Margaret Eleanor Atwood
Margaret Atwood is a Canadian poet, novelist, literary critic, essayist, teacher, environmental activist, and inventor. (Margaret Atwood Quotes)
“A bachelor, a studio, those were the names for that kind of apartment. Separate entrance it would say in the ads, and that meant you could have sex, unobserved.”
Margaret Atwood
The Handmaid’s Tale
“A bird of the air will carry the voice.”
Margaret Atwood
The Testaments
“A divorce is like an amputation, you survive but there’s less of you.”
Margaret Atwood
Surfacing
“A faithless preacher with a good manner and voice will always convert more than a limp-handed long-faced fool, no matter how godly.”
Margaret Atwood
Alias Grace
“A great fear came over me, and my body went entirely cold, and I stood as if paralyzed with fear; for I knew that the horse was no earthly horse, but the pale horse that will be sent at the Day of Reckoning, and the rider of it is Death; and it was Death himself who stood behind me, with his arms wrapped around me as tight as iron bands, and his lipless mouth kissing my neck as if in love. But as well as the horror, I also felt a strange longing.”
Margaret Atwood
Alias Grace
“A hot wind was blowing around my head, the strands of my hair lifting and swirling in it, like ink spilled in water.”
Margaret Atwood
The Blind Assassin
“A Log Cabin quilt is a thing every young woman should have before marriage, as it means the home; and there is always a red square at the centre, which means the hearth fire.”
Margaret Atwood
Alias Grace
“A man in a cloud, with icicle teeth and eyes of fire.”
Margaret Atwood
Lady Oracle
“A Paradox, the doughnut hole. Empty space, once, but now they’ve learned to market even that. A minus quantity; nothing, rendered edible. I wondered if they might be used-metaphorically, of course-to demonstrate the existence of God. Does naming a sphere of nothingness transmute it into being?”
Margaret Atwood
The Blind Assassin
“A place with no handholds, no landmarks, no past at all: That would have been too much like dying”
Margaret Atwood
Lady Oracle
“A prison does not only lock its inmates inside, it keeps all others out. Her strongest prison is of her own construction.”
Margaret Atwood
Alias Grace
“A profile used to mean a picture of somebody’s nose seen from the side, she wrote. Now it means the picture of somebody’s nose seen from the bottom.”
Margaret Atwood
Bodily Harm
“A rat in a maze is free to go anywhere, as long as it stays inside the maze.”
Margaret Atwood
The Handmaid’s Tale
“A sad pretty girl inspires the urge to console, unlike a sad old crone.”
Margaret Atwood
The Blind Assassin
“A wave of blood goes up to my head, my stomach shrinks together, as if something dangerous has just missed hitting me. It’s as if I’ve been caught stealing, or telling a lie; or as if I’ve heard other people talking about me, saying bad things about me, behind my back. There’s the same flush of shame, of guilt and terror, and of cold disgust with myself. But I don’t know where these feelings have come from, what I’ve done.”
Margaret Atwood
Cat’s Eye
“A woman like me is always a temptation, if possible to arrange it unobserved; as whatever we may say about it later, we will not be believed.”
Margaret Atwood
Alias Grace
“A writer’s age at the time of a work’s composition is never irrelevant.”
Margaret Atwood
In Other Worlds
“According to Tobias, women hang around longer because they’re less capable of indignation and better at being humiliated, for what is old age but one long string of indignities? What person of integrity would put up with it?”
Margaret Atwood
Stone Mattress
“After everything that’s happened, how can the world still be so beautiful? Because it is.”
Margaret Atwood
Oryx and Crake
“After he had listened to the telephone commercial he scratched the hair on his chest thoughtfully and gave the sort of enthusiastic response for which a whole seminary of admen had no doubt been offering daily prayers.”
Margaret Atwood
The Edible Woman
“After we’re gone the work of our knives will survive us.”
Margaret Atwood
Dearly
“All fathers except mine are invisible in daytime; daytime is ruled by mothers. But fathers come out at night. Darkness brings home the fathers, with their real, unspeakable power. There is more to them than meets the eye.”
Margaret Atwood
Cat’s Eye
“All I can hope for is a reconstruction: the way love feels is always only approximate.”
Margaret Atwood
The Handmaid’s Tale
“All myths are stories, but not all stories are myths: among stories, myths hold a special place.”
Margaret Atwood
In Other Worlds
“All of these men are thinking mostly about ruling and rulers. Who should rule, and how. Who should have power, how they should get it, and how they should use it.”
Margaret Atwood
Hag-Seed
“All she wants is for both of them to be different. Not very different, a little would do it. Same molecules, different arrangement. All she wants is a miracle, because anything else is hopeless.”
Margaret Atwood
Life Before Man
“All stories are about wolves. All worth repeating, that is. Anything else is sentimental drivel.”
Margaret Atwood
The Blind Assassin
“All that was necessary was a law degree and a uterus: a lethal combination.”
Margaret Atwood
The Testaments
“All those years you were my lifeline, she wants to say. But doesn’t.”
Margaret Atwood
MaddAddam
“Also we must be a beacon of hope, because if you tell people there’s nothing they can do, they will do worse than nothing.”
Margaret Atwood
The Year of the Flood
“Also, if a man takes pride in his disguise skills, it would be a foolish wife who would claim to recognise him: it’s always an imprudence to step between a man and the reflection of his own cleverness.”
Margaret Atwood
The Penelopiad
“Amazing how quickly the past becomes idyllic.”
Margaret Atwood
MaddAddam
“An unearned income encourages self-pity in those already prone to it.”
Margaret Atwood
The Blind Assassin
“And he couldn’t stand to be nothing, to know himself to be nothing. He needs to be listened to, he needs to be heard. He needs at least the illusion of being understood.”
Margaret Atwood
Oryx and Crake
“And how easily a hand becomes a fist.”
Margaret Atwood
The Testaments
“And I wondered what would become of me, and comforted myself that in a hundred years I would be dead and at peace, and in my grave; and I thought it might be less trouble altogether, to be in it a good deal sooner than that.”
Margaret Atwood
Alias Grace
“And once you’ve got clocks, you’ve got death and dead people, because time, as we know, runs on, and then it runs out, and dead people are situated outside of time, whereas living people are still immersed in it.”
Margaret Atwood
Negotiating with the Dead
“And so they continue, in a straight line that takes them over the Atlantic and past the curvature of the earth, out through the moon’s orbit and into the dark reaches beyond.”
Margaret Atwood
Bluebeard’s Egg
“And then she began to cry, and when I asked her why she was doing that, she said it was because I was to have a happy ending, and it was just like a book; and I wondered what books she’d been reading.”
Margaret Atwood
Alias Grace
“And there we were, in a kind of harmony; and the evening was so beautiful, that it made a pain in my heart, as when you cannot tell whether you are happy or sad; and I thought that if I could have a wish, it would be that nothing would ever change, and we could stay that way forever.”
Margaret Atwood
Alias Grace
“And yet it disturbs me to learn I have hurt someone unintentionally. I want all my hurts to be intentional.” (Margaret Atwood Quotes)
Margaret Atwood
Cat’s Eye
“Another belief of mine: that everyone else my age is an adult, whereas I am merely in disguise.”
Margaret Atwood
Cat’s Eye
“Another thing about myths: they gather in and circumscribe their target audience. They make a collection into a collective.”
Margaret Atwood
In Other Worlds
“Any forced change of leadership is always followed by a move to crush the opposition. The opposition is led by the educated, so the educated are the first to be eliminated.”
Margaret Atwood
The Testaments
“Art is long and life is brief and mortality looms.”
Margaret Atwood
The Robber Bride
“Art was a kind of demonic possession. Art would dance you to death. It would move in and take you over, and then destroy you.”
Margaret Atwood
Negotiating with the Dead
“As a child I learned three things well: how to be quiet, what not to say, and how to look at things without touching them. When I think of that house I think of the objects and silences. The silences of that house were almost visible; I pictured them as grey, hanging in the air like smoke. I learned to listen for what wasn’t being said, because it was usually more important than what was. My grandmother was the best at silences. According to her, it was bad manners to ask direct questions.”
Margaret Atwood
Bodily Harm
“As all historians know, the past is a great darkness, and filled with echoes. Voices may reach us from it; but what they say to us is imbued with the obscurity of the matrix out of which they come; and try as we may, we cannot always decipher them precisely in the clearer light of our day.”
Margaret Atwood
The Handmaid’s Tale
“As any bank robber can tell you (Nell would say), the best thing to do when running away is not to run. Just walk. Just stroll. A combination of ease and purposefulness is desirable. Then no one will notice you’re running. In addition to which, don’t carry heavy suitcases, or canvas bags full of money, or packsacks with body parts in them. Leave everything behind you except what’s in your pockets. Lightest is best.”
Margaret Atwood
Moral Disorder and Other Stories
“As Charles Darwin said, ‘The economy shown by Nature in her resources is striking,” says the Spirit. ‘All wealth comes from Nature. Without it, there wouldn’t be any economics. The primary wealth is food, not money. Therefore anything that concerns the handling of the land also concerns me.”
Margaret Atwood
Payback
“As for Nate, it’s simple. All she wants is for both of them to be different. Not very different, a little would do it. Same molecules, different arrangement. All she wants is a miracle, because anything else is hopeless.”
Margaret Atwood
Life Before Man
“As Marilyn Monroe is rumoured to have said, ‘If you’re nobody you-can’t be somebody unless you’re somebody else.”
Margaret Atwood
Negotiating with the Dead
“As the old joke goes, Christianity, great religion, just never been tried.”
Margaret Atwood
Payback
“As they say, history does not repeat itself, but it rhymes.”
Margaret Atwood
The Testaments
“As with all knowledge, once you knew it, you couldn’t imagine how it was that you hadn’t known it before. Like stage magic, knowledge before you knew it took place before your very eyes, but you were looking elsewhere.”
