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.

This passage is from Margaret Atwood’s novel *The Robber Bride* (1993), voiced in the book’s close third-person narration as it reflects on how bodily suffering is remembered—or fails to be remembered—once the immediate sensation has passed. In a novel preoccupied with the lingering effects of betrayal, trauma, and self-reinvention, Atwood uses the idea of pain’s “shadow” to suggest that experience can leave durable traces even when it cannot be vividly recalled. The phrasing evokes the commonplace “out of sight, out of mind,” but turns it toward the body, implying that what disappears from conscious memory may persist as an embodied residue.

The speaker reflects on the paradox of pain: it is overwhelming while it lasts, yet difficult to reconstruct accurately once it has ended. Atwood suggests that memory cannot fully re-inhabit bodily suffering; what persists is a dim “shadow” and a residual inscription on the body—scar tissue, altered nerves, reflexive fear—rather than a clear mental record. The line “Pain marks you, but too deep to see” frames suffering as formative and identity-shaping even when it becomes invisible to others and partially inaccessible to oneself. The closing cliché, “Out of sight, out of mind,” is used ironically to show how easily pain is socially and psychologically minimized once it is no longer immediately present.