Explore the most impactful and insightful quotes and sayings by Margaret Atwood, and enrich your perspective with the wisdom. Share these inspiring Margaret Atwood quotes pictures with your friends on social media platforms such as Facebook, Twitter, or your personal blogs, completely free. Here are the top 1779 Margaret Atwood quotes for you to read and share.
Nevertheless, blood is thicker than water, as anyone knows who has tasted both. -- Margaret Atwood
The light flickers on all of us and makes us look softer and more beautiful than we really are. But sometimes it makes us darker and scarier too, when the faces go into shadow and you can't see the eyes, only the eye sockets. Deep pools of blackness welling out of our heads. My -- Margaret Atwood
She had no images of this love. She could offer no anecdotes. It was a belief rather than a memory. -- Margaret Atwood
Why is it that night falls, instead of rising, like the dawn? Yet if you look east, at sunset, you can see night rising, not falling; darkness lifting into the sky, up from the horizon ... -- Margaret Atwood
A lot of people call you a feminist painter."
"What indeed," I say. "I hate party lines, I hate ghettos. Anyway. I'm too old to have invented it and you're too young to understand it, so what's the point of discussing it at all? -- Margaret Atwood
Each form has its pluses and its minuses. -- Margaret Atwood
I was horrified in high school by the fate of the hanged maids at the end of the Odyssey; it seemed unfair to me, even then. -- Margaret Atwood
This form of love is like the pain
of childbirth: so intense
it's hard to remember afterwards, -- Margaret Atwood
It gives me a strange feeling on my skin to think of someone else, someone in England, walking around in my clothes. My clothes seem a part of me, even the ones I've outgrown. -- Margaret Atwood
Just remember this, when the scream at last has ended and you've turned on the lights: by the rules of the game, I must always lie. -- Margaret Atwood
Short forms are returning online. Interactivity is coming back; it was always there in oral storytelling. -- Margaret Atwood
Don't think that way, Moira would say. Think that way and you'll make it happen. -- Margaret Atwood
There were signs and I missed them. For instance, Crake said once, "Would you kill someone you loved to spare them pain?" "You mean, commit euthanasia?" said Jimmy. "Like putting down your pet turtle?" "Just tell me," said Crake.
"I don't know. What kind of love, what kind of pain? -- Margaret Atwood
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. -- Margaret Atwood
I hate to tell you this, but you will never actually go to a galaxy far, far away and encounter Darth Vader. That's science fiction; it isn't going to happen. -- Margaret Atwood
There is something powerful in the whispering of obscenities, about those in power. There's something delightful about it, something naughty, secretive, forbidden, thrilling. It's like a spell, of sorts. It deflates them, reduces them to the common denominator where they can be dealt. -- Margaret Atwood
I thought my heart was pure. We do like to have such good opinions of our own motives when we're about to do something harmful, to someone else. -- Margaret Atwood
The short answer to 'Why do you write' is - I suppose I write for some of the same reasons I read: to live a double life; to go places I haven't been; to examine life on earth; to come to know people in ways, and at depths, that are otherwise impossible; to be surprised. -- Margaret Atwood
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. -- Margaret Atwood
God works in mysterious ways his wonders to perform, as Reenie used to say. Could it be that Myra is my designated guardian angel? Or is she instead a foretaste of Purgatory? And how do you tell the difference? -- Margaret Atwood
She's smiling, a bright diminutive smile. Her eyes have come loose. -- Margaret Atwood
I don't want a man around, what use are they except for ten seconds' worth of half babies -- Margaret Atwood
WOMEN'S PRAYVAGANZA TODAY. The banner covers the building's former name, some dead president they shot. Below -- Margaret Atwood
Being here with him is safety; it's a cave, where we huddle together while the storm goes on outside. This is a delusion, of course. This room is one of the most dangerous places I could be. -- Margaret Atwood
You young people don't appreciate things, she'd say. You don't know what we had to go through, just to get you where you are. Look at him, slicing up the carrots. Don't you know how many women's lives, how many women's bodies, the tanks had to roll over just to get that far? -- Margaret Atwood
The possibility of injury or death was a strong attraction: as the online world became more and more pre-edited and slicked up, and as even its so-called reality sites raised questions about authenticity in the minds of the viewers, the rough, unpolished physical world was taking on a mystic allure. -- Margaret Atwood
I walk away from him. It's enormously pleasing to me, this walking away. It's like being able to make people appear and vanish, at will. -- Margaret Atwood
We should think only beautiful things, as much as we can. There is so much beautiful in the world if you look around. You are only looking at the dirt under your feet, Jimmy. It's not good for you. -- Margaret Atwood
I wanted things to be highly coloured, simple in outline, without ambiguity, which is what most children want when it comes to the stories of their parents. They want a postcard. -- Margaret Atwood
You say, Do you / love me, do you love me / I answer you: / I stretch your arms out / one to either side, / your head slumps forward. -- Margaret Atwood
Being upset is a warmer, close-up feeling, not a chilly distant feeling like laughing at people. -- Margaret Atwood
...that's what Hiltler exemplified: not the triumph of evil but the failure of reason. -- Margaret Atwood
It's evening, one of those gray water-color washes, like liquid dust. -- Margaret Atwood
You must observe the risings of the Sun and the changings of the Moon, because to everything there is a season. On -- Margaret Atwood
How could I be sleeping with this particular man ... Surely only true love could justify my lack of taste. -- Margaret Atwood
It's crowded, which pleases me. Salesladies intimidate me, I don't like to be caught shopping. -- Margaret Atwood
The stories the children whispered to one another - while they sat weaving their endless carpets, while they could still see - was about this possible future life. It was a saying among them that only the blind are free. -- Margaret Atwood
Like a pathway through a forest, like a carpet for royalty, it shows me the way -- Margaret Atwood
a handful of crumpled stars -- Margaret Atwood
Poetry is where the language is renewed. -- Margaret Atwood
Don't wait until you're 'in the mood.' Get into the mood by writing. -- Margaret Atwood
I intend to get out of here. It can't last forever. Others have thought such things, in bad times before this, and they were always right, they did get out one way or another, and it didn't last forever. Although for them it may have lasted all the forever they had. -- Margaret Atwood
I am not a saint or a cripple, I am not a wound; now I will see whether I am a coward. -- Margaret Atwood
Murderess, murderess, he whispers to himself. It has an allure, a scent almost. Hothouse gardenias. Lurid, but also furtive. He imagines himself breathing it as he draws Grace towards him, pressing his mouth against her. Murderess. He applies it to her throat like a brand. -- Margaret Atwood
For me the experience of writing is really an experience of losing control. ... I think it's very much like dreaming or like surfing. You go out there and wait for a wave, and when it comes it takes you somewhere and you don't know where it'll go. -- Margaret Atwood
Below me, in the foundations of the house, I could hear the clothes I'd buried there growing themselves a body. -- Margaret Atwood
When demons are required someone will always be found to supply the part, and whether you step forward or are pushed is all the same in the end. -- Margaret Atwood
There is only so much manpower and tax revenue that can be devoted to riot control, to social surveillance, to chasing fast youths down dark alleyways, to fire-hosing and pepper-spraying suspicious-looking gatherings. -- Margaret Atwood
Now I can see how that can happen. You can fall in love with anybody
a fool, a criminal, a nothing. There are no good rules. -- Margaret Atwood
The combination of presence and anonymity - confession without penance, truth without consequences - it has its attractions. Getting the blood off your hands, one way or another. -- Margaret Atwood
You can mean more than one.
You can mean thousands.
I'm not in any immediate danger, I'll say to you.
I'll pretend you can hear me.
But it's no good, because I know you can't. -- Margaret Atwood
All writers must go from now to once upon a time; all must take care not to be captured and held immobile by the past. -- Margaret Atwood
I don't need that fluff on my coffee. Looks like shaving cream. One swallow and you're foaming at the mouth. -- Margaret Atwood
she refused to feel what he wanted her to feel. Was -- Margaret Atwood
Although from you I far must roam, do not be broken hearted. We two, who in the souls are one, are never truly parted. -- Margaret Atwood
Without a word she swivels, as if she's voice activated, as if she's on little oiled wheels, as if she's on top of a music box. I resent this grace of hers. I resent her meek head, bowed as if into a heavy wind. But there is no wind. -- Margaret Atwood
I want anything that breaks the monotony, subverts the perceived respectable order of things. -- Margaret Atwood
They might play Extinctathon, or one of the others. Three-Dimensional Waco, Barbarian Stomp, Kwiktime Osama. They all used parallel strategies: you had to see where you were headed before you got there, but -- Margaret Atwood
I believe in the resistance as I believe there can be no light without shadow; or rather, no shadow unless there is also light. -- Margaret Atwood
We have learned to see the world in gasps. -- Margaret Atwood
Daughters of Naiads were a dime a dozen in those days; the place was crawling with them. Nevertheless, it never hurts to be of semi-divine birth. Or it never hurts immediately. -- Margaret Atwood
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. -- Margaret Atwood
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. -- Margaret Atwood
There are to be no toeholds for love. We are two-legged wombs, that's all: sacred vessels, ambulatory chalices. -- Margaret Atwood
Also she went in for culture, which gave her a certain moral authority. It wouldn't now; but people believed, then, that culture could make you better - a better person. They believed it could uplift you, or the women believed it. They hadn't yet seen Hitler at the opera house. -- Margaret Atwood
they sleep, they can be startled, even there in the soothing of the heart, like waves on the shore around them. A -- Margaret Atwood
We dangle by a flimsy thread,
Our little lives are grains of sand:
The Cosmos is a tiny sphere
Held in the hollow of God's hand.
Give up your anger and your spite,
And imitate the Deer, the Tree;
In sweet Forgiveness find your joy,
For it alone can set you free. -- Margaret Atwood
I have failed once again to fulfill the expectations of others, which have become my own. -- Margaret Atwood
Why are you so interested in amoebas?"