Margaret Atwood
The Year of the Flood
“At first I was given centuries to wait in caves, in leather tents, knowing you would never come back”
Margaret Atwood
Power Politics
“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 Handmaid’s Tale
“At some indeterminate point in their life cycles, they cause themselves to be placed in artificial stone or wooden cocoons, or chrysalises. They have an idea that they will someday emerge from these in an altered state, which they symbolize with carvings of themselves with wings. However, we did not observe that any had actually done so.”
Margaret Atwood
Good Bones
“Because citizens were always a bit like inmates and inmates were always a bit like citizens, so Consilience and Positron have only made it official.”
Margaret Atwood
The Heart Goes Last
“Because if you weren’t an Aunt or a Martha, said Aunt Vidala, what earthly use were you if you didn’t have a baby?”
Margaret Atwood
The Testaments
“Because you are never here
Margaret Atwood
but always there, I forget
not you but what you look like
You drift down the street
in the rain, your face
dissolving, changing shape, the colours
running together
My walls absorb
you, breathe you forth
again, you resume
yourself, I do not recognize you
You rest on the bed
watching me watching
you, we will never know
each other any better
than we do now”
Power Politics
“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
Alias Grace
“Beginnings are sudden, but also insidious. They creep up on you sideways, they keep to the shadows, they lurk unrecognized. Then, later, they spring.”
Margaret Atwood
The Blind Assassin
“Being able to read and write did not provide answers to all questions. It led to other questions, and then to others.”
Margaret Atwood
The Testaments
“Being socially retarded is like being mentally retarded, it arouses in others disgust and pity and the desire to torment and reform.”
Margaret Atwood
Surfacing
“Below me, in the foundations of the house, I could hear the clothes I’d buried there growing themselves a body.”
Margaret Atwood
Lady Oracle
“Besides, who would think of marrying a mothball? A question my mother put to me often, later, in other forms.”
Margaret Atwood
Lady Oracle
“Better never means better for everyone… It always means worse, for some.”
Margaret Atwood
The Handmaid’s Tale
“Better not to invent her in her absence. Better to wait until she’s actually here. Then he can make her up as she goes along.”
Margaret Atwood
The Blind Assassin
“Between the living and the dead. They carried the Word made air.”
Margaret Atwood
The Year of the Flood
“Blood is thinner than money.”
Margaret Atwood
MaddAddam
“Books and characters in books, pictures and elements in pictures—they all have families and ancestors, just like people.”
Margaret Atwood
In Other Worlds
“Both grandmothers spoke as if they personally had been through the war, had been gassed, raped, run through with bayonets, shot, starved, bombed and cremated, and had by a miracle survived; which wasn’t true.”
Margaret Atwood
Life Before Man
“Breasts were one thing: they were in front, where you could have some control over them. Then there were bums, which were behind, and out of sight, and thus more lawless. Apart from loosely gathered skirts, nothing much could be done about them.”
Margaret Atwood
Moral Disorder and Other Stories
“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
Good Bones
“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
MaddAddam
“But how can she ever get out of it, her life, except through him?”
Margaret Atwood
The Blind Assassin
“But how can you have a sense of wonder if you’re prepared for everything?”
Margaret Atwood
Stone Mattress
“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
Cat’s Eye
“But in an account such as this, it is better to be scrupulous about your faults, as about all your other actions. Otherwise no one will understand why you made the decisions that you made.” (Margaret Atwood Quotes)
Margaret Atwood
The Testaments
“But it can put a lot of pressure on a person to be told they need to be strong.”
Margaret Atwood
The Testaments
“But it seems she’d wanted children after all, because when she was told she’d been accidentally sterilized she could feel all the light leaking out of her.”
Margaret Atwood
The Year of the Flood
“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
Lady Oracle
“But maybe he was destructive by nature since he messed up every girl he touched”
Margaret Atwood
The Year of the Flood
“But mostly she likes the fact that there’s a reason for every death, and only one murderer at a time, and things get figured out at the end, and the murderer always gets caught.”
Margaret Atwood
The Robber Bride
“But remember that forgiveness too is a power. To beg for it is a power, and to withhold or bestow it is a power, perhaps the greatest. Maybe none of this is about control. Maybe it isn’t really about who can own whom, who can do what to whom and get away with it, even as far as death. Maybe it isn’t about who can sit and who has to kneel or stand or lie down, legs spread open. Maybe it’s about who can do what to whom and be forgiven for it. Never tell me it amounts to the same thing.”
Margaret Atwood
The Handmaid’s Tale
“But something had shifted, some balance. I felt shrunken, so that when he put his arms around me, gathering me up, I was as small as a doll. I felt love going forward without me.”
Margaret Atwood
The Handmaid’s Tale
“But what if she discovers the truth? What he suspects is the truth. That he’s patchwork, a tin man, his heart stuffed with sawdust. He thinks of her waiting for him, somewhere else, an island, subtropical, not muggy, her long hair waving in the sea breeze, a red hibiscus tucked behind one ear. If he’s lucky she’ll wait till that happens, till he can get there to be with her.”
Margaret Atwood
Life Before Man
“But whatever his reaction is, she knows her final decision will not be based on it. Nate has been displaced, if only slightly, from the center of the universe.”
Margaret Atwood
Life Before Man
“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
The Handmaid’s Tale
“But why bother about the end of the world? It’s the end of the world every day, for someone. Time rises and rises, and when it reaches the level of your eyes you drown.”
Margaret Atwood
The Blind Assassin
“By contrast, no one in Alphinland ever demanded a blowjob. But then, no one in Alphinland had a toilet either. Toilets weren’t necessary. Why waste time on that kind of routine bodily function when there were giant scorpions invading the castle?”
Margaret Atwood
Stone Mattress
“By now you must have guessed: I come from another planet. But I will never say to you, ‘Take me to your leaders.’ Instead I will say, ‘Take me to your trees. Take me to your breakfasts, your sunsets, your bad dreams, your shoes, your nouns. Take me to your fingers; take me to your deaths.’ These are worth it. These are what I have come for.”
Margaret Atwood
Stone Mattress
“By telling you anything at all I’m at least believing in you, believe you’re there, I believe you into being. Because I’m telling you this story I will your existence. I tell, therefore you are. So I will go on. So I will myself to go on.”
Margaret Atwood
The Handmaid’s Tale
“By the time he got around to meaning it, the words had sounded fraudulent to him and he’d been afraid to pronounce them.”
Margaret Atwood
Oryx and Crake
“By the time she was sixteen, Jane had heard enough about this to last her several lifetimes. In her mother’s account of the way things were, you were young briefly and then you fell. You plummeted downwards like an overripe apple and hit the ground with a squash; you fell, and everything about you fell too. You got fallen arches and a fallen womb, and your hair and teeth fell out. That’s what having a baby did to you. It subjected you to the force of gravity.”
Margaret Atwood
Wilderness Tips
“Can a single ant be said to be alive, in any meaningful sense of the word, or does it only have relevance in terms of its anthill?”
Margaret Atwood
Oryx and Crake
“Canlit might not exert the fascination of – say – a venereal wart.”
Margaret Atwood
Survival
“Change and decay in all around I see,’ she said, smiling in a way he did not like at all. ‘I’m not prepared for eternity.”
Margaret Atwood
Wilderness Tips
“Chemistry can be like magic. It can be merciless.”
Margaret Atwood
The Heart Goes Last
“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
The Penelopiad
“China does not exist. Nevertheless, she longs to be there.”
Margaret Atwood
Life Before Man
“Cleverness is a quality a man likes to have in his wife as long as she is some distance away from him. Up close, he’ll take kindness any day of the week, if there’s nothing more alluring to be had.”
Margaret Atwood
The Penelopiad
“Confronted by too much emptiness, said Adam One, the brain invents. Loneliness creates company as thirst creates water. How many sailors have been wrecked in pursuit of islands that were merely a shimmering?”
Margaret Atwood
The Year of the Flood
“Congratulations on a good outcome! We’ve all been rooting for you.” Charmaine wonders who’s been doing the rooting, because she hasn’t noticed anyone. But like so many things around here, maybe the rooting has taken place behind the scenes.”
Margaret Atwood
The Heart Goes Last
“Considering that the whole point of Consilience is for things to run smoothly, with happy citizens, or are they inmates? Both, to be honest. Because citizens were always a bit like inmates and inmates were always a bit like citizens, so Consilience and Positron have only made it official.”
Margaret Atwood
The Heart Goes Last
“Craziness was considered funny, like all other things that were in reality frightening and profoundly shameful.”
Margaret Atwood
Cat’s Eye
“Creating some god for one’s inspirations was always a good way to avoid accusations of pride should the scheme succeed, as well as the blame if did not.”
Margaret Atwood
The Penelopiad
“Daniel, who at this point was still Dr. Luoma, looked at her as if he was disappointed in her: other women no doubt said similar things. This embarrassed her, since even such a short time ago she still assumed she was unique.”
Margaret Atwood
Bodily Harm
“David is slipping into his yokel dialect; he does it for fun, it’s a parody of himself, the way he says he talked back in the fifties when he wanted to be a minister and was selling Bibles door to door to put himself through theological seminary”
Margaret Atwood
Surfacing
“Dead was not an absolute concept to her. Some people were more dead than others, and finally it was a matter of opinion who was dead and who was alive, so it was best not to discuss such a thing.”
Margaret Atwood
Moral Disorder and Other Stories
“Death is much too high a price to pay for the satisfaction of curiosity, needless to say.”
Margaret Atwood
The Penelopiad
“Despite all that she did for me, Melanie had a distant smell. She smelled like a floral guest soap in a strange house I was visiting.”
Margaret Atwood
The Testaments
“Don’t cry anymore, she tells herself. Just do one thing at a time. Get from hour to hour and day to day like a frog jumping on lily pads.”
Margaret Atwood
The Heart Goes Last
“Don’t let the bastards grind you down.”
Margaret Atwood
The Handmaid’s Tale
“Don’t misunderstand me. I am not scoffing at goodness, which is far more difficult to explain than evil, and far more complicated. But sometimes it’s hard to put up with.”
Margaret Atwood
The Blind Assassin
“Even an obvious fabrication is some comfort when you have few others.”
Margaret Atwood
The Penelopiad
“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
Oryx and Crake
“Every ending is arbitrary, because the end is where you write The end. A period, a dot of punctuation, a point of stasis. A pinprick in the paper: you could put your eye to it and see through, to the other side, to the beginning of something else. Or, as Tony says to her students, Time is not a solid, like wood, but a fluid, like water or the wind. It doesn’t come neatly cut into even-sized length, into decades and centuries. Nevertheless, for our purposes we have to pretend it does. The end of any history is a lie in which we all agree to conspire.”
Margaret Atwood
The Robber Bride
“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
The Handmaid’s Tale
“Everyone has to be somewhere, and this is where Lucy is. She is in Lois’s apartment, in the holes that open inwards on the wall, not like windows but like doors. She is here. She is entirely alive.”
Margaret Atwood
Wilderness Tips
“Everyone likes to think they are doing good while at the same time pocketing a bag of cash”
Margaret Atwood
Stone Mattress
“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
Dancing Girls and Other Stories
“Everything is post these days, as if we’re all just a footnote to something earlier that was real enough to have a name of its own.”
Margaret Atwood
Cat’s Eye
“Experiences were what you got when you couldn’t get what you wanted.”
Margaret Atwood
Stone Mattress
“Extreme good, extreme evil: the abilities required are similar.”
Margaret Atwood
The Robber Bride
“Farewells can be shattering, but returns are surely worse. Solid flesh can never live up to the bright shadow cast by its absence. Time and distance blur the edges; then suddenly the beloved has arrived, and it’s noon with its merciless light, and every spot and pore and wrinkle and bristle stands clear.”
Margaret Atwood
The Blind Assassin
“First the leaders and the led, then the tyrants and the slaves, then the massacres. That’s how it’s always gone.”
Margaret Atwood
Oryx and Crake
“For an instant she felt them, their identities, almost their substance, pass over her head like a wave. At some time she would be — or no, already she was like that too; she was one of them, her body the same, identical, merged with that other flesh that choked the air in the flowered room with its sweet organic scent; she felt suffocated by this thick sargasso-sea of femininity.” (Margaret Atwood Quotes)
Margaret Atwood
The Edible Woman
“For if the world treats you well, Sir, you come to believe you are deserving of it.”
Margaret Atwood
Alias Grace
“Forbidden things are open to the imagination.”
Margaret Atwood
The Testaments
“Forced to chose between one irascible tyrant and another, Laura had chosen the one which was greater, and also further away.”
Margaret Atwood
The Blind Assassin
“Forgiving men is so much easier than forgiving women.”
Margaret Atwood
Cat’s Eye
“Four angels standing round my bed, Two to feet and two to head; One to watch and one to pray, And two to carry my soul away.”
Margaret Atwood
The Testaments
“From any rational point of view I am absurd; but there are no longer any rational points of view.”
Margaret Atwood
Surfacing
“From this distance it does resemble fun. Fun is not knowing how it will end.”
Margaret Atwood
Stone Mattress
“Genius is an infinite capacity for causing pain.”
Margaret Atwood
The Robber Bride
“Ger says that Kat has a tendency to push things to extremes, to go over the edge, merely from a juvenile desire to shock, which is hardly a substitute for wit. One of these days, he says, she will go way too far. Too far for him, is what he means.”
Margaret Atwood
Wilderness Tips
“Giving up was the new normal, and I have to say it was catching.”
Margaret Atwood
The Testaments
“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
The Year of the Flood
“Gone mad is what they say, and sometimes Run mad, as if mad is a different direction, like west; as if mad is a different house you could step into, or a separate country entirely. But when you go mad you don’t go any other place, you stay where you are. And somebody else comes in.”
Margaret Atwood
Alias Grace
“Happiness is a garden walled with glass: there’s no way in or out. In Paradise there are no stories, because there are no journeys. It’s loss and regret and misery and yearning that drive the story forward, along its twisted road.”
Margaret Atwood
The Blind Assassin
“Happy endings are best achieved by keeping the right doors locked”
Margaret Atwood
The Penelopiad
“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
Cat’s Eye
“He doesn’t understand yet that guilt comes to you not from the things you’ve done, but from the things that others have done to you.”
Margaret Atwood
Alias Grace
“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
Oryx and Crake
“He got his driver’s license, he got his high school diploma, he got his university degree. He got a worried little furrow between his eyes. He did what he thought was expected of him, and brought the official pieces of paper home to her like a cat bringing dead mice. Now it’s as if he’s given up because he doesn’t know what else to bring; he’s run out of ideas.”
Margaret Atwood
The Robber Bride
“He loved her; in some ways he was devoted to her. But he couldn’t reach her, and it was the same on her side. It was as if they’d drunk some fatal potion that would keep them forever apart, even though they lived in the same house, ate at the same table, slept in the same bed.”
Margaret Atwood
The Blind Assassin
“He smiles most of the time and has eyes that the naive might think of as candid.”
Margaret Atwood
Murder in the Dark
“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
Surfacing
“He thought Rennie knew things she didn’t know but ought to; he thought she lived in the real world. It pleased him to believe this, and Rennie wanted him to be pleased, she liked to amuse him, though she was afraid that sooner or later he would decide that the things she knew weren’t really worth knowing.”
Margaret Atwood
Bodily Harm
“He wants to see, he wants to know, only to see and know. I’m aware that it is this mentality, this curiosity, which is responsible for the hydrogen bomb and the imminent demise of civilization and that we would all be better off if we were still at the stone-worshipping stage. Though surely it is not this affable inquisitiveness that should be blamed.”
Margaret Atwood
Bluebeard’s Egg
“He was twisted as a pretzel, he was a tinfoil-halo shitnosed frogstomping king rat asshole, but he wasn’t stupid.”
Margaret Atwood
MaddAddam
“He will exist for her at least, he will be created by her, he will have a place in her mythology after all.”
Margaret Atwood
Wilderness Tips
“He would like to get out of his own body for a while; he’d like to be somebody else.”
Margaret Atwood
Wilderness Tips
“He’d developed a strangely tender feeling towards such words, as if they were children abandoned in the woods and it was his duty to rescue them.”
Margaret Atwood
Oryx and Crake
“He’s a carnivore, you’re a vegetarian. That’s what you have to get over.”
Margaret Atwood
Murder in the Dark
“Heaven, for the Presbyterians, must resemble a banking establishment, with each soul tagged and docketed, and placed in the appropriate pigeonhole.”
Margaret Atwood
Alias Grace
“He’d wanted us to be more like boys, and now we were. You don’t teach boys to be charming. It makes people think they are devious.”
Margaret Atwood
The Blind Assassin
“Help is what they offer but gratitude is what they want, they roll around in it like cats in the catnip.”
Margaret Atwood
Alias Grace
“Her house is not perfect; parts of it are in fact crumbling, most noticeably the front porch. But it’s a wonder that she has a house at all, that she’s managed to accomplish a house. Despite the wreckage. She’s built a dwelling over the abyss, but where else was there to build it? So far, it stands.”
Margaret Atwood
Life Before Man
“Her life began to seem long. Her adrenalin was running out. Soon she would be thirty, and all she could see ahead was more of the same.”
Margaret Atwood
Wilderness Tips
“Her metaphors for her children included barnacles encrusting a ship and limpets clinging to a rock.”
Margaret Atwood
The Edible Woman
“Her own life is placid and satisfactory, but there is nothing much that can be said about happiness.”
Margaret Atwood
Wilderness Tips
“Here comes his hand, planing slowly across the white tablecloth like a manta ray in one of those deep-sea documentaries. It’s descending onto her own hand, which she shouldn’t have left so carelessly lying around on the table.”
Margaret Atwood
The Heart Goes Last
“His generation believed that if there was trouble all you’d have to do was shoot someone and then it would be okay.”
Margaret Atwood
The Year of the Flood
“His view of the world featured swift disasters set against a background of lurking doom, my cooking did nothing to contradict it.”
Margaret Atwood
Lady Oracle
“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
The Journals of Susanna Moodie
“How can I have behaved so badly, so cruelly, so stupidly? You will ask. You yourself would never have done such things! But you yourself will never have had to.”
Margaret Atwood
The Testaments
“How could I be sleeping with this particular man. Surely only true love could justify my lack of taste.”
Margaret Atwood
Lady Oracle
“How could I have been so ignorant? she thinks. So stupid, so unseeing, so given over to carelessness. But without such ignorance, such carelessness, how could we live? If you knew what was going to happen, if you knew everything that was going to happen next—if you knew in advance the consequences of your own actions—you’d be doomed. You’d be as ruined as God. You’d be a stone. You’d never eat or drink or laugh or get out of bed in the morning. You’d never love anyone, ever again. You’d never dare to.”
Margaret Atwood
The Blind Assassin
“How dare she show herself to be everything he was so annoyed with her for not being?”
Margaret Atwood
The Heart Goes Last
“How did she end up in this madhouse? By putting one foot in front of the other and never taking her eyes off her feet. You could end up anywhere that way.”
Margaret Atwood
Bluebeard’s Egg
“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
The Robber Bride
“How soon before there are ancient texts they feel they have to obey but have forgotten how to interpret?”
Margaret Atwood
MaddAddam
“How strange to remember typewriters, with their jammed keys and snarled ribbons and the smudgy carbon paper for copies.”
Margaret Atwood
Stone Mattress
“How tedious is a tyranny in the throes of enactment. It’s always the same plot.”
Margaret Atwood
The Testaments
“Human understanding is fallible, and we see through a glass, darkly. Any religion is a shadow of God. But the shadows of God are not God.”
Margaret Atwood
The Year of the Flood
“I always made dough men, I never made dough women, because after they were baked I would eat them, and that made me feel I had a secret power over men. It was becoming clear to me that, despite the urges Aunt Vidala said I aroused in them, I had no power over them otherwise.”
Margaret Atwood
The Testaments
“I always remembered what she looked like, the dried apple face, the silvery gray hair, the snapping blue eyes.”
Margaret Atwood
Lady Oracle
“I always thought eating was a ridiculous activity anyway. I’d get out of it myself if I could, though you’ve got to do it to stay alive, they tell me.”
Margaret Atwood
The Edible Woman
“I am afraid of falling into hopeless despair, over my wasted life, and I am still not sure how it happened.”
Margaret Atwood
Alias Grace
“I am like a room where things once happened and now nothing does, except the pollen of the weeds that grow up outside the window, blowing in as dust across the floor.” (Margaret Atwood Quotes)
Margaret Atwood
The Handmaid’s Tale
“I am not your justification for existence.”
Margaret Atwood
The Handmaid’s Tale
“I am tempted to think that to be despised by her sex is a very great compliment to a woman.”
Margaret Atwood
The Penelopiad
“I avoid looking down at my body, not so much because it’s shameful or immodest but because I don’t want to see it. I don’t want to look at something that determines me so completely.”
Margaret Atwood
The Handmaid’s Tale
“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
The Handmaid’s Tale
“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
The Edible Woman
“I can’t believe in my own sadness, I can’t take it seriously. I watch myself crying in the mirror, intrigued by the sight of tears.”
Margaret Atwood
Cat’s Eye
“I could see how you could do extreme things for the person you loved. Adam One said that when you loved a person, that love might not always get returned the way you wanted, but it was a good thing anyway because love went out all around you like an energy wave, and a creature you didn’t know would be helped by it.”
Margaret Atwood
The Year of the Flood
“I decided she was naive. I was the age at which parents suddenly transform from people who know everything into people who know nothing.”
Margaret Atwood
The Testaments
“I did not give him a straight answer, because saying what you really want out loud brings bad luck, and then the good thing will never happen. It might not happen anyway, but just to make sure, you should be careful about saying what you want or even wanting anything, as you may be punished for it.”
Margaret Atwood
Alias Grace
“I did not know how to paint or even what to paint, but I knew I had to begin.”
Margaret Atwood
Cat’s Eye
“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
Lady Oracle
“I don’t remember that school day much, because why would I? It was normal. Normal is like looking out a car window. Things pass by, this and that and this and that, without much significance. You don’t register such hours; they’re habitual, like brushing your teeth.”
Margaret Atwood
The Testaments
“I don’t want to look at something that determines me so completely.”
Margaret Atwood
The Handmaid’s Tale
“I don’t want to see anyone. I lie in the bedroom with the curtains drawn and nothingness washing over me like a sluggish wave. Whatever is happening to me is my own fault. I have done something wrong, something so huge I can’t even see it, something that’s drowning me. I am inadequate and stupid, without worth. I might as well be dead.”
Margaret Atwood
Cat’s Eye
“I feel angry. I’m not proud of myself for this, or for any of it. But then, that’s the point.”
Margaret Atwood
The Handmaid’s Tale
“I felt confused, and also inadequate; whatever he was asking or demanding, it was beyond me. this was the first time a man would expect more from me than i was capable of giving, but it wouldn’t be the last.”
Margaret Atwood
The Blind Assassin
“I felt that would be the best way to live, in a floating house carrying everything you needed with you and some other people you liked; when you wanted to move somewhere else it would be easy.”
Margaret Atwood
Surfacing
“I got a reputation for being absentminded, which Arthur’s friends found endearing. Soon it was expected of me, and I added it to my repertoire of deficiencies.”
Margaret Atwood
Lady Oracle
“I had a boyfriend once who sent me in a plastic bag, so it wouldn’t drip a real cow’s heart with a real arrow stuck through it. As you may divine, he knew I was interested in poetry.”
Margaret Atwood
Negotiating with the Dead
“I have failed once again to fulfill the expectations of others, which have become my own.”
Margaret Atwood
The Handmaid’s Tale
“I have them, these attacks of the past, like faintness, a wave sweeping over my head.”
Margaret Atwood
The Handmaid’s Tale
“I have to be more careful about my memories, I have to be sure they’re my own and not the memories of other people telling me what I felt, how I acted, what I said: if the events are wrong the feelings I remember about them will be wrong too, I’ll start inventing them and there will be no way of correcting it, the ones who could help are gone.”
Margaret Atwood
Surfacing
“I knew what love was supposed to be: obsession with undertones of nausea.”
Margaret Atwood
Cat’s Eye
“I know I was alright on Friday when I got up; if anything I was feeling more stolid than usual.”
Margaret Atwood
The Edible Woman
“I know why there is no glass, in front of the watercolor picture of blue irises, and why the window opens only partly and why the glass in it is shatter-proof. It isn’t running away they’re afraid of. We wouldn’t get far. It’s those other escapes, the ones you can open in yourself, given a cutting edge.”
Margaret Atwood
The Handmaid’s Tale
“I lie on the floor, washed by nothing and hanging on. I cry at night. I am afraid of hearing voices, or a voice. I have come to the edge, of the land. I could get pushed over.”
Margaret Atwood
Cat’s Eye
“I longed for the simplicity of that world, where happiness was possible and wounds were only ritual ones. Why had I been closed out from that impossible white paradise where love was as final as death, and banished to this other place where everything changed and shifted?”
Margaret Atwood
Lady Oracle
“I look up at the ceiling, tracing the foliage of the wreath. Today it makes me think of a hat, the large-brimmed hats women used to wear at some period during the old days: hats like enormous halos, festooned with fruit and flowers, and the feathers of exotic birds; hats like an idea of paradise, floating just above the head, a thought solidified.”
Margaret Atwood
The Handmaid’s Tale
“I made choices, and then, having made them, I had fewer choices.”
Margaret Atwood
The Testaments
“I must admit it’s a surprise to find myself still here, still talking to you. I prefer to think of it as talking, although of course it isn’t: I’m saying nothing, you’re hearing nothing. The only thing between us is this black line: a thread thrown onto the empty page, into the empty air.”
Margaret Atwood
The Blind Assassin
“I no longer think that anything can happen. I no longer want to think that way. Happen is what you wait for, not what you do; and anything is a large category.”
Margaret Atwood
Wilderness Tips
“I planned my death carefully, unlike my life, which meandered along from one thing to another, despite my feeble attempts to control it.”
Margaret Atwood
Lady Oracle
“I planted him in this country like a flag”
Margaret Atwood
The Journals of Susanna Moodie
“I remember thinking when the girls were born, first one and then the other, that I should have had sons and not daughters. I didn’t feel up to daughters, I didn’t know how they worked. I must have been afraid of hating them. With sons I would have known what to do.”
Margaret Atwood
Cat’s Eye
“I sang out the words unflinchingly though, as I stomped around the toadstool in clouds of church-basement dust, with a damp Gnome hand clutched in each of mine.”
Margaret Atwood
Lady Oracle
“I see that there will be no end to imperfection, or to doing things the wrong way. Even if you grow up, no matter how hard you scrub, whatever you do, there will always be some other stain or spot on your face or stupid act, somebody frowning.” (Margaret Atwood Quotes)
Margaret Atwood
Cat’s Eye
“I should have known better than to rely on pills. You can’t buy unconsciousness quite so cheaply.”
Margaret Atwood
The Blind Assassin
“I smile a forgiving smile. The real truth is that I was sneakier than my brother, and got caught less often. No front-line charges into enemy machine-gun nests for me, if they could be at all avoided. My own solitary acts of wickedness were devious and well concealed; it was only in partnership with my brother that I would throw caution to the winds.”
Margaret Atwood
Bluebeard’s Egg
“I stand holding the apple in both hands. It feels precious, like a heavy treasure. I lift it up and smell it. It has such an odour of outdoors on it I want to cry.”
Margaret Atwood
Alias Grace
“I suppose it’s everyone’s fate to be reduced to quaintness by those younger than themselves.”
Margaret Atwood
The Blind Assassin
“I thought everyone would be familiar with this figure: if I’d studied a thing in school I assumed it was general knowledge. I hadn’t yet discovered that I lived in a sort of transparent balloon, drifting over the world without making much contact with it, and that the people I knew appeared to me at a different angle from the one at which they appeared to themselves; and that the reverse was also true. I was smaller to others, up there in my balloon, than I was to myself. I was also blurrier.”
Margaret Atwood
Moral Disorder and Other Stories
“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 Blind Assassin
“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
Moral Disorder and Other Stories
“I thought, men who changed their names were likely to be con-men, criminals, undercover agents or magicians, whereas women who changed their names were probably just married.”
Margaret Atwood
Lady Oracle
“I tried to visualize my jealousy as a yellowy-brown cloud boiling around inside me, then going out through my nose like smoke and turning into a stone and falling down into the ground. That did work a little. But in my visualization a plant covered with poison berries would grow out of the stone, whether I wanted it to or not.”
Margaret Atwood
The Year of the Flood
“I used to think of my body as an instrument, of pleasure, or a means of transportation, or an implement for the accomplishment of my will.”
Margaret Atwood
The Handmaid’s Tale
“I want everything back, the way it was. But there is no point to it, this wanting.”
Margaret Atwood
The Handmaid’s Tale
“I want my father to be just my father, the way he has always been, not a separate person with an earlier, mythological life of his own. Knowing too much about other people puts you in their power, they have a claim on you, you are forced to understand their reasons for doing things and then you are weakened.”
Margaret Atwood
Cat’s Eye
“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
The Handmaid’s Tale
“I wanted happy endings in those days, and happy endings are best achieved by keeping the right doors locked and going to sleep during the rampages.”
Margaret Atwood
The Penelopiad
“I wanted to forget the past, but it refused to forget me; it waited for sleep, then cornered me.”
Margaret Atwood
Lady Oracle
“I was buying time. One is always buying something.”
Margaret Atwood
The Testaments
“I wasn’t discriminating in my reading, and I’m still not. I read then primarily to be entertained, as I do now. And I’m not saying that apologetically: I feel that if you remove the initial gut response from reading — the delight or excitement or simply the enjoyment of being told a story — and try to concentrate on the meaning or the shape of the “message” first, you might as well give up, it’s too much like all work and no play.”
Margaret Atwood
Survival
“I wasn’t even sure I wanted a man in my life again; by that time I’d exhausted the notion that the answer to a man is another man, and I was out of breath.”
Margaret Atwood
Cat’s Eye
“I will bend, I will touch the ground, or as close to it as I can get without rupture. I will lay a wreath of invisible money on her grave.”
Margaret Atwood
Wilderness Tips
“I will never be that old, thinks Joanne. I will die before I’m thirty. She knows this absolutely. It’s a tragic but satisfactory thought. If necessary, if some wasting disease refuses to carry her off, she’ll do it herself, with pills. She is not at all unhappy but she intends to be, later. It seems required.”
Margaret Atwood
Wilderness Tips
“I wish I didn’t have to think about you. You wanted to impress me; well, I’m not impressed, I’m disgusted…You wanted to make damn good and sure I’d never be able to turn over in bed again without feeling that body beside me, not there but tangible, like a leg that’s been cut off. Gone but the place still hurts.”
Margaret Atwood
Life Before Man
“I wish this story were different. I wish it were more civilized. I wish it showed me in a better light, if not happier, than at least more active, less hesitant, less distracted by trivia. I wish it had more shape. I wish t were about love, or about sudden realizations important to one’s life, or even about sunsets, birds, rainstorms, or snow. I’m sorry there is so much pain in this story. I’m sorry it’s in fragments, like a body caught in crossfire or pulled apart by force. But there is nothing I can do to change it.”
“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
The Handmaid’s Tale
“I would never blame a human creature for feeling lonely.”
Margaret Atwood
Alias Grace
“I would rather dance as a ballerina, though faultily, than as a flawless clown.”
Margaret Atwood
Surfacing
“I’m beginning to feel that I’ve discovered something worth knowing. There’s a way out of places you want to leave, but can’t. Fainting is like stepping sideways, out of your own body, out of time or into another time. When you wake up it’s later. Time has gone on without you.”
Margaret Atwood
Cat’s Eye
“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
Cat’s Eye
“If anyone else told her to lower her voice, Roz would know what to do: scream louder.”
Margaret Atwood
The Robber Bride
“If he wants to be an asshole, it’s a free country. Millions before him have made the same life choice.”
Margaret Atwood
Oryx and Crake
“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
Alias Grace
“If I love you, is that a fact or a weapon?”
Margaret Atwood
Power Politics
“If I thought this would never happen again I would die. But this is wrong, nobody dies from lack of sex. It’s lack of love we die from.”
Margaret Atwood
The Handmaid’s Tale
“If I’d been older I would’ve asked what it was right away, but I didn’t because I wanted to postpone the moment when I would know what it was. In stories I’d read, I’d come across the words nameless dread. They’d just been words then, but now that’s exactly what I felt.”
Margaret Atwood
The Testaments
“If there were no emptiness, there would be no life.”
Margaret Atwood
Dearly
“If they want a monster so badly they ought to be provided by one.”
Margaret Atwood
Alias Grace
“If we were all on trial for our thoughts, we would all be hanged.”
Margaret Atwood
Alias Grace
“If you do bad things for reasons you’ve been told are good, does it make you a bad person?”
Margaret Atwood
The Heart Goes Last
“If you don’t like it, change it, we said, to each other and to ourselves. And so we would change for the man, for another one. Change, we were sure, was for the better always. We were revisionists; what we revised was ourselves.”
Margaret Atwood
The Handmaid’s Tale
“If you have a need and they find it out, they will use it against you. The best way is to stop from wanting anything.”
Margaret Atwood
Alias Grace
“If you knew what was going to happen, if you knew everything that was going to happen next—if you knew in advance the consequences of your own actions—you’d be doomed. You’d be ruined as God. You’d be a stone. You’d never eat or drink or laugh or get out of bed in the morning. You’d never love anyone, ever again. You’d never dare to.”
Margaret Atwood
The Blind Assassin
“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
The Year of the Flood
“Ignoring isn’t the same as ignorance, you have to work at it.”
Margaret Atwood
The Handmaid’s Tale
“I’ll make you mine, lovers said in old books. They never said, I’ll make you me.”
Margaret Atwood
Oryx and Crake
“I’m sitting there with my hair not brushed and I really have to pee, but I don’t want to interrupt him because he obviously finds this important, and I’m thinking, I’ve heard this before, only it used to be women saying it to men. I can’t believe it! And I’m thinking do I want a long-term meaningful relationship with this guy? And then I’m thinking, does he have anything to offer besides sex? Well, the answer was no. But that didn’t used to matter, did it. How come it matters all of a sudden? Why do we have to start respecting their minds?”
Margaret Atwood
Bodily Harm
“Immortality and mortality didn’t mix well: it was fire and mud, only the fire always won. The gods were never averse to making a mess. In fact they enjoyed it.”
Margaret Atwood
The Penelopiad
“In Heaven, there are no debts – all have been paid, one way or another – but in Hell there’s nothing but debts, and a great deal of payment is exacted, though you can’t ever get all paid up. You have to pay, and pay, and keep on paying. So Hell is like an infernal maxed-out credit card that multiplies the charges endlessly.”
Margaret Atwood
Payback
“In pictures like these there are always empty shoes. It’s the shoes that get to me. Sad, that innocent daily task – putting your shoes on your feet, in the firm belief that you’ll be going somewhere.”
Margaret Atwood
Moral Disorder and Other Stories
“In reduced circumstances the desire to live attaches itself to strange objects.”
Margaret Atwood
The Handmaid’s Tale
“In the east a bank of cloud rises up silently like dark bread.”
Margaret Atwood
Morning in the Burned House
“In the end, we’ll all become stories. Or else we’ll become entities. Maybe it’s the same.”
Margaret Atwood
Moral Disorder and Other Stories
“In the midst of such rigorous and demanding splendor, who will remember Bob?”
Margaret Atwood
Stone Mattress
“In the spring, at the end of the day, you should smell like dirt.”
Margaret Atwood
Bluebeard’s Egg
“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
The Blind Assassin
“In theory I can do almost anything; certainly I have been told how. In practice I do as little as possible. I pretend to myself that I would be quite happy in a hermit’s cave, living on gruel, if someone else would make the gruel. Gruel, like so many other things, is beyond me.”
Margaret Atwood
Bluebeard’s Egg
“In those timeless years between infancy and, say, seven what is has always been: in that way children inhabit the realm of myth.”
Margaret Atwood
In Other Worlds
“In what ways, if any, does talent set you apart? Does it exempt you from the duties and responsibilities expected of others? Or does it load you up with even more duties and responsibilities, but of a different kind?” (Margaret Atwood Quotes)
Margaret Atwood
Negotiating with the Dead
“Innocent men denying their guilt sound exactly like guilty men, as I am sure you have noticed, my reader. Listeners are inclined to believe neither.”
Margaret Atwood
The Testaments
“Instead I will say, “Take me to your trees. Take me to your breakfasts, your sunsets, your bad dreams, your shoes, your nouns. Take me to your fingers; take me to your deaths.” These are worth it. These are what I have come for.”
Margaret Atwood
In Other Worlds
“It begins as disbelief and ends in sorrow, but in between those two phases her whole body shakes with anger.”
Margaret Atwood
The Year of the Flood
“It has thrown off its disguise as a meal and has revealed itself to me for what it is, a large dead bird. I’m eating a wing. It’s the wing of a tame turkey, the stupidest bird in the world, so stupid it can’t even fly any more. I am eating lost flight.”
Margaret Atwood
Cat’s Eye
“It is always a mistake to curse back openly at those who are stronger than you unless there is a fence between.”
Margaret Atwood
Alias Grace
“It is better to journey than to arrive, as long as we journey in firm faith and for selfless ends.”
Margaret Atwood
The Year of the Flood
“It is my opinion that they sometimes take what is intended for us, which would not surprise me in the least, as it is dog eat dog around here and they are the bigger dogs.”
Margaret Atwood
Alias Grace
“It is not only the body that travels, Adam One used to say, it is also the Soul. And the end of one journey is the beginning of another.”
Margaret Atwood
The Year of the Flood
“It is shocking how many crimes the Bible contains. The Governor’s wife should cut them all out and paste them into her scrapbook.”
Margaret Atwood
Alias Grace
“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
Oryx and Crake
“It isn’t running away they’re afraid of. We wouldn’t get far. It’s those other escapes, the ones you can open in yourself, given a cutting edge.”
Margaret Atwood
The Handmaid’s Tale
“It must have been then that I began to lose faith in reasonable argument as the sole measure of truth.”
Margaret Atwood
Bluebeard’s Egg
“It took me a long time to figure out that the youngest in a family of dragons is still a dragon from the point of view of those who find dragons alarming.”
Margaret Atwood
Negotiating with the Dead
“It was a question now, rather than a statement; a question with no answer.”
Margaret Atwood
Oryx and Crake
“It was always a cruelty to promise them equality,” he said, “since by their nature they can never achieve it. We have already begun the merciful task of lowering their expectations.”
Margaret Atwood
The Testaments
“It was like being in an elevator cut loose at the top. Falling, falling, and not knowing when you will hit.”
Margaret Atwood
The Handmaid’s Tale
“It was my brother who made up these moral distinctions, at some point he became obsessed with them, he must have picked them up from the war. There had to be a good kind and a bad kind of everything.”
Margaret Atwood
Surfacing
“It was what they both wanted: freedom from the world of mothers, the world of precautions, the world of burdens and fate and heavy female constraints upon the flesh. They wanted a life without consequences.”
Margaret Atwood
Wilderness Tips
“It would be good if you’d only stay up there where I put you, I could believe”
Margaret Atwood
Power Politics
“It would be nice to believe that love should be dished out in a fair way so that everyone got some. But that wasn’t how it was going to be for me.”
