teeth
Rabbits
How Easy It Is To Invent A Humanity, For Anyone At All.
Empathy
Humanity
Easy
The Goals Of The Feminist Movement Have Not Been Achieved, And Those Who Claim We're Living In A Post-feminist Era Are Either Sadly Mistaken Or Tired Of Thinking About The Whole Subject.
Tired
Thinking
Goal
You Think You Have The Amount Of Money That Is Your Credit Limit. We're Just Wired To Think That, You Know? Until The Bill Arrives - A Sobering Moment - You Think You're Richer Than You Are.
Thinking
Credit
Bills
You Refuse To Own Yourself, You Permit Others To Do It For You
Self Esteem
Permit
Refuse
I Did ... Learn An Important Distinction In Graduate School: A Speculation About Who Had Syphilis When Is Gossip If It's About Your Friends, A Plot Element If It's About A Character In A Novel, And Scholarship If It's About John Keats.
School
Character
Gossip
Falling In Love, Although It Resulted In Altered Body Chemistry And Was Therefore Real, Was A Hormonally Induced Delusional State, According To Him. In Addition It Was Humiliating, Because It Put You At A Disadvantage, It Gave The Love Object Too Much Power. As For Sex Per Se, It Lacked Both Challenge And Novelty, And Was On The Whole A Deeply Imperfect Solution To The Problem Of Intergenerational Genetic Transfer.
Falling In Love
Sex
Real
This Above All, To Refuse To Be A Victim.
Victim
Refuse
The Heart With Letters On It Shining Like A Light Bulb Through The Trim Hole Painted In The Chest, Art History.
Art
Light
Shining
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