"Oh, they're immortal," he said, "and sort of shapeless and flexible. Being a
person is getting too complicated. -- Margaret Atwood
Writing is alone, but I don't think it's lonely. Ask any writer if they feel lonely when they're writing their book, and I think they'll say no. -- Margaret Atwood
Stan got the message. He allowed the chicken assignations. What did that make him? A chicken pimp. Better than dead. -- Margaret Atwood
Some cleric putting a match to her. /Neither of them looks happy about it. /Once lit, she'll burn like a book, /like a book that was ever finished, /like a locked-up library. -- Margaret Atwood
Young girls have such sweet tooths. Or is that sweet teeth? -- Margaret Atwood
Before the Civil War, Canada was at the top of the underground railroad. If you made it into Canada, you were safe unless someone came and hauled you back. That was also true during the Vietnam War for draft resisters. -- Margaret Atwood
I myself have 12 hats, and each one represents a different personality. Why just be yourself? -- Margaret Atwood
I'm the only person you've ever met who has read Longfellow. -- Margaret Atwood
The palliative care nurses welcome him: he's a spot of brightness, they claim he keeps the patients interested in life. "We don't think of the clients here as dying," one of them said to him on his first visit. "After all everyone's dying, just some of us more slowly. -- Margaret Atwood
Is it disapproval or extreme lust? Toby wonders. With some men it's hard to tell the difference. -- Margaret Atwood
In the end, we'll all become stories. Or else we'll become entities. Maybe it's the same. -- Margaret Atwood
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. -- Margaret Atwood
When the slugs begin to talk there's no time to lose. -- Margaret Atwood
I didn't go to school for a full year until I was 12. In the summer I was a wild child in the woods, with no shoes, and in the fall it was back to the city, shoe shops and school. -- Margaret Atwood
Some bioengineering is good, especially if it results in plants that are more drought-resistant or perennial food crops. -- Margaret Atwood
You don't look back along time but down through it, like water. Sometimes this comes to the surface, sometimes that, sometimes nothing. Nothing goes away. -- Margaret Atwood
My transition from not being a writer to being one was instantaneous, like the change from docile bank clerk to fanged monster in "B" movies. -- Margaret Atwood
She has such guileless teeth: asexual teeth, nothing fanged about them. She used to worry about looking so symmetrical, so blond, but she's come to think of this as an asset. Her small teeth alarm no one: bland is good camouflage. - -- Margaret Atwood
God made them that way but He did not make you that way. He made you different. It's up to you to set the boundaries. -- Margaret Atwood
She was small-boned and exquisite, and naked like the rest of them, with nothing on her but a garland of flowers and a pink hair ribbon, frequent props on the sex-kiddie sites. -- Margaret Atwood
I would like to be the air that inhabits you for a moment only. I would like to be that unnoticed and that necessary. -- Margaret Atwood
No, you will not be cooked on a fire when you die. Because you are not a fish. -- Margaret Atwood
But whose fault was it? Aunt Helena says, holding up one plump finger. Her fault, her fault, her fault, we chant in unison. Who led them on? Aunt Helena beams, pleased with us. She did. She did. She did. -- Margaret Atwood
I'm not used to girls, or familiar with their customs. I feel awkward around them, I don't know what to say. I know the unspoken rules of boys, but with girls I sense that I am always on the verge of some unforeseen, calamitous blunder. -- Margaret Atwood
Sooner or later, I hate to break it to you, you're gonna die, so how do you fill in the space between here and there? It's yours. Seize your space. -- Margaret Atwood
also may be untrue. 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? Does Luke hope? -- Margaret Atwood
I bet it's your mouldy socks," said Jimmy. "All the perfumes of Arabia will
not sweeten these little socks. -- Margaret Atwood
What were these animals then?"
"They didn't have names, but I knew what they were. -- Margaret Atwood
I thought of myself as an itinerant brain
the equivalent of a strolling player of Elizabethan times, or else a troubadour, clutching my university degree like a cheap lute. -- Margaret Atwood
I am alive, I live, I breathe, I put my hand out, unfolded, into the sunlight. -- Margaret Atwood
I'm not interested in cutting the feet off my characters or stretching them to make them fit my certain political view. -- Margaret Atwood
Genres aren't closed boxes. Stuff flows back and forth across the borders all the time. -- Margaret Atwood
If you're not annoying somebody, you're not really alive. -- Margaret Atwood
If your not annoying somebody, you're not alive. -- Margaret Atwood
That was all quite long ago. I see it in retrospect, indulgently, from the point I've reached now. But how else could I see it. We can't really travel to the past, no matter how we try. if we do, it's as tourists. -- Margaret Atwood
To live in prison is to live without mirrors. To live without mirrors is to live without the self. She is living selflessly, she finds a hole in the stone wall and on the other side of the wall, a voice. The voice comes through darkness and has no face. This voice becomes her mirror. -- Margaret Atwood
The lock splits. The iron gate swings open. She emerges, raises her arms towards the suddenly chilled moon. The world changes. -- Margaret Atwood
Ah men, why do you want all this attention? I can write poems for myself, make love to a doorknob if absolutely necessary. What do you have to offer me I can't find otherwise except humiliation? Which I no longer need. -- Margaret Atwood
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. -- Margaret Atwood
Eating is our earliest metaphor, preceding our consciousness of gender difference, race, nationality, and language. We eat before we talk. -- Margaret Atwood
If I were going to convert to any religion I would probably choose Catholicism because it at least has female saints and the Virgin Mary. -- Margaret Atwood
Don't go yet, he said, but it was never any use saying don't go yet to her. When she'd decided a thing, she was on her way. -- Margaret Atwood
Take a pencil to write with on aeroplanes. Pens leak. But if the pencil breaks, you can't sharpen it on the plane, because you can't take knives with you. Therefore: take two pencils. -- Margaret Atwood
If she'd foreseen that Alphinland was going to last so long and be so successful, she would have planned it better. It would have had a shape, a more defined structure; it would have had boundaries. As it is, it's grown like urban sprawl. Not -- Margaret Atwood
If social stability goes pear-shaped, you have a choice between anarchy and dictatorship. Most people will opt for more security, even if they have to give up some personal freedom. -- Margaret Atwood
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. -- Margaret Atwood
That kind of love comes and goes and is hard to remember afterwards, like pain. You would look at the man one day and you would think, I loved you, and the tense would be past, and you would be filled with a sense of wonder, because it was such an amazing and precarious and dumb thing to have done; -- Margaret Atwood
the bees were on good terms with the unseen world, being the messengers to the dead. She -- Margaret Atwood
She is dying because she said.
She is dying for the sake of the word.
It is her body, silent
and fingerless, writing this poem. -- Margaret Atwood
All she wants is a miracle, because anything else is hopeless. -- Margaret Atwood
What pays for all this?"
"Grief in the face of inevitable death. The wish to stop time. The human condition. -- Margaret Atwood
In the daylight we know
what's gone is gone,
but at night it's different.
Nothing gets finished,
not dying, not mourning; -- Margaret Atwood
I'm not just any dead man," he says out loud.
Of course not! Each one of us is unique! And every single dead person is dead in his or her very own special way! Now, who wants to share about being dead, in our own special words? Jimmy, you seem eager to talk, so why don't you begin? -- Margaret Atwood
In ten years, you'll be on a stamp /
where anyone at all can lick you. -- Margaret Atwood
Knowing this secret, being the only one chosen to know, makes me feel important in a way. But it's a negative importance, it's the importance of a blank sheet of paper. I can know because I don't count. I feel singled out, but also bereft. -- Margaret Atwood
I was once a graduate student in Victorian literature, and I believe as the Victorian novelists did, that a novel isn't simply a vehicle for private expression, but that it also exists for social examination. I firmly believe this. -- Margaret Atwood
what is is, as Grandma Win used to say, and what can't be cured must be endured, and laugh and the world laughs with you but cry and you cry alone. -- Margaret Atwood
I suffer from my own multiplicity. Two or three images would have been enough, or four, or five. That would be allowed for a firm idea: This is she. As it is, I'm watery, I ripple, from moment to moment I dissolve into my other selves. -- Margaret Atwood
Now that she's the carrier of life, she is closer to death, and needs special security. -- Margaret Atwood
The only sure camouflage was unpredictability. -- Margaret Atwood
They were concentrating first on the others. They got them more or less under control before they started in on everybody else. -- Margaret Atwood
He thought of it as a contest, like the children at school who would twist your arm and say Give in? Give in? until you did; then they would let go. He didn't love me, it was an idea of himself he loved and he wanted someone to join him, anyone would do, I didn't matter so I didn't have to care. -- Margaret Atwood
With you I could have
more than one skin,
a blank interior, a repertoire
of untold stories,
a fresh beginning. -- Margaret Atwood
Messy love is better than none,
I guess. I am no authority
on sane living. -- Margaret Atwood
There are other women with baskets, some in red, some in the dull green of the Marthas, some in the striped dresses, red and blue and green and cheap and skimpy, that mark the women of the poorer men. Econowives, -- Margaret Atwood
I knew they made that up, I knew it was wrong, and they left things out, too, but there was no way of checking. -- Margaret Atwood
It could be old clips, it could be faked. But -- Margaret Atwood
Fatigue is here, in my body, in my legs and eyes. That is what gets you in the end. Faith is only a word, embroidered. -- Margaret Atwood
He drowned his sorrows, though like other drowned things they had a habit of floating to the surface when least expected. -- Margaret Atwood
Screw poetry, it's you I want, your taste, rain on you, mouth on your skin. -- Margaret Atwood
But unshed tears can turn rancid. So can memory. So can biting your tongue. My bad nights were beginning. I couldn't sleep. -- Margaret Atwood
Galleries are frightening places, places of evaluation, of judgement. -- Margaret Atwood
Within each of these categories, the principle was the same: rarity and beauty increased value. -- Margaret Atwood
Once, though, I heard Rita say to Cora that she wouldn't debase herself like that. Nobody asking you, Cora said. Anyways, what could you do, supposing? Go to the Colonies, Rita said. They have the choice. With the Unwomen, and starve to death and Lord knows what all? said Cora. Catch you. They -- Margaret Atwood
We yearned for the future. How did we learn it, that talent for insatiability? -- Margaret Atwood
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? -- Margaret Atwood
Every child should have love, every person should have it. She herself would rather have had her mother's love - the love she still continued to believe in, the love that had followed her through the jungle in the form of a bird so she would not be too frightened or lonely. -- Margaret Atwood
A divorce is like an amputation, you survive but there's less of you. -- Margaret Atwood
This is the middle of my life, I think of it as a place, like the middle of a river, the middle of a bridge, halfway across, halfway over. I'm supposed to have accumulated things by now: possessions, responsibilities, achievements, experience and wisdom. I'm supposed to be a person of substance. -- Margaret Atwood
But in life, a tragedy is not one long scream. It includes everything that led up to it. Hour after trivial hour, day after day, year after year, and then the sudden moment: the knife stab, the shell burst, the plummet of the car from a bridge. -- Margaret Atwood
I was born in the Ottawa General Hospital right after the Gray Cup Football Game in 1939. Six months later, I was backpacked into the Quebec bush. I grew up in and out of the bush, in and out of Ottawa, Sault Ste. Marie and Toronto. -- Margaret Atwood
But all my love ever came to was a bad end. Red-hot shoes, barrels studded with nails. That's what it feels like, unrequited love. -- Margaret Atwood
Then sail, my fine lady, on the billowing wave -
The water below is as dark as the grave,
And maybe you'll sink in your little blue boat -
It's hope, and hope only, that keeps us afloat -- Margaret Atwood
Where there are wars, there will be crows, the carrion-fanciers. And ravens too, the warbirds, the eyeball gourmands. And vultures, the holy birds of yore, old connoisseurs of rot. -- Margaret Atwood
Where there's a doctor it's always a bad sign. Even when they are not doing the killing themselves it means a death is close, and in that way they are like ravens or crows. -- Margaret Atwood
I can tell you're admiring my febrility. I know it's appealing, I practice at it; every woman loves an invalid. But be careful. You might do something destructive: hunger is more basic than love. Florence Nightingale was a cannibal you know. -- Margaret Atwood
It's better to hope than mope! -- Margaret Atwood
I meet a lot of readers who first encountered my work in school. And I can only assume there is another group who would run away very fast if they saw me coming, for exactly the same reason. Reading is individual, and not all tastes are alike. -- Margaret Atwood
Is there no end to his diguises of benevolence? -- Margaret Atwood
I wait. I compose myself. My self is a thing I must now compose, as one composes a speech. What I must present is a made thing, not something born -- Margaret Atwood
Though at that time men and women tried each other on, casually, like suits, rejecting whatever did not fit. The -- Margaret Atwood
I feel despised there, for having so little money; also for once having had so much. I never actually had it, of course. Father had it, and then Richard. But money was imputed to me, the same way crimes are imputed to those who've simply been present at them. -- Margaret Atwood
Yes, it does feel deceptively safer with two; but Thou is a slippery character. Every Thou I've known has had a way of going missing. They skip town or turn perfidious, or else the drop like flies and then where are you? -- Margaret Atwood
He is talking to people in Toronto, trying to find out if I am guilty; but he won't find it out that way. He doesn't understand yet that guilt comes to you not from the things you've done, but from the things that other have done for you. -- Margaret Atwood
He's heard Unitarianism called a featherbed for falling Christians, but his mother doesn't seem like a woman who has fallen anywhere. (Where is the featherbed for falling Unitarians, he wonders? Such as himself.) [From "Life Before Man," 1979) -- Margaret Atwood
One boy had drawn a perfect isosceles triangle on every single page- meticulously, it was emphasized. Meticulously was a chilling touch: meticulousness, we knew, was just one step away from full-blown lunacy. -- Margaret Atwood
The pores, the wrinkles, the nose hairs, the impossibly whitened teeth shoved right up in front of your eyes so you can't ignore them the way you would in real life. It's like being forced to act as someone else's bathroom mirror, the magnifying kind: seldom a happy experience, those mirrors. -- Margaret Atwood
Nothing is ever settled," says Jocelyn. "Every day is different. Isn't it better to do something because you've decided to? Rather than because you have to?" "No, it isn't," says Charmaine. "Love isn't like that. With love, you can't stop yourself." She wants the helplessness, she wants ... -- Margaret Atwood
There is nothing more onerous than enforced gratitude. -- Margaret Atwood
All myths are stories, but not all stories are myths: among stories, myths hold a special place. -- Margaret Atwood
But maybe, underneath, she loves him too much. Maybe it's her excessive love that pushes him away. -- Margaret Atwood
The body is pure energy, solidifed light. -- Margaret Atwood
It must have been an endless breathing in: between the wish to know and the wish to praise there was no seam. -- Margaret Atwood
There is never only one, of anyone -- Margaret Atwood
The central symbol for Canada-and this based on numerous instances of its occurrence in both English and French Canadian literature-is undoubtedly Survival, la Survivance. -- Margaret Atwood
Maybe the kid gravitated to Zeb for the same reason children like dinosaurs: when feeling abandoned in a world of forces beyond your control, it's comforting to have a huge, scaly beast who is your friend. -- Margaret Atwood
I have a big following among the biogeeks of this world. Nobody ever puts them in books. -- Margaret Atwood
So many crucial events take place behind people's backs, when they aren't in a position to watch: birth and death, for instance. And the temporary oblivion of sex. -- Margaret Atwood
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. -- Margaret Atwood
I didn't want him to become gray and multi-dimensional and complicated like everyone else. Was every Heathcliff a Linton in disguise? -- Margaret Atwood
I was warped early by Ray Bradbury and Edgar Allan Poe. I was very fond of Franz Kafka. -- Margaret Atwood
Life is warped. I'm just in sync. -- Margaret Atwood
I can't think of myself, my body, sometimes, without seeing the skeleton: how I must appear to an electron. A cradle of life, made of bones; and within, hazards, warped proteins, bad crystals jagged as glass. -- Margaret Atwood
If you really want to stay the same age you are now forever and ever, she'd be thinking, try jumping off the roof: death's a sure-fire method for stopping time. -- Margaret Atwood
Not so her eyes, which were the flat hostile blue of a midsummer sky in bright sunlight, a blue that shuts you out. -- Margaret Atwood
Things that are falling apart encourage me: whatever else, I'm in better shape than they are. -- Margaret Atwood
Because you may think a bed is a peaceful thing, Sir, and to you it may mean rest and comfort and a good night's sleep. But it isn't so for everyone; and there are many dangerous things that may take place in a bed. -- Margaret Atwood
And Zeb's brother, Adam, was inside the flower too. That -- Margaret Atwood
Nature may be dumb as a sack of hammers, Zeb used to say, but it's smarter than you. -- Margaret Atwood
It's like the Vatican's porn collection," Zeb told her. "Safe in our hands. -- Margaret Atwood
The card-carrying furfuckers looked down their narrow green true-believer noses at Zeb and his edgy like, -- Margaret Atwood
She'd learned a lot of things from Zeb in his Urban Bloodshed Limitation classes: in Zeb's view, the first bloodshed to be limited should be your own. -- Margaret Atwood
I already told you," said Adam. "There is no need to swear."
"Sorry, it just fucking slipped out," said Zeb. -- Margaret Atwood
Would I laugh?"
"Matter of fact, you would," says Zeb. "Heart like shale. What you need is a good fracking. -- Margaret Atwood
And I said that Crozier did not need to call Fuck right now because we were not in trouble and did not need his help. And Toby said, That's right, he doesn't like to be summoned on trivial matters. And Zeb coughed. -- Margaret Atwood
But love was undependable, it came and then it went, so it was good to have a money value, because then at least those who wanted to make a profit from you would make sure you were fed enough and not damaged too much. -- Margaret Atwood
But they had a money value: they represented a cash profit to others. They must have sensed that
sensed that they were worth something. -- Margaret Atwood
They wore blouses with buttons down the front that suggested the possibilities of the word undone. These women could be undone; or not. They seemed to be able to choose. -- Margaret Atwood
Thinking can hurt your chances, and I intend to last -- Margaret Atwood
How I would like to have them back, those pointless afternoons - the boredom, the aimlessness, the unformed possibilities. -- Margaret Atwood
Inside John, she thinks, is another John, who is much nicer. This other John will emerge like a butterfly from a cocoon, a Jack from a box, a pit from a prune, if the first John is only squeezed enough. -- Margaret Atwood
You must cultivate poverty of spirit. Blessed are the meek. She didn't go on to say anything about inheriting the earth. -- Margaret Atwood
Maybe all women should be robots, he thinks with a tinge of acid: the flesh-and-blood ones are out of control. -- Margaret Atwood
Canada is a balloon-puncturing country. You are not really allowed to be an icon unless you also make an idiot of yourself. -- Margaret Atwood
We get along by a symbiotic adjustment of habits and with a minimum of that pale-mauve hostility you often find among women. -- Margaret Atwood
The older women, the married ones and the widows, wear black clothes and no makeup, as I used to do. When I was in the later months of pregnancy, they would smile at me, as if I was almost one of them. Now they smile at Sarah first. -- Margaret Atwood
I've forgotten about these things all winter, but here they are again, and when I see them I remember them, I know them, I greet them as if they are home. -- Margaret Atwood
I forgave her, of course. I always did; I had to, because there were only the two of us. The two of us on our thorn-encircled island, waiting for rescue; and, on the mainland, everyone else. -- Margaret Atwood
I wonder why trying to transcend time never even succeeds in stopping it ... -- Margaret Atwood
His view of the world featured swift disasters set against a background of lurking doom, my cooking did nothing to contradict it. -- Margaret Atwood
She doesn't want to begin, she wants to continue. No: she wants to go back. -- Margaret Atwood
You will flicker in these words
and in the words of others
for a while and then go out.