Margaret Atwood
The Year of the Flood
“It’s a gamble every time you get up in the morning,”
Margaret Atwood
The Testaments
“It’s a lifelong failing: she has never been prepared. But how can you have a sense of wonder if you’re prepared for everything? Prepared for the sunset. Prepared for the moonrise. Prepared for the ice storm. What a flat existence that would be.”
Margaret Atwood
Stone Mattress
“It’s all right, he said. It was malignant but I think we got it all. He was telling her that he has saved her life, for the time being anyway, and now he was dragging her back into it, this life that he had saved. By the hand. Malignant, Rennie thought.”
Margaret Atwood
Bodily Harm
“It’s always an advantage to have something to do with your hands. That way, if someone makes an inappropriate remark, you can pretend you haven’t heard it. Then you don’t have to answer.”
Margaret Atwood
The Penelopiad
“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
In Other Worlds
“It’s always risky, the prospect that the prisoners might be having more fun than the guards. Resentment can build up, and that would cause problems for Felix.”
Margaret Atwood
Hag-Seed
“It’s amazing the way Mitch can just write these women off. Sink his teeth into them, spit them out, and Roz is expected to clean up the mess. Fire of his loins and then wipe, like a blackboard, and after that he can barely remember their names. Roz is the one who remembers. Their names, and everything else about them.”
Margaret Atwood
The Robber Bride
“It’s an old sound, a sound left over.”
Margaret Atwood
Wilderness Tips
“It’s an old word, fading now. Dearly did I wish. Dearly did I long for. I loved him dearly.”
Margaret Atwood
Dearly
“It’s better that way, and I am a great proponent of better. In the absence of best.”
Margaret Atwood
The Testaments
“It’s doors I’m afraid of because I can’t see through them, its the door opening by itself in the wind I’m afraid of.”
Margaret Atwood
Surfacing
“It’s foolish to joke with those who have absolute control over you. They don’t like it; they think you don’t appreciate the full extent of their power.”
Margaret Atwood
The Testaments
“It’s long been her theoretical opinion that Man is a danger to the universe, a mischievous ape, spiteful, destructive, malevolent. But only theoretical. Really she believed that if people could see how they were acting they would act some other way. Now she knows this isn’t true.”
Margaret Atwood
Life Before Man
“It’s taken a while, but revenge is a dish best eaten cold, he reminds himself.”
Margaret Atwood
Hag-Seed
“It’s the turnips in their innocent rows, ordinary, lit from within, the praise lavished on mere tomatoes, the bunches of grapes, painted in all their translucent hues. As if they are worth it.”
Margaret Atwood
Life Before Man
“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
Dancing Girls and Other Stories
“It’s wonderful to hear his voice, even if she can’t depend on having any sort of a conversation with him. His interventions tend to be one-sided: if she answers him, he doesn’t often answer back. But it was always more or less like that between them.”
Margaret Atwood
Stone Mattress
“It’s always an imprudence to step between a man and the reflection of his own cleverness.”
Margaret Atwood
The Penelopiad
“It’s fun to be different, but not too different!”
Margaret Atwood
Stone Mattress
“It’s impossible to say a thing exactly the way it was, because of what you say can never be exact, you always have to leave something out, there are too many parts, sides, crosscurrents, nuances; too many gestures, which could mean this or that, too many shapes which can never be fully described, too many flavors, in the air or on the tongue, half-colors, too many.”
Margaret Atwood
The Handmaid’s Tale
“It’s old light, and there’s not much of it. But it is enough to see by.”
Margaret Atwood
Cat’s Eye
“It’s simple,’ Kat told them. ‘You bombard them with images of what they ought to be, and you make them feel grotty for being the way they are. You’re working with the gap between reality and perception. That’s why you have to hit them with something new, something they’ve never seen before, something they aren’t. Nothing sells like anxiety.”
Margaret Atwood
Wilderness Tips
“It’s somewhat daunting to reflect that Hell is possibly the place where you are stuck in your own personal narrative forever, and Heaven is possibly the place where you can ditch it, and take up wisdom instead.”
Margaret Atwood
Negotiating with the Dead
“It’s story that counts. No use telling me this isn’t a story, or not the same story. I know you’ve fulfilled everything you promised, you love me, we sleep till noon and we spend the rest of the day eating, the food is superb, I don’t deny that. But I worry about the future… Don’t evade, don’t pretend you won’t leave after all: you leave in the story and the story is ruthless.”
Margaret Atwood
You are Happy
“It’s wrong to give so much time over to mourning, she tells herself. Mourning and brooding. There’s nothing to be accomplished by it.”
Margaret Atwood
The Year of the Flood
“I’ve got nothing against telepathy, said Jane; but the telephone is so much more dependable.”
Margaret Atwood
Murder in the Dark
“I’ve learned quite a lot, over the years, by avoiding what I was supposed to be learning.”
Margaret Atwood
Moral Disorder and Other Stories
“I’ve learned to do without a lot of things. If you have a lot of things, said Aunt Lydia, you get too attached to this material world and you forget about spiritual values.”
Margaret Atwood
The Handmaid’s Tale
“Jimmy had been full of himself back then, thinks Snowman with indulgence and a little envy. He’d been unhappy too, of course. It went without saying, his unhappiness. He’d put a lot of energy into it.”
Margaret Atwood
Oryx and Crake
“Just because there’s a silence it doesn’t mean that nothing is going on.”
Margaret Atwood
The Robber Bride
“Keep your friends close but your enemies closer. Having no friends, I must make do with enemies.”
Margaret Atwood
The Testaments
“Kill what you can’t save
Margaret Atwood
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.”
You are Happy
“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
Cat’s Eye
“Knowing too much about other people puts you in their power, they have a claim on you, you are forced to understand their reasons for doing things and then you are weakened.”
Margaret Atwood
Cat’s Eye
“Knowing was a temptation. What you don’t know won’t tempt you.”
Margaret Atwood
The Handmaid’s Tale
“Knowledge is power only as long as you keep your mouth shut.”
Margaret Atwood
Wilderness Tips
“Language divides us into fragments, I wanted to be whole.”
Margaret Atwood
Surfacing
“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
Negotiating with the Dead
“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
Cat’s Eye
“Last year I abstained this year I devour without guilt which is also an art”
Margaret Atwood
You are Happy
“Laugh and the world laughs with you, said my grandmother. Cry and you cry alone.”
Margaret Atwood
Bodily Harm
“Life is just another sexually transmitted social disease.”
Margaret Atwood
Bodily Harm
“Life is not about hair,” I said then, only half jocularly. Which is true, but it is also true that hair is about life. It is the flame of the body’s candle, and as it dwindles the body shrinks and melts away.” (Margaret Atwood Quotes)
Margaret Atwood
The Testaments
“Life is warped. I’m just in sync.”
Margaret Atwood
MaddAddam
“Life, life, you sang with every cell, compelled into dancing as the spell held you enchained and you burned air.”
Margaret Atwood
Dearly
“Lighting a fire is an act of renewal, of beginning, and she doesn’t want to begin, she wants to continue. No: she wants to go back.”
Margaret Atwood
Stone Mattress
“Like many other art forms of vanished civilizations, the techniques for this one have been lost and cannot quite be duplicated.”
Margaret Atwood
Bluebeard’s Egg
“Like the trains, she’s never on time and always departing.”
Margaret Atwood
The Blind Assassin
“Lions don’t know they are lions. They don’t know how brave they are.”
Margaret Atwood
Dearly
“Little girls are cute and small only to adults. To one another they are not cute. They are life sized.”
Margaret Atwood
Cat’s Eye
“Live in the present, make the most of it, it’s all you’ve got.”
Margaret Atwood
The Handmaid’s Tale
“Looking down, she became aware of the water, which was covered with a film of calcinous hard-water particles of dirt and soap, and of the body that was sitting in it, somehow no longer quite her own. All at once she was afraid that she was dissolving, coming apart layer by layer like a piece of cardboard in a gutter puddle.”
Margaret Atwood
The Edible Woman
“Lose your temper and you lose the fight.”
Margaret Atwood
The Blind Assassin
“Love blurs your vision; but after it recedes, you can see more clearly than ever. It’s like the tide going out, revealing whatever’s been thrown away and sunk: broken bottles, old gloves, rusting pop cans, nibbled fishbodies, bones. This is the kind of thing you see if you sit in the darkness with open eyes, not knowing the future. The ruin you’ve made.”
Margaret Atwood
Cat’s Eye
“Love is giving, marriage is buying and selling. You can’t put love into a contract.”
Margaret Atwood
The Blind Assassin
“Love was merely a tool, smiles were another tool, they were both just tools for accomplishing certain ends. No magic, merely chemicals. I felt I’d never really loved anyone, not Paul, not Chuck the Royal Porcupine, not even Arthur. I’d polished them with my love and expected them to shine, brightly enough to return my own reflection, enhanced and sparkling.”
Margaret Atwood
Lady Oracle
“Luckily she was not too beautiful; extreme beauty put people off. Instead she looked healthy, vitaminized. Trustworthy.”
Margaret Atwood
Wilderness Tips
“Madness is only an amplification of what you already are.”
Margaret Atwood
Surfacing
“Male fantasies, male fantasies, is everything run by male fantasies? Up on a pedestal or down on your knees, it’s all a male fantasy: that you’re strong enough to take what they dish out, or else too weak to do anything about it. Even pretending you aren’t catering to male fantasies is a male fantasy: pretending you’re unseen, pretending you have a life of your own, that you can wash your feet and comb your hair unconscious of the ever-present watcher peering through the keyhole, peering through the keyhole in your own head, if nowhere else. You are a woman with a man inside watching a woman. You are your own voyeur.”
Margaret Atwood
The Robber Bride
“May I remind you all about the importance of hand-washing, seven times a day at least, and after every encounter with a stranger. It is never too early to practise this essential precaution. Avoid anyone who is sneezing.”
Margaret Atwood
The Year of the Flood
“Maybe acting as if she believes in such a future will help to create it, which is the kind of thing the Gardeners used to say.”
Margaret Atwood
MaddAddam
“Maybe it’s about who can do what to whom and can be forgiven for it. Never tell me it amounts to the same thing.”
Margaret Atwood
The Handmaid’s Tale
“Maybe sadness was a kind of hunger, she thought. Maybe the two went together.”
Margaret Atwood
The Year of the Flood
“Maybe that’s what love is, I thought: it’s being pissed off.”
Margaret Atwood
The Year of the Flood
“Maybe they’ll just take her someplace else, like an island, with the other people on it who are like her. People who don’t fit in, but not criminal elements. Surely that’s what they’ll do.”
Margaret Atwood
The Heart Goes Last
“Men don’t like to think about makeup, they like to think everything about you is genuine. Unless of course they want to think you’re a slut and everything about you is fake.”
Margaret Atwood
The Heart Goes Last
“Messy love is better than none, I guess. I am no authority on sane living.”
Margaret Atwood
Morning in the Burned House
“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 them to be noble. They don’t really have to think about it much; they sprout benevolent acts the way trees sprout leaves.” (Margaret Atwood Quotes)
Margaret Atwood
Hag-Seed
“Modern research backs up Dickens and Rackham, apparently rich people are not made happier simply by having a lot of wealth, but they are made happier when they give some of their wealth away. I read about this phenomenon in a newspaper, so it must be true.”
Margaret Atwood
Payback
“Money does talk, but it has a limited vocabulary.”
Margaret Atwood
Stone Mattress
“Money isn’t the only thing that must flow and circulate in order to have good value: good turns and gifts must flow and circulate… for any social system to remain in balance.”
Margaret Atwood
Payback
“Moon snakes, tongues of the dark speak like bones unlocking, leaves falling of a future you won’t believe in”
Margaret Atwood
You are Happy
“More often than not, she acted as if she wanted to protect him, from the image of herself in the past. She liked to keep only the bright side of herself turned towards him. She liked to shine.”
Margaret Atwood
Oryx and Crake
“Most mothers worry when their daughters reach adolescence but I was the opposite. I relaxed, I sighed with relief. Little girls are cute and small only to adults. To one another they are not cute. They are life sized.”
Margaret Atwood
Cat’s Eye
“Most people are good underneath if they have a chance to show their goodness.”
Margaret Atwood
The Heart Goes Last
“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
Alias Grace
“Mushrooms were the roses in the garden of that unseen world, because the real mushroom plant was underground. The parts you could see – what most people called a mushroom – was just a brief apparition. A cloud flower.”
Margaret Atwood
The Year of the Flood
“My audience is God, because who the hell else could understand me?”
Margaret Atwood
Morning in the Burned House
“My life had a tendency to spread, get flabby, to scroll and festoon like the frame of a baroque mirror, which came from following the line of least resistance. I wanted my death, by contrast, to be neat and simple, understated, even a little severe, like a Quaker church or the basic black dress with a single strand of pearls…”
Margaret Atwood
Lady Oracle
“My mother said Aunt Pauline meant kindly but had standards, which were all very well for those that could afford them.”
Margaret Atwood
Alias Grace
“My own view of myself was that I was small and innocuous, a marshmallow compared to the others. I was a poor shot with a 22, for instance, and not very good with an ax. It took me a long time to figure out that the youngest in a family of dragons is still a dragon from the point of view of those who find dragons alarming.”
Margaret Atwood
Negotiating with the Dead
“My status is a problem, they obviously think I’m married. But I’m safe, I’m wearing my ring, I never threw it out, it’s useful for landladies. I sent my parents a postcard after the wedding, they must have mentioned it to Paul; that, but not the divorce. It isn’t part of the vocabulary here, there’s no reason to upset them.”
Margaret Atwood
Surfacing
“Nate hasn’t yet frightened her by asking her to tell him about herself, though he’s been talking since they sat down. She ordered the cheapest thing on the menu, a grilled cheese sandwich and a glass of milk. She listens, eating in small bites, concealing her teeth.”
Margaret Atwood
Life Before Man
“Nature full strength is more than we can take, Adam One used to say. It’s a potent hallucinogen, a soporific, for the untrained Soul. We’re no longer at home in it. We need to dilute it. We can’t drink it straight. And God is the same. Too much God and you overdose. God needs to be filtered.”
Margaret Atwood
The Year of the Flood
“Nature is an expert in cost-benefit analysis,’ she says. ‘Although she does her accounting a little differently. As for debts, she always collects in the long run.”
Margaret Atwood
Payback
“Nature is to zoos as God is to churches.”
Margaret Atwood
Oryx and Crake
“Never mind. Point being that you don’t have to get too worked up about us, dear educated minds. You don’t have to think of us as real girls, real flesh and blood, real pain, real injustice. That might be too upsetting. Just discard the sordid part. Consider us pure symbol. We’re no more real than money.”
Margaret Atwood
The Penelopiad
“Never pray for justice, because you might get some.”
Margaret Atwood
Cat’s Eye
“No mother is ever, completely, a child’s idea of what a mother should be, and I suppose it works the other way around as well. But despite everything, we didn’t do too badly by one another, we did as well as most.”
Margaret Atwood
The Handmaid’s Tale
“No one wants to die,” said Becka. “But some people don’t want to live in any of the ways that are allowed.”
Margaret Atwood
The Testaments
“No, you will not be cooked on a fire when you die. Because you are not a fish.”
Margaret Atwood
MaddAddam
“Nobody has any authority on the fucks that other people give.”
Margaret Atwood
The Testaments
“Nothing changes instantaneously: in a gradually heating bathtub you’d be boiled to death before you knew it.”
Margaret Atwood
The Handmaid’s Tale
“Nothing is more difficult than to understand the dead, I’ve found; but nothing is more dangerous than to ignore them.”
Margaret Atwood
The Blind Assassin
“Now she imagines him dreaming. She imagines him dreaming of her, as she is dreaming of him. Through a sky the color of wet slate they fly towards each other on dark invisible wings.”
Margaret Atwood
The Blind Assassin
“Now she wants these voices back; even the squabbling, even the rage. She wants to dance with flowers on her head, she wants to be endorsed, sanctified, she doesn’t care who by. She wants a mother’s blessing. Though she can’t imagine her own mother doing such a thing. This is the problem. She knows by now that people do not behave the way she wishes them to. So what should she do, change wishes?”
Margaret Atwood
Life Before Man
“Oblivion is increasingly attractive to the young, and even to the middle-aged, since why retain your brain when no amount of thinking can even begin to solve the problem?”
Margaret Atwood
The Heart Goes Last
“Of course you have always been an idealist, and filled with your optimistic dreams; but reality must at some time obtrude, and you are now turned thirty.”
Margaret Atwood
Alias Grace
“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
Cat’s Eye
“On my Tree of Paradise, I intend to put a border of snakes entwined; they will look like vines or just a cable pattern to others, as I will make the eyes very small, but they will be snakes to me; as without a snake or two, the main part of the story would be missing.”
Margaret Atwood
Alias Grace
“Once a story you’ve regarded as true has turned false, you begin suspecting all stories.”
Margaret Atwood
The Testaments
“Once in a while, though, he went on binges. He would sneak into bookstores or libraries, lurk around the racks where the little magazines were kept; sometimes he’d buy one. Dead poets were his business, living ones his vice. Much of the stuff he read was crap and he knew it; still, it gave him an odd lift. Then there would be the occasional real poem, and he would catch his breath. Nothing else could drop him through space like that, then catch him; nothing else could peel him open.”
Margaret Atwood
Wilderness Tips
“Once she wasn’t supposed to like it. To have her in a position she didn’t like, that was power. Even if she liked it she had to pretend she didn’t. Then she was supposed to like it. To make her do something she didn’t like and then make her like it, that was greater power. The greatest power of all is when she doesn’t really like it but she’s supposed to like it, so she has to pretend.”
Margaret Atwood
Murder in the Dark
“One by one I could handle them, but if they combined into a mob of three I would have trouble. Divide and conquer would be my motto.”
Margaret Atwood
The Testaments
“One day you will wake up and everything, the stones by the driveway, the brick houses, each brick, each leaf of each tree, your own body, will be glowing from within, lit up, so bright you can hardly look. You will reach out in any direction and you will touch the light itself.”
Margaret Atwood
Murder in the Dark
“One day, he said that what you had to do in any adversarial situation was to kill the king, as in chess. I said people didn’t have kings any more. He said he meant the centre of power, but today it wouldn’t be a single person, it would be the technological connections.”
Margaret Atwood
The Year of the Flood
“One look at a banana and you can tell it came from outer space.”
Margaret Atwood
The Blind Assassin
“One person alone is not a full person: we exist in relation to others. I was one person: I risked becoming no person.”
Margaret Atwood
The Testaments
“Our curiosity is supposed to have limits, though these have never been defined exactly.”
Margaret Atwood
Cat’s Eye
“Our time together is drawing short, my reader. Possibly you will view these pages of mine as a fragile treasure box, to be opened with the utmost care. Possibly you will tear them apart, or burn them: that often happens to words.”
Margaret Atwood
The Testaments
“People always forget about prophecies unless they come true.”
Margaret Atwood
The Blind Assassin
“People change, though, especially after they are dead.”
Margaret Atwood
Bluebeard’s Egg
“People need such stories, because however dark, a darkness with voices in it is better than a silent void.”
Margaret Atwood
MaddAddam
“Perfection exacts a price, but it’s the imperfect who pay it.”
Margaret Atwood
MaddAddam
“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
The Handmaid’s Tale
“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
The Blind Assassin
“Perhaps, Lesje thinks, she should join a discussion group. She’s heard about such groups, she reads about them in the family sections of the papers Nate brings home every night. They meet in church basements and offer bandages to those wounded by the shrapnel of exploding families. Maybe she should go and drink cups of tea with such a group and eat cookies and bitch about Elizabeth. But she knows she can’t. She’s hopeless in groups, she’d be afraid of what she might say. In any gathering of the disabled she will always be the least disabled, or pretend to be.” (Margaret Atwood Quotes)
Margaret Atwood
Life Before Man
“Poetry deals with the core of human existence: life, death, renewal, change; as well as fairness and unfairness, injustice and sometimes justice. The world in all its variety.”