Even if I send them,
you will never get these letters.
Even if I see you again,
I will never see you again. -- Margaret Atwood
Extreme emotions could be lethal. If I can't have you nobody will, and so forth. Death could set in. -- Margaret Atwood
Fear is synonymous with the future, and the future consists of forked roads, I should say forking roads, because the roads are forking all the time, like slow lightning. A road is a process, not a location. -- Margaret Atwood
It is better to hope than to mope! -- Margaret Atwood
It was love, after all,
that rubbed the skins from their gray cheeks,
crippled their fingers,
snarled their hair, brown or dull gold.
Hate would merely have smashed them. -- Margaret Atwood
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. -- Margaret Atwood
The cemetery has ... an inscription: 'Though I walk through the Valley of the Shadow of Death I will Fear No Evil, For Thou Art With Me.' Yes, it does feel deceptively safer with two; but Thou is a slippery character. Every Thou I've known has had a way of going missing. -- Margaret Atwood
He put his arms around me. We were both feeling miserable. How were we to know we were happy, even then? Because we at least had that: arms, around. -- Margaret Atwood
The object is very clear in the fight against racism; you have reasons why you're opposed to it. But when you're writing a novel, you don't want the reader to come out of it voting yes or no to some question. Life is more complicated than that. -- Margaret Atwood
The stains on the mattress. Like dried flower petals. Not recent. Old love; there's no other kind of love in this room now. -- Margaret Atwood
Like a cat that crawls onto the page when you're trying to read. -- Margaret Atwood
Hatred would have been easier. With hatred, I would have known what to do. Hatred is clear, metallic, one-handed, unwavering; unlike love. -- Margaret Atwood
Watch out for the leaders, Crake used to say. First the leaders and the led, then the tyrants and the slaves, then the massacres. That's how it's always gone. -- Margaret Atwood
What could he have done or said differently? What change would have altered the course of events? In the big picture, nothing. In the small picture, so much. -- Margaret Atwood
I wanted to forget the past, but it refused to forget me; it waited for sleep, then cornered me. -- Margaret Atwood
Miranda nods, because she knows that to be true: noble people don't do things for the money, they simply have money, and that's what allows they to be noble. They don't really have to think about it much; they sprout benevolent acts the way trees sprout leaves. -- Margaret Atwood
There is so much going on all over the world that it's impossible for one person to keep up. And I can't. -- Margaret Atwood
She'd have been gnawing her way through his bedroom walls to sink her avid fingers into his youthful flesh. -- Margaret Atwood
I'm a novelist, and idle speculation is what novelists do. How odd to spend one's life trying to pretend that non-existent people are real: though no odder, I suppose, than what government bureaucrats do, which is trying to pretend that real people are non-existent. -- Margaret Atwood
Women have curious ways of hurting someone else. They hurt themselves instead; or else they do it so the guy doesn't even know he's been hurt until much later. Then he finds out. Then his dick falls off. -- Margaret Atwood
I should have known better than to rely on pills. You can't buy unconsciousness quite so cheaply. -- Margaret Atwood
They didn't realize that her clumsiness was not the ordinary kind, not poor coordination. It was just because she wasn't sure where the edges of her body ended and the rest of the world began. -- Margaret Atwood
But in the end, back she comes. There's no use resisting. She goes to him for amnesia, for oblivion. She renders herself up, is blotted out; enters the darkness of her own body, forgets her name. Immolation is what she wants, however briefly. To exist without boundaries. -- Margaret Atwood
Don't eat anything you aren't prepared to kill. Don't kill anything you aren't prepared to eat. -- Margaret Atwood
When I was 16, I started publishing all kinds of things in school magazines. -- Margaret Atwood
Why were the bad people doing that? Because of Money. Money was invisible, like Fuck. They thought that Money was their helper; they thought he was a better helper than Fuck. But they were wrong about that. Money was not their helper. Money goes away just when you need it. But Fuck is very loyal. -- Margaret Atwood
I remember Queen Victoria's advice to her daughter. Close your eyes and think of England. -- Margaret Atwood
You're clear, Mr. Duke." Grins from both of them. What could Felix possibly be suspected of smuggling, a harmless old thespian like him? It's the words that should concern you, he thinks at them. That's the real danger. Words don't show up on scanners. -- Margaret Atwood
They did not set out to disappoint their father, not on purpose, but neither did they wish to shoulder the lumpy, enervating burden of the mundane. -- Margaret Atwood
Bless you. Be careful. Anyone intending to meddle with words needs such blessing, such warning. -- Margaret Atwood
But the adjectives change," said Jimmy. "Nothing's worse than last year's adjectives. -- Margaret Atwood
You refuse to own yourself, you permit others to do it for you -- Margaret Atwood
The fact is that blank pages inspire me with terror. What will I put on them? Will it be good enough? Will I have to throw it out? -- Margaret Atwood
Actually, they took turns trying to avoid being the victims. That's the whole point about war! -- Margaret Atwood
There's a moon now, almost full. Good luck for owls; bad luck for rabbits, who often choose to cavort riskily but sexily in the moonlight, their brains buzzing with pheromones. -- Margaret Atwood
Somewhere in Limbo, all the old devices and appliances and costumes are lined up, waiting their turn for reentry. -- Margaret Atwood
But I'm ravenous for news, any kind of news; even if it's false news, it must mean something. We -- Margaret Atwood
A thing is valued, only if it is rare and hard to get. -- Margaret Atwood
We would not be Human if we did not prefer to be the devourers rather than the devoured, but either is a blessing. Should your life be required of you, rest assured that it is required by Life. -- Margaret Atwood
Every night when I go to bed I think, In the morning I will wake up in my own house and things will be back the way they were.
It hasn't happened this morning, either. -- Margaret Atwood
Sex and violence, he thinks now. A lot of the songs were about that. We didn't even notice. We thought it was art. -- Margaret Atwood
A river shaped her,
smoothed her with sand and battered
her against the shore, and she
resisted, she is still here. -- Margaret Atwood
I feel like cotton candy: sugar and air. Squeeze me and I'd turn into a small sickly damp wad of weeping pinky-red. -- Margaret Atwood
In the days of anarchy, it was freedom to. Now you are being given freedom from. Don't underrate it. In -- Margaret Atwood
The moon is a stone and the sky is full of deadly hardware, but oh God, how beautiful anyway. -- Margaret Atwood
I grew up in the north woods of Canada. You had to know certain things about survival. Wilderness survival courses weren't very formalized when I was growing up, but I was taught certain things about what to do if I got lost in the woods. -- Margaret Atwood
Our generation in the west was lucky: we had readymade gateways. We had books, paper, teachers, schools and libraries. But many in the world lack these luxuries. How do you practice without such tryout venues? -- Margaret Atwood
Being socially retarded is like being mentally retarded, it arouses in others disgust and pity and the desire to torment and reform. -- Margaret Atwood
A writer's age at the time of a work's composition is never irrelevant. -- Margaret Atwood
If it's a story I'm telling, then I have control over the ending ...
But if it's a story, even in my head, I must be telling it to someone.
You don't tell a story only to yourself. There's always someone else. Even when there is no one. -- Margaret Atwood
She was afraid of losing her shape, spreading out, not being able to contain herself any longer, beginning (that would be worst of all) to talk a lot, to tell everybody, to cry. -- Margaret Atwood
In their dreams they touch, they intertwine, it's more like a collision, and that is the end of flying. They fall to earth, fouled parachutists, botched and cindery angels, love streaming out behind them like torn silk. Enemy groundfire comes up to meet them. -- Margaret Atwood
He'd wanted to track down and personally injure anyone who had ever done harm to her or made her unhappy. He'd tortured himself with painful knowledge: every white-hot factoid he could collect he'd shove up under his fingernails. The more it hurt, the more
he was convinced
he loved her. -- Margaret Atwood
Gardening is not a rational act. -- Margaret Atwood
Perhaps they were looking for passion; perhaps they delved into this book as into a mysterious parcel - a gift box at the bottom of which, hidden in layers of rustling tissue paper, lay something they'd always longed for but couldn't ever grasp. -- Margaret Atwood
She was faintly terrifying. She wanted it all. She wanted them all. She wanted experiences. In Tin's already jaded view, experiences were what you got when you couldn't get what you wanted, but Jorrie had always been more optimistic than him. -- Margaret Atwood
The girls in the stories make such fools of themselves. They are so weak. They fall helplessly in love with the wrong men, they give in, they are jilted. Then they cry. -- Margaret Atwood
I stand in the presence
of the destroyed god:
a rubble of tendons,
knuckles and raw sinews.
Knowing that the work is mine
how can I love you? -- Margaret Atwood
A sad pretty girl inspires the urge to console, unlike a sad old crone. -- Margaret Atwood
She who weeps when the sun's in sky, Will never pile the platter high. -- Margaret Atwood
Everything in this town is retro, which accounts for the large supply of black vintage items in Accessories. The past is so much safer, because whatever's in it has already happened. It can't be changed; so, in a way, there's nothing to dread. She -- Margaret Atwood
They meet in church basements and offer bandages to those wounded by the shrapnel of exploding families. -- Margaret Atwood
A suicide is both a rebuke to the living and a puzzle that defies them to solve it. Like a poem, suicide is finished and refuses to answer questions as to its final cause. -- Margaret Atwood
Freedom, like everything else, is relative. -- Margaret Atwood
I can't remember what I really felt. Maybe nothing happened, maybe these emotions I remember are not the right emotions. -- Margaret Atwood
The heart with letters on it shining like a light bulb through the trim hole painted in the chest, art history. -- Margaret Atwood
Perhaps he's reached that state of intoxication which power is said to inspire, the state in which you believe you are indispensable and can therefore do anything, absolutely anything you feel like, anything at all. -- Margaret Atwood
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. -- Margaret Atwood
It's clear, it's fresh, like a mint candy. -- Margaret Atwood
Or he'd watch the news: more plagues, more famines, more floods, more insect or microbe or small-mammal outbreaks, more droughts, more chickenshit boy-soldier wars in distant countries. Why was everything so much like itself? -- Margaret Atwood
I am not running for mayor yet. But if it comes to be true that people cannot voice an opinion unless they have been elected, then we are no longer in a democracy, -- Margaret Atwood
Heaven, for the Presbyterians, must resemble a banking establishment, with each soul tagged and docketed, and placed in the appropriate pigeonhole. -- Margaret Atwood
A plane of cheekbone, -- Margaret Atwood
This world is not enough, but it will have to do. You can either hold on or let go. -- Margaret Atwood
...I was shut up inside that doll of myself, and my true voice could not get out. -- Margaret Atwood
But now undesirable is whoever Ed says. -- Margaret Atwood
Rachel; and he said, Am I in God's stead, who hath withheld from thee the fruit of the womb? And she said, Behold my maid Bilhah, -- Margaret Atwood
It was a question now, rather than a statement; a question with no answer. -- Margaret Atwood
Exploited, they'd say. Yes, any way
you cut it, but I've a choice
of how, and I'll take the money. -- Margaret Atwood
Why couldn't the two of them have gone on and on forever? Himself and Constance, sun and moon, each one of them shining, though in different ways. Instead of which he's here, forsaken by her, abandoned. In time, which fails to sustain him. In space, which fails to cradle him. -- Margaret Atwood
The body may be the home of the soul and the pathway of the spirit, but it is also the perversity, the stubborn resistance, the malign contagion of the material world. Having a body, being in the body, is like being roped to a sick cat. -- Margaret Atwood
The ancestral voices were prophesying war because ancestral voices never shut up, and they hate to be wrong, and war is a sure thing, sooner or later. -- Margaret Atwood
If he wants to be an asshole, it's a free country. Millions before him have made the same life choice. -- Margaret Atwood
Econowives, they're called. These -- Margaret Atwood
As Saint Paul says, marry or burn. -- Margaret Atwood
But a chair, sunlight, flowers: these are not to be dismissed. I am alive, I live, I breathe, I put my hand out, unfolded, into the sunlight. Where I am is not a prison but a privilege, as Aunt Lydia said, who was in love with either/or. -- Margaret Atwood
I felt white, drained of blood, cared for, purified. Peaceful. -- Margaret Atwood
History (that list
of ballooning wishes, flukes,
bent times, plunges and mistakes
clutched like parachutes)
is rolling itself up in your head
at one end unrolling at the other. -- Margaret Atwood
Malum quidem nullum esse sine aliquo bono, Tin noted in the journal he was sporadically keeping then. Every cloud has a silver lining. -- Margaret Atwood
Which of us can resist the temptation of being thought indispensable? -- Margaret Atwood
There is something reassuring about the toilets. Bodily functions at least remain democratic. Everybody shits. -- Margaret Atwood
Nothing changes instantaneously: in a gradually heating bathtub you'd be boiled to death before you knew it. -- Margaret Atwood
Women can't add, he once said, jokingly. When I asked him what he meant, he said, For them, one and one and one and one don't make four. What do they make? I said, expecting five or three. Just one and one and one and one, he said. -- Margaret Atwood
Money was the only measure of worth, for everyone, they got no respect as mothers. -- Margaret Atwood
People had hoarded the lead bullets from the time before sprayguns, despite the ban on the pleebs having any kind of gun at all. Snowman -- Margaret Atwood
He doesn't know which is worse, a past he can't regain or a present that will destroy him if he looks at it too clearly. Then there's the future. Sheer vertigo. -- Margaret Atwood
How easy it is, treachery. You just slide into it. -- Margaret Atwood
Show me a character totally without anxieties and I will show you a boring book. -- Margaret Atwood
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. -- Margaret Atwood
It was like being in an elevator cut loose at the top. Falling, falling, and not knowing when you will hit. -- Margaret Atwood
God is not the voice in the whirlwind, God is the whirlwind. -- Margaret Atwood
But there's something missing in them, even the nice ones. It's like they're permanently absent-minded, like that can't quite remember who they are. -- Margaret Atwood
I'm sad now, the way we're talking is infinitely sad: faded music, faded paper flowers, worn satin, an echo of an echo. All gone away, no longer possible. -- Margaret Atwood
I think of sardines and their backbones. You can eat their backbones. The bones crumble between your teeth; one touch and they fall apart. This must be what my own backbone is like: hardly there at all. What is happening to me is my own fault, for not having more backbone. -- Margaret Atwood
Human beings- I've observed- are hot-wired for score keeping, and since they like to win, they're always going one better than the other fellow. -- Margaret Atwood
At moments like this I envy those who have found a safe haven in which to bestow their hearts; or perhaps I envy them for having a heart to bestow. I often feel that I myself am without one, and possess in its stead merely a heart shaped stone. -- Margaret Atwood
The way love feels is always only approximate. I would like to be without shame. I would like to be shameless. I would like to be ignorant. Then I would not know how ignorant I was. -- Margaret Atwood
A scar is like writing on your body. It tells about something that once happened to you, such as a cut on your skin where blood came out. What -- Margaret Atwood
To be rendered unconscious; to lie exposed, without shame, at the mercy of others; to be touched, incised, plundered, remade - this is what they are thinking of when they look at him, with their widening eyes and slightly parted lips. -- Margaret Atwood
I admired her lack of compunction, the courage of her bad manners, the energy of simple rage. Throwing a bag of spaghetti had a simplicity to it, a recklessness, a careless grandeur. It got things over with. I was a long way, then, from being able to do anything like it myself. -- Margaret Atwood
Religious people of any serious kind made her nervous: they were like men in raincoats who might or might not be flashers. -- Margaret Atwood
I am nervous about dogmas of any kind, whether they be religious, political, or anti-religious. Too many heads have rolled because of them. -- Margaret Atwood
The night is mine, my own time, to do with it as I will, as long as I am quiet. As long as I don't move. As long as I lie still. The difference between lie and lay. Lay is always passive. -- Margaret Atwood
The sands of time are quicksands, said Adam One. So much can sink into them without a trace. And what a blessing when those things that sink away are needless worries. -- Margaret Atwood
He doesn't know what is worse, a past he can't regain or a present that will destroy him it he looks at it too clearly. -- Margaret Atwood
But I was the daughter of a Naiad. Behave like water, I told myself. Don't try to oppose them. When they try to grasp you, slip through their fingers. Flow around them. -- Margaret Atwood
this history will soon be swept away by the Waterless Flood. Nothing will remain of the Exfernal World but decaying wood and rusting metal implements; and -- Margaret Atwood
He feels like saying that of course there's lint on Mr. Wiggly, or dust at any rate, or maybe rust; what does she expect, because as she is well aware Mr. Wiggly has been on the shelf for some time. -- Margaret Atwood
Love is not a profession
genteel or otherwise
sex is not dentistry
the slick filling of aches and cavities
you are not my doctor
you are not my cure,
nobody has that
power, you are merely a fellow/traveler. -- Margaret Atwood
A breath would blow you away, they beam down at her silently. You wish, thinks Tony, smiling up. Many have blown. She -- Margaret Atwood
So when time had begun to run out on Adelia with no really acceptable husband in sight, she'd married money
crude money, button money. She was expected to refine this money, like oil. -- Margaret Atwood
Your legacy from him is the realm of infinite speculation. You're free to reinvent yourself at will. -- Margaret Atwood
According to Tobias, it was more difficult to seduce a stupid woman than an intelligent one because stupid women could not understand innuendo or even connect cause with effect. -- Margaret Atwood
But it wasn't more honestly that would have saved me, I thought; it was more dishonesty. In my experience, honesty and expressing your feelings could lead to only one thing. Disaster. -- Margaret Atwood
The sitting room is subdued, symmetrical; it's one of the shapes money takes when it freezes. Money has trickled through this room for years and years, as if through an underground cavern, crusting and hardening like stalactites into these forms. -- Margaret Atwood
She breathes in the cold air; pellets of blown ice whip against her face. The wind's getting up, as the TV said it would. Nonetheless there's something brisk about being out in the storm, something energizing: it whisks away the cobwebs, it makes you inhale. The -- Margaret Atwood
Setting fire to the roofs, getting away with the loot, suiting herself. She studied modern philosophy, read Sartre on the side, smoked Gitanes, and cultivated a look of bored contempt. But inwardly, she was seething with unfocused excitement, and looking for someone to worship. -- Margaret Atwood
I have never had any problems with editors who wanted me to change my methods or point of view. I pay a lot of attention to editors, but in a different way. They sometimes catch mistakes and help with the order of poems in a book. I do not underestimate them! Indeed, I have been one myself. -- Margaret Atwood
Within one's own family, money is not the measure of things, unless the person is an absolute Scrooge. Only the most extreme kind of monster would put a price on everything. -- Margaret Atwood
Last night I felt the approach of nothing. Not too close but on its way, like a wingbeat, like the cooling of the wind, the slight initial tug of an undertow. -- Margaret Atwood
Arboreal, a fine word. Our arboreal ancestors, Crake used to say. Used to shit on their enemies from above while perched in trees. All planes and rockets and bombs are simply elaborations on that primate instinct. -- Margaret Atwood
Sex is like a drink, it's bad to start brooding about it too early in the day. -- Margaret Atwood
The Adams and the Eves used to say, We are what we eat, but I prefer to say, we are what we wish. Because if you can't wish, why bother? -- Margaret Atwood
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. -- Margaret Atwood
I began writing at the age of 5, but there was a dark period between the ages of 8 and 16 when I didn't write. I started again at 16 and have no idea why, but it was suddenly the only thing I wanted to do. -- Margaret Atwood
The small details of life often hide a great significance. -- Margaret Atwood
I tend to feel if people say they're going to do something, they will, if given the chance. -- Margaret Atwood
At night, Toby breathed herself in. Her new self. Her skin smelled like honey and salt. And earth -- Margaret Atwood
But rabbits belong to the Children of Oryx and are sacred to Oryx herself, and it would be a bad idea to offend the women. It -- Margaret Atwood
Modesty is invisibility ... Never forget it. To be seen - to be seen - is to be ... penetrated. What you must be girls, is impenetrable. -- Margaret Atwood
It disturbs me that he can remember some of these things about himself, but not others; that the things he's lost or misplaced exist now only for me. If he's forgotten so much, what have I forgotten? -- Margaret Atwood
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. -- Margaret Atwood
It is the strict adherence to daily routine that tends towards the maintenance of good morale and the preservation of sanity, he says out loud. -- Margaret Atwood
I want to be held and told my name. I want to be valued, in ways that I am not; I want to be more than valuable. I repeat my former name; remind myself of what I once could do, how others saw me. I want to steal something. -- Margaret Atwood
How were we to know we were happy? -- Margaret Atwood
On the top of my desk there are initials, carved into the wood, and dates ... This carving, done with a pencil dug many times into the warn varnish of the desk, has the pathos of all vanished civilizations. It's like a handprint on stone. Whoever made this was once alive. -- Margaret Atwood
The tulips along the border are redder than ever, opening, no longer wine cups but chalices; thrusting themselves up, to what end? They are, after all, empty. When they are old they turn themselves inside out, explode slowly, the petals thrown like shards. -- Margaret Atwood
I was nervous. How was I to know he loved me? It might be just an affair. Why did we ever say just? Though at that time men and women tried each other on, casually, like suits, rejecting whatever did not fit. -- Margaret Atwood
You could tell 'The Handmaid's Tale' from a male point of view. People have mistakenly felt that the women are oppressed, but power tends to organise itself in a pyramid. I could pick a male narrator from somewhere in that pyramid. It would interesting. -- Margaret Atwood
The thing to remember is that there is nothing new about the society depicted in The Handmaid's Tale except the time and place. All of the things I have written about have been done before, more than once. -- Margaret Atwood
God is love,' they once said, but we reversed that, and love, like heaven, was always just around the corner. The more difficult it was to love the particular man beside us, the more we believed in Love, abstract and total. We were waiting, always, for the incarnation. That word, made flesh. -- Margaret Atwood
The society in 'The Handmaid's Tale' is a throwback to the early Puritans whom I studied extensively at Harvard under Perry Miller, to whom the book is dedicated. -- Margaret Atwood
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. -- Margaret Atwood
Fuck, thinks Stan. She knows about the chickens. -- Margaret Atwood
How could a person be caught that way, in an instant, by a glance, the lift of an eyebrow, the curve of an arm? But he was. -- Margaret Atwood
What restless woman can resist a man with a shovel in one hand and a glowing rose bush in the other, and a moderately crazed glitter in his eyes that might be mistaken for love? -- Margaret Atwood
Real painters grunt like Marlon Brando -- Margaret Atwood
In the evenings there's been thunder, a distant bumping and stumbling, like God on a sullen binge. -- Margaret Atwood
It has taken so little time to change our minds, about things like this. Then -- Margaret Atwood
If one of the arguments against eating meat is to do with cruelty and animal intelligence, then lab meat avoids that. There's also the environmental argument for it. -- Margaret Atwood
Fuck that shit, I told them, I've started this and I'm going to finish it. -- Margaret Atwood
I'm such a mess," he says. "Sometimes I think everyone's dead. -- Margaret Atwood
Don't let the bastards grind you down. I repeat this to myself but it conveys nothing. You might as well say, Don't let there be air; or, Don't be. -- Margaret Atwood
if the teenage kids want to carouse, that's where they do it. They make bonfires, and drink too much and smoke dope, and grope around in one another's clothing as if they've just invented it, and smash their parents cars up on the way back to town. -- Margaret Atwood
For the heart was both key and lock, and he who could master the hearts of men and learn their secrets was well on the way to mastering the Fates and controlling the thread of his own destiny. -- Margaret Atwood
I write as if I've lived a lot of things I haven't lived.. -- Margaret Atwood
An odd thing souvenir-hunting: now becomes then even while it is still now. -- Margaret Atwood
This could be the last time I have to wait. But I don't know what I'm waiting for. What are you waiting for? they used to say. That meant Hurry up. No answer was expected. For what are you waiting is a different question, and I have no answer for that one either. -- Margaret Atwood
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. -- Margaret Atwood
Another belief of mine: that everyone else my age is an adult, whereas I am merely in disguise. -- Margaret Atwood
Men are sex machines, said Aunt Lydia, and not much more. They only want one thing. You must learn to manipulate them, for your own good. -- Margaret Atwood
How old do you have to get before wisdom descends like a plastic bag over your head and you learn to keep your big mouth shut? Maybe never. Maybe you get more frivolous with age. -- Margaret Atwood
If I were to meet Cordelia again, what would I tell her about myself? The truth, or whatever would make me look good?
Probably the latter. I still have that need. -- Margaret Atwood
We are containers, it's only the insides of our bodies that are important. -- Margaret Atwood
Forgiving men is so much easier than forgiving women. -- Margaret Atwood
Happy as a clam, is what my mother says for happy. I am happy as a clam: hard-shelled, firmly closed. -- Margaret Atwood
Wind comes in, your candle tips over and flares up, and a loose tent-flap catches fire, and through the widening black-edged gap you can see the eyes of the howlers, red and shining in the light from your burning paper shelter, but you keep on writing anyway because what else can you do? -- Margaret Atwood
Their mothers had finally caught up to them and been proven right. There were consequences after all but they were the consequences to things you didn't even know you'd done. -- Margaret Atwood
My hands are out of practice, my eyes disused. Most of what I do is drawing, because the preparation of the surface, the laborious underpainting and detailed concentration ... are too much for me. I have lost confidence: perhaps all I will ever be is what I am now. -- Margaret Atwood
Lambhood and tigerishness may be found in either gender, and in the same individual at different times. -- Margaret Atwood
He manages to appear puzzled, as if he can't quite remember how we all got in here. As if we are something he inherited, like a Victorian pump organ, and he hasn't figured out what to do with us. What we are worth. -- Margaret Atwood
My brother and I were both good at science, and we were both good at English literature. Either one of us could have gone either way. -- Margaret Atwood
Love was like a steamroller. There was no avoiding it, it went over you and you came out flat. -- Margaret Atwood
Science and fiction both begin with similar questions: What if? Why? How does it all work? But they focus on different areas of life on earth. -- Margaret Atwood
Everyone who lived here said those things: provincial, self-satisfied, boring. If you said that, it showed you recognized these qualities but did not partake of them yourself. -- Margaret Atwood
Remember,' she'd tell her staff, 'every customer wants to feel like a princess, and princesses are selfish and overbearing. -- Margaret Atwood
The fact is that I hate this city. I've hated it so long I can hardly remember feeling any other way about it. -- Margaret Atwood
His mouth is on me, his hands, I can't wait and he's moving, already, love, it's been so long, I'm alive in my skin, again, arms around him, falling and water softly everywhere, never-ending. -- Margaret Atwood
There's nothing like drawing a thing to make you really see it. -- Margaret Atwood
I reproached them all for not having told me of my son's departure, and for not stopping him, until that interfering old biddy Eurycleia confessed that she alone had aided and abetted him. -- Margaret Atwood
As his editor put it, Yeah, it's a piece of shit, but it's good shit. -- Margaret Atwood
Younger people have greatest fears. Why is that? Because they don't know the plot. They don't know their own individual plot ... they don't know what's going to happen to them. -- Margaret Atwood
It's the unbroken calm, both within and without, that is getting to her. Real events happen to people, she thinks, why not me? And then there's her conviction that they are happening, all around her, but that they're being kept from her. -- Margaret Atwood
Who should turn up but that long-lost schmuck of a Billy, and what did Charis do but rent him the other half of her duplex? It's enough to make you tear your hair out by its tiny grey roots, -- Margaret Atwood
My favorite author's question of all time - because it's so simple to answer ... 'Is your hair really like that, or do you get it done? -- Margaret Atwood
It's kind of shocking to hear Toby called a babe; sort of like calling God a studmuffin. -- Margaret Atwood
There are tenses that define us now: past tense, back then; future tense, not yet. We live in the small window between them, the space we've only recently come to think as still, and really it's no smaller than anyone else's window. -- Margaret Atwood
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. -- Margaret Atwood
So much for endings. Beginnings are always more fun. True connoisseurs, however, are known to favor the stretch in between, since it's the hardest to do anything with. That's about all that can be said for plots, which anyway are just one thing after another, a what and a what and a what. -- Margaret Atwood
The thing about delirium is you think it's great, but it actually isn't. -- Margaret Atwood
It's possible to go so far in, so far down and back, they could never get you out. -- Margaret Atwood
She's not extravagant or greedy, she tells herself: all she ever wanted was to be protected by layer upon layer of kind, soft, insulating money, so that nobody and nothing could get close enough to harm her. -- Margaret Atwood
There is a silence. But sometimes it's as dangerous not to speak. "Yes, -- Margaret Atwood
There's only so long you can feel sorry for a person before you come to feel that their affliction is an act of malice committed by them against you. -- Margaret Atwood
There's something to be said for hunger: at least it lets you know you're still alive. -- Margaret Atwood
For every age there is a popular idea about what madness is, what causes it, and how a mad person should look and behave; and it's usually these popular ideas, rather than those of medical professionals, that turn up in songs and stories and plays and books. -- Margaret Atwood
There's only that one picture of me, standing in front of the motel door with 9 on it, long ago, a month ago. Already that child seems much younger, poorer, farther away, a shrunken, ignorant version of myself. -- Margaret Atwood
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. -- Margaret Atwood
It's the end of the world every day, for someone. -- Margaret Atwood
It's old light, and there's not much of it. But it is enough to see by. -- Margaret Atwood
I have no image of myself in the hole; only a black square filled with nothing, a square like a door. Perhaps the square is empty; perhaps it's only a marker, a time marker that separates the time before it from the time after. The point at which I lost power. -- Margaret Atwood
It's always encouraging to be told that it is intellectually acceptable to read the sorts of things that you like to read anyway. -- Margaret Atwood
There were still newspapers, then. We used to read them in bed. It's French, he said. From m'aidez. Help Me. -- Margaret Atwood
Should is a futile word. It's about what didn't happen. It belongs in a parallel universe. It belongs in another dimension of space. -- Margaret Atwood
The tension between her lack of control and her attempt to suppress it is horrible. It's like a fart in church. -- Margaret Atwood
But I envy the Commander's Wife her knitting. It's good to have small goals that can be easily attained. -- Margaret Atwood
Roamin' here, roamin' there, roamin' in my underwear, I got a sweetie covered in hair, She's all pussy everywhere -- Margaret Atwood
It's no good thinking you're invisible if you aren't -- Margaret Atwood
If you can call it talking, these clipped whispers, projected through the funnels of our white wings. It's more like a telegram, a verbal semaphore. Amputated speech. -- Margaret Atwood
Attack, voracious
eating, and flight:
it's a sound routine
for staying alive on edges. -- Margaret Atwood
Though it's hard to concentrate on the idea of a future. She's too immersed in the present: -- Margaret Atwood
Oh God. It's no joke. Oh God oh God. How can I keep on living? -- Margaret Atwood
It's probably a form of childish curiosity that keeps me going as a fiction writer. I ... want to open everybody's bureau drawers and see what they keep in there. I'm nosy. -- Margaret Atwood
The problem with meditating is I generally go to sleep, and that's because I'm doing it wrong. -- Margaret Atwood
Am I shallow? she asks the mirror. Yes, I am shallow. The sun shines on the ripples where it's shallow. Deep is too dark. -- Margaret Atwood
She looks like a very young old person, or a very old young person; but then, she's looked that way ever since she was two. -- Margaret Atwood
Everyone thinks writers must know more about the inside of the human head, but that's wrong. They know less, that's why they write. Trying to find out what everyone else takes for granted. -- Margaret Atwood
What confronts us, now the excitement's over, is our own failure. -- Margaret Atwood
Maybe I don't really want to know what's going on. Maybe I'd rather not know. Maybe I couldn't bear to know. The Fall was a fall from innocence to knowledge. -- Margaret Atwood
Via the conduit of a wild dog pack, she has now made the ultimate Gift to her fellow Creatures, and has become part of God's great dance of proteins. -- Margaret Atwood
She knows she's deceiving herself about that, but she prefers to deceive herself. She desperately needs to believe such pure joy is still possible. -- Margaret Atwood
I no longer feel I'll be dead by thirty; now it's sixty. I suppose these deadlines we set for ourselves are really a way of saying we appreciate time, and want to use all of it. I'm still
writing, I'm still writing poetry, I still can't explain why, and I'm still running out of time. -- Margaret Atwood
This is the solstice, the still point
of the sun, its cusp and midnight,
the year's threshold
and unlocking, where the past
lets go of and becomes the future;
the place of caught breath ... -- Margaret Atwood
A lie, that we come from water.
The truth is we were born
from stones, dragons, the sea's
teeth, -- Margaret Atwood
Hope throws a smokescreen. Smoke gets in your eyes and so no one is prepared for it, but suddenly it;s there, like an out-of-control bonfire - like murder, only multiplied. It's in full spate. -- Margaret Atwood
The darkness is really out there. It's not something that's in my head, just. It's in my work because it's in the world. -- Margaret Atwood
It was as if they could read each other's minds. No, not minds: each other's mindlessness. -- Margaret Atwood
I've never understood why people consider youth a time of freedom and joy. It's probably because they have forgotten their own. -- Margaret Atwood
Writing ... is an act of faith: I believe it's also an act of hope, the hope that things can get better than they are. -- Margaret Atwood
It hasn't escaped me that the object that keeps me alive is the same one that will kill me. In this way it's like love, or a certain kind of it. -- Margaret Atwood
I would pore for hours over the stalls of worn necklaces, sets of gilt spoons, sugar tongs in the shape of hen's feet or midget hands, clocks that didn't work, flowered china, spotty mirrors and ponderous furniture, the flotsam left by those receding centuries in which, more and more, I was living. -- Margaret Atwood
Their faces were the way women's faces are when they've been talking about you behind your back and they think you've heard: embarrassed, but also a little defiant, as if it were their right. -- Margaret Atwood
at this distance
you're a mirage, a glossy image
fixed in the posture
of the last time I saw you.
Turn you over, there's a place
for the address. Wish you were
here. -- Margaret Atwood
I used to jog but it's bad for the knees. Too much beta carotene turns you orange, too much calcium gives you kidney stones. Health kills. -- Margaret Atwood
Back at home they drew the curtains and read, with disapproval, with relish, with avidity and glee - even the ones who'd never thought of opening a novel before. There's nothing like a shovelful of dirt to encourage literacy. -- Margaret Atwood
More of your brain is involved when reading than it is when you watch television ... because you are supplying just about everything ... you're a creator. -- Margaret Atwood
Symbolic thinking of any kind would signal downfall, in Crake's view. Next they'd be inventing idols, and funerals, and grave goods, and the afterlife, and sin, and Linear B, and kings, and then slavery and war. -- Margaret Atwood
I'd felt like crying, but cry once and it's all over: if you cry, the reliable men will despise you, and then they will not be reliable any more. -- Margaret Atwood
I would rather dance as a ballerina, though faultily, than as a flawless clown. -- Margaret Atwood
Tell me, Elly Kleinman, why do men feel threatened by women? -- Margaret Atwood
Time folds you in its arms and gives you one last kiss, and then it flattens you out and folds you up and tucks you away until it's time for you to become someone else's past time, and then time folds again. -- Margaret Atwood
The beauty is an illusion, and also a warning: there's a dark side to beauty, as with poisonous butterflies. -- Margaret Atwood
Children were vehicles for passing things along. These things could be kingdoms, rich wedding gifts, stories, grudges, blood feuds. Through children, alliances were forged; through children, wrongs were avenged. To have a child was to set loose a force in the world. -- Margaret Atwood
To go through all that and give birth to a shredder: it wasn't a fine thought. We didn't know exactly what would happen to the babies that didn't get passed, that were declared Unbabies. But we knew they were put somewhere, quickly, away. -- Margaret Atwood
What is believed in society is not always the equivalent of what is true; but as regards to a woman's reputation, it amounts to the same thing. -- Margaret Atwood
Every month there is a moon, gigantic, round, heavy, an omen. IT transits, pauses, continues on and passes out of sight, and I see despair coming towards me like famine. To feel that empty, again, again. I listen to my heart, wave upon wave, salty and red, continuing on and on, marking time. -- Margaret Atwood
They thought he was only what they could see. A nice boy but a bit of a goof, a bit of a show-off. Not the brightest star in the universe; not a numbers person, but you couldn't have everything you wanted and at least he wasn't a total washout. -- Margaret Atwood
People change, though, especially after they are dead. -- Margaret Atwood
Only some, mind you, she said coyly, raising her index finger, waggling it at us. But they were Godless, and that can make all the difference, don't you agree? I -- Margaret Atwood
No wires tender even as nerves
can transmit the impact of
our seasons, our catastrophes
while we are closed inside them -- Margaret Atwood
You can't keep a cool head when you're drowning in love. You just thrash around a lot and scream, and wear yourself out. -- Margaret Atwood
This could be a college guest room, for the less distinguished visitors; or a room in a rooming house, of former times, for ladies in reduced circumstances. That is what we are now. The circumstances have been reduced; for those of us who still have circumstances. -- Margaret Atwood
Don't sit down in the middle of the woods. If you're lost in the plot or blocked, retrace your steps to where you went wrong. Then take the other road. And/or change the person. Change the tense. Change the opening page. -- Margaret Atwood
I don't think the relationship between novels and realities are one to one. Of course novels play different roles. It's essentially just a long narrative form. What you use that long narrative form for can be very different. -- Margaret Atwood
While I read, the Commander sits and watches me doing it, without speaking but also without taking his eyes off me. This watching is a curiously sexual act, and I feel undressed while he does it. -- Margaret Atwood
Without the protection of surliness and levity, all children would be crushed by the past - the past of others, loaded onto their shoulders. Selfishness is their saving grace. -- Margaret Atwood
It is spring, and the night wind
is moist with the smell of turned loam
and the early flowers;
the moon pours out its beauty
which you see as beauty finally,
warm and offering everything.
You have only to take. -- Margaret Atwood
What was the rationale for all this pillaging? Souvenirs. These people needed something to remember themselves by. An odd thing, souvenir-hunting: now becomes then even while it is still now. You don't really believe you're there, and so you nick the proof, or something you mistake for it. -- Margaret Atwood
Hey. Everyone's different," says Derek.
"But some are more different than others," says Budge, and they all laugh. -- Margaret Atwood
He came to understand why serial killers sent helpful clues to the police. His -- Margaret Atwood
Experiences were what you got when you couldn't get what you wanted. -- Margaret Atwood
Fiction is not necessarily about what you know, it's about how you feel. That is the truth about fiction, and the other truth is that all science is a tool, and we use our tools not to actualise what we know, but to implement how we feel. -- Margaret Atwood
When women let their hair down, it means either sexiness or craziness or death, the three by Victorian times having become virtually synonymous. -- Margaret Atwood
But if you happen to be a man, sometime in the future, and you've made it this far, please remember: you will never be subjected to the temptation of feeling you must forgive, a man, as a woman. -- Margaret Atwood
To them I must have seemed quaint, but I suppose it's everyone's fate to be reduced to quaintness by those younger than themselves. Unless there's blood on the floor, of course. War, pestilence, murder, any kind of ordeal or violence, that's what they respect. Blood means we were serious. -- Margaret Atwood
Some of our earliest writing, in cuneiform, was about who owes what. -- Margaret Atwood
It was true, I took too much for granted; I trusted fate, back then. -- Margaret Atwood
Oppression involves a failure of the imagination: the failure to imagine the full humanity of other human beings. -- Margaret Atwood
it, something naughty, secretive, forbidden, thrilling. It's like a spell, of sorts. It deflates them, reduces them to the common denominator where they can be dealt with. -- Margaret Atwood
The genres, it is thought, have other designs on us. They want to entertain, as opposed to rubbing our noses in the daily grit produced by the daily grind. Unhappily for realistic novelists, the larger reading public likes being entertained. -- Margaret Atwood
(...) and its crush of suited people, men and women both, all with the averted eyes and vacant faces of lifelong servants. People who see only what they're paid to see. -- Margaret Atwood
Even an obvious fabrication is some comfort when you have few others. -- Margaret Atwood
I tried for the longest time to find out what deconstructionism was. Nobody was able to explain it to me clearly. The best answer I got was from a writer, who said, 'Honey, it's bad news for you and me. -- Margaret Atwood
They are boiling with the pressured energy of explosive forces confined in a small space, and with the fervor of all religious movements in their early, purist stages. It is not enough to give lip service and to believe in equal pay: there has to be a conversion, from the heart. Or so they imply. -- Margaret Atwood
Is it real? No, it is not real. What is this not real? Not real can tell us about real. -- Margaret Atwood
You can only be jealous of someone who has something you think you ought to have yourself. -- Margaret Atwood
Is that all we are? he thinks. Unmistakable clothing, a hairstyle, a few exaggerated features, a gesture? - -- Margaret Atwood
I won't fatten them in cages, though. I won't ply them with poisoned fruit items. I won't change them into clockwork images or talking shadows. I won't drain out their life's blood. They can do all those things for themselves. -- Margaret Atwood
Canadians are fond of a good disaster, especially if it has ice, water, or snow in it. You thought the national flag was about a leaf, didn't you? Look harder. It's where someone got axed in the snow. -- Margaret Atwood
So much better to travel than to arrive. -- Margaret Atwood
Yes, they know her. They touch her lips, gather her words, fly away with the message, disappear into the dark. Pass through the membrane that separates this world from the unseen world that lies just underneath it. -- Margaret Atwood
Crankiness leads to bad outcomes, if you don't have any power to back up your crankiness. -- Margaret Atwood
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. -- Margaret Atwood
I said maybe I was too sad for the job: didn't they want a more upbeat personality in their girls? But Mordis smiled with his shiny black-ant eyes and said, as if he was patting me: Ren. Ren. Everyone's too sad for everything. -- Margaret Atwood
I am not mad because I'm a woman ... I'm mad because you're an asshole. -- Margaret Atwood
Oh Toby," says the Craker boy, "what sickness do -- Margaret Atwood
The priest was bribed; in addition to that, we appealed to his sense of compassion. Everyone likes to think they are doing good while at the same time pocketing a bag of cash, and our priest was no exception. -- Margaret Atwood
There were the garden shears, the knitting needles; the world is full of weapons if you're looking for them. I should have paid attention -- Margaret Atwood
The next few weeks were the worst he could remember. Too many things were coming back to him, too much of what he'd lost - or - sadder - had never had in the first place. All that wasted time, and he didn't even know who'd wasted it. -- Margaret Atwood
Art is what you can get away with, said somebody or other, which makes it sound like shoplifting or some other minor crime. And maybe that's all it ever was, or is: a kind of stealing. A hijacking of the visual. -- Margaret Atwood
He can't shake the feeling that this place is some sort of pyramid scheme, and that those who fail to understand that will be left empty-handed. But there's no obvious reason for this feeling of his. Maybe he's ungrateful by nature. -- Margaret Atwood
When a man is attacked in print, it's usually for saying what he says; when a woman is attacked in print, it's often for being who she is. -- Margaret Atwood
At this dim season of the year we hunger for such tales. Winter's tales, they are. We want to huddle round them, as if around a small but cheerful fire ... It was the right thing to do on the darkest day of the year. -- Margaret Atwood
Jack quit his advertising job and devoted himself to the life of the pen. Or rather, to the life of the Remington, soon to be replaced with an IBM Selectric, with the bouncing ball that let you change the typeface. Now that was cool! -- Margaret Atwood
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. -- Margaret Atwood
Maybe that's what love is, I thought: it's being pissed off. -- Margaret Atwood
Ed, knows power corrupts, they'll have experienced that first-hand. They'll see how I'd be tempted to use my own power for personal reasons. They may not approve of that, but they'll buy -- Margaret Atwood
She'd stepped out of sex as if out of a loose dress. Now she was brisk, decisive, no nonsense. -- Margaret Atwood
So now I imagine, among these Angels and their drained white brides, momentous grunts and sweating, damp furry encounters; or, better, ignominious failures, cocks like three-week-old carrots, anguished fumblings upon flesh cold and unresponding as uncooked fish. -- Margaret Atwood
Your friend is intellectually honourable," Jimmy's mother would say. "He doesn't lie to himself. -- Margaret Atwood
But hatred and viciousness are addictive. You can get high on them. Once you've had a little, you start shaking if you don't get more. -- Margaret Atwood
Anyway, maybe there weren't any solutions. Human society, corpses and rubble. It never learned, it made the same cretinous mistakes over and over, trading short-term gain for long-term pain. -- Margaret Atwood
I wish I had a pig ball. -- Margaret Atwood
Hunger is a powerful reorganizer of the conscience. -- Margaret Atwood
But what is a memorial, when you come right down to it, but a commemoration of wounds endured? Endured, and resented. Without memory, there can be no revenge. -- Margaret Atwood
Men and women are not "equal" if "equal" means "exactly the same." Our many puzzlements and indeed unhappinesses come from trying to figure out what the differences really mean, or should mean, or should not mean. -- Margaret Atwood
And consider: it is loss to which everything flows, absence in which everything flowers -- Margaret Atwood
This murdered girl troubles me. After the first shock, nobody at school says much about her. Even Cordelia does not want to talk about her. It's as if this girl has done something shameful, herself, by being murdered. -- Margaret Atwood
Come away with me, he said, we will live on a desert island. I said, I am a desert island. It was not what he had in mind. -- Margaret Atwood
I want everything back, the way it was. But there is no point to it, this wanting. -- Margaret Atwood
Later she will learn
about edges. Or better, find
by luck or a longer journey
the shadow of that liquid
gold place, which can be
so single and clear for her
only now, when it means danger
only to me. -- Margaret Atwood
Another friend of mine used to maintain that airplanes stayed up in the air only because people believed - against reason - that they could fly: without that collective delusion sustaining them, they would instantly plummet to earth. -- Margaret Atwood
You're not my real parents, every child has thought. I'm not your real child. But with orphans, it's true. What freedom, to thumb your nose authentically! -- Margaret Atwood
I didn't much like it, this grudge-holding against the past. -- Margaret Atwood
Language is not morally neutral because the human brain is not neutral in its desires. Neither is the dog brain. Neither is the bird brain: crows hate owls. We like some things and dislike others, we approve of some things and disapprove of others. Such is the nature of being an organism. -- Margaret Atwood
That is a reconstruction, too. -- Margaret Atwood
when I was still imaginary for him. Before we were married and I solidified. -- Margaret Atwood
It's strange to remember how we used to think, as if everything were available to us, as if there were no contingencies, no boundaries; as if we were free to shape and reshape forever the everexpanding perimeters of our lives. -- Margaret Atwood
If you want to be a writer, you should go into the largest library you can find and stand there contemplating the books that have been written. Then you should ask yourself, 'Do I really have anything to add?' If you have the arrogance or the humility to say yes, you will know you have the vocation. -- Margaret Atwood
Think of an adaptation, any adaptation, and some animal somewhere will have thought of it first. -- Margaret Atwood
Who cares, who cares. The perennial adolescent riposte. I cared, of course. I cared what people thought. I always did care. Unlike Laura, I have never had the courage of my convictions. -- Margaret Atwood
She's been a distraction for him, but not a necessity of life. More like a super-strong mint: intense while it lasted but quickly finished. -- Margaret Atwood
She wasn't stupid. She just didn't want to put her neuron power into long sentences. -- Margaret Atwood
Why do I hate her so much? Why do I care, in any way, what went on in her head? -- Margaret Atwood
Menopause. A pause while you reconsider men. -- Margaret Atwood
You can examine the whole 19th century from the point of view of who would have maxed out their credit cards. Emma Bovary would have maxed hers out. No question. Mr. Scrooge would not have. He would have snipped his up. -- Margaret Atwood
It must have been then that I began to lose faith in reasonable argument as the sole measure of truth. -- Margaret Atwood
I have long since decided if you wait for the perfect time to write, you'll never write. There is no time that isn't flawed somehow. -- Margaret Atwood
Florida's not the hick town you keep saying it is," says Reynolds. "Times have changed; they've got good universities now and a great book festival! Thousands of people come to it! -- Margaret Atwood
Oblivion was increasingly attractive, since why retain your brain when no amount of thinking could even begin to solve the problem? -- Margaret Atwood
You don't understand much, he says. Why do you think I was lost in the impenetrable forest in the first place? -- Margaret Atwood
She knows the rituals, she knows how we're supposed to be behaving ... But I think these things are impenetrable and fraudulent, and I can't do them without feeling I'm acting. -- Margaret Atwood
Another of those things that must be true because everyone else agrees they are, although they don't seem so to me. -- Margaret Atwood
Waste not want not. I am not being wasted. Why do I want? -- Margaret Atwood
My parents are like younger, urchinlike brothers and sisters whose faces are dirty and who blurt out humiliating things that can neither be anticipated nor controlled. I sigh and make the best of it. I feel I'm older than they are, much older. I feel ancient. -- Margaret Atwood
One and one and one and one doesn't equal four. Each one remains unique, there is no way of joining them together. They cannot be exchanged, one for the other. They cannot replace each other. -- Margaret Atwood