Margaret Atwood
Dearly
“Poetry was the way out then, for young people who wanted some exit from the lumpen bourgeoisie and the shackles of respectable wage-earning. It was what painting had been at the turn of the century. Richard knows this now, although he did not then. He doesn’t know what the equivalent is at the moment. Film-making, he’d guess, for those with intellectual pretensions.”
Margaret Atwood
Wilderness Tips
“Possibly, then, writing has to do with darkness, and a desire or perhaps a compulsion to enter it, and, with luck, to illuminate it, and to bring something back out to the light.”
Margaret Atwood
Negotiating with the Dead
“Prayer is wanting. Jesus, Jesus he says, but he’s not praying to Jesus, he’s praying to you, not to your body or your face but to the space you hold at the centre, which is the shape of the universe. Empty.”
Margaret Atwood
Murder in the Dark
“Religious people of any serious kind made her nervous: they were like men in raincoats who might or might not be flashers.”
Margaret Atwood
Bluebeard’s Egg
“Remember,’ she’d tell her staff, ‘every customer wants to feel like a princess, and princesses are selfish and overbearing.”
Margaret Atwood
The Year of the Flood
“Rennie can see what she is now: she’s an object of negotiation. The truth about knights comes suddenly clear: the maidens were only an excuse. The dragon was the real business. So much for vacation romances, she thinks. A kiss is just a kiss, Jocasta would say, and you’re lucky if you don’t get trenchmouth.”
Margaret Atwood
Bodily Harm
“Romantic people are not supposed to laugh, I know that much from looking at the pictures.”
Margaret Atwood
Alias Grace
“Running them down doesn’t make you any bigger, you know.”
Margaret Atwood
Stone Mattress
“Sanity is a valuable possession; I hoard it the way people once hoarded money. I save it, so I will have enough, when the time comes.”
Margaret Atwood
The Handmaid’s Tale
“Scrooge is about to say that rich people deserve to be rich because of their superior genes and moral fibre, but he catches the Spirit frowning at him and refrains.”
Margaret Atwood
Payback
“Second-hand American was spreading over him in patches, like mange or lichen. He was infested, garbled, and I couldn’t help him: it would take such time to heal, unearth him, scrape down to where he was true.”
Margaret Atwood
Surfacing
“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
Wilderness Tips
“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
Wilderness Tips
“Sex has been domesticated, stripped of the promised mystery, added to the category of the merely expected. It’s just what is done, mundane as hockey. It’s celibacy these days that would raise eyebrows.”
Margaret Atwood
Wilderness Tips
“Sex is like a drink, it’s bad to start brooding about it too early in the day.”
Margaret Atwood
Oryx and Crake
“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.”
Margaret Atwood
Stone Mattress
“She felt betrayed, bereft. Loss of face, the Japanese called it. They knew. She felt as though her face, so carefully prepared and nourished, had been ripped off.”
Margaret Atwood
Wilderness Tips
“She finds this objectivity of hers, this clarity, almost more depressing than she can bear, not because there is anything hideous or repellant about this man but because he has now returned to the ordinary level, the level of things she can see, in all their amazing and complex particularity, but cannot touch.”
Margaret Atwood
Bluebeard’s Egg
“She found herself stepping into ritual as if into a pair of stone shoes.”
Margaret Atwood
The Year of the Flood
“She had her reasons. Not that they were the same as anybody else’s reasons.”
Margaret Atwood
The Blind Assassin
“She had no images of this love. She could offer no anecdotes. It was a belief rather than a memory.”
Margaret Atwood
Oryx and Crake
“She has done an outrageous thing, but she doesn’t feel guilty. She feels light and peaceful and filled with charity, and temporarily without a name.”
Margaret Atwood
Wilderness Tips
“She liked to keep only the bright side of herself turned towards him. She liked to shine.”
Margaret Atwood
Oryx and Crake
“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
The Robber Bride
“She no longer knows what she wants from him.”
Margaret Atwood
Wilderness Tips
“She rents herself a large, empty apartment on the top floor of a house. She has no long-term plans. At night she listens to the radio and cooks subsistence meals, and cries onto her plate.”
Margaret Atwood
Wilderness Tips
“She said love was useless, because it led you into dumb exchanges in which you gave too much away, and then you got bitter and mean.”
Margaret Atwood
The Year of the Flood
“She sees where she is, she’s here, by herself, she’s stranded in the future. She doesn’t know how to get back.”
Margaret Atwood
Bodily Harm
“She told him he was a grouch, but since that was more or less the behavior she expected from husbands she didn’t seem to mind.”
Margaret Atwood
Wilderness Tips
“She was a more charitable person than I was; I admired her in that, but I could not emulate her.”
Margaret Atwood
The Testaments
“She was an infallible prophetess, and these powers came from her ability to look into the patterns of the universe.”
Margaret Atwood
Payback
“She wasn’t ready to settle down, she told her friends. That was one way of putting it. Another was would have been that she had not found anyone to settle down with. There had been several men in her life, but they hadn’t been convincing. They’d been somewhat like her table – quickly acquired, brightened up a little, but temporary. The time for that kind of thing was running out, however. She was tired of renting.”
Margaret Atwood
Moral Disorder and Other Stories
“She who weeps when the sun’s in sky, Will never pile the platter high.”
Margaret Atwood
The Penelopiad
“She would be invisible, of course. No one would hear her. And nothing has happened, really, that hasn’t happened before.”
Margaret Atwood
Wilderness Tips
“She would roll up her sleeves and dispense with sentimentality, and do whatever blood-soaked, bad-smelling thing had to be done. She would become adept with axes.”
Margaret Atwood
Moral Disorder and Other Stories
“She’s afraid of men and it’s simple, it’s rational, she’s afraid of men because men are frightening.”
Margaret Atwood
Bodily Harm
“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
The Heart Goes Last
“She’s against it on principle, and life isn’t run on principles but by adjustments”
Margaret Atwood
The Edible Woman
“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
Stone Mattress
“So Crake never remembered his dreams. It’s Snowman that remembers them instead. Worse than remembers: he’s immersed in them, he’d wading through them, he’s stuck in them. Every moment he’s lived in the past few months was dreamed first by Crake. No wonder Crake screamed so much.”
Margaret Atwood
Oryx and Crake
“So many crucial events take place behind people’s backs, when they aren’t in a position to watch: birth and death, for instance.”
Margaret Atwood
Oryx and Crake
“So peaceful, the streets; so tranquil, so orderly; yet underneath the deceptively placid surfaces, a tremor, like that near a high-voltage power line. We’re stretched thin, all of us; we vibrate; we quiver, we’re always on the alert. Reign of terror, they used to say, but terror does not exactly reign. Instead it paralyzes. Hence the unnatural quiet.”
Margaret Atwood
The Testaments
“So this was the rest of his life. It felt like a party to which he’d been invited, but at an address he couldn’t actually locate. Someone must be having fun at it, this life of his; only, right at the moment, it wasn’t him.”
Margaret Atwood
Oryx and Crake
“Some people like to throw objects, such as glasses of water or rocks, but nail painting is more positive. If more world leaders would take it up there would be less overall suffering, in her opinion.”
Margaret Atwood
The Heart Goes Last
“Some people write letters, in the library.”
Margaret Atwood
In Other Worlds
“Someday they may be grandmothers. It occurs to her, a new idea, that this tension between the two of them is a difficulty for the children. They ought to stop.”
Margaret Atwood
Life Before Man
“Something has changed, she has changed something, but she doesn’t yet know what.”
Margaret Atwood
Wilderness Tips
“Sometimes he gets high, on the pot that circulates as freely as cigarettes did once. He thinks he should be enjoying this experience more than he actually does.”
Margaret Atwood
Wilderness Tips
“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
The Blind Assassin
“Stupidity is the same as evil if you judge by the results.”
Margaret Atwood
Surfacing
“Such regrets are of no practical use. I made choices, and then, having made them, I had fewer choices. Two roads diverged in a yellow wood, and I took the one most travelled by. It was littered with corpses, as such roads are. But as you will have noticed, my own corpse is not among them.”
Margaret Atwood
The Testaments
“Sucked into the well of knowledge, you could only plummet, learning more and more, but not getting any happier.”
Margaret Atwood
The Year of the Flood
“Suddenly revenge is so close he can actually taste it. It tastes like steak, rare.”
Margaret Atwood
Hag-Seed
“That is what you have to do before you kill, I thought. You have to create an it, where none was before. You do that first in your head, and then you make it real.”
Margaret Atwood
The Handmaid’s Tale
“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 Quotes)
Margaret Atwood
Moral Disorder and Other Stories
“That was nothing but fair. I never wanted anything but what was fair”. Some debts can’t be discharged by money payments, and this is one of them.”
Margaret Atwood
Payback
“That was the original idea, but once you’ve got a controlled population with a wall around it and no oversight, you can do anything you want.”
Margaret Atwood
The Heart Goes Last
“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
The Handmaid’s Tale
“That’s the nice thing about me. I’m very flexible, I’m the universal substitute.” He reached up over her head and turned off the light.”
Margaret Atwood
The Edible Woman
“The ability to concoct plausible lies is a talent not to be underestimated”
Margaret Atwood
The Testaments
“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 Year of the Flood
“The alcohol smell is on my fingers, cold and remote, piercing like a steel pin going in. It smells like white enamel basins. When I look up at the stars in the nighttime, cold and white and sharp, I think they must smell like that.”
Margaret Atwood
Cat’s Eye
“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
The Blind Assassin
“The animals have no need for speech, why talk when you are a word.”
Margaret Atwood
Surfacing
“The answer can only be that God has given Adam free will, and therefore Adam may do things that God Himself cannot anticipate in advance.”
Margaret Atwood
The Year of the Flood
“The beauty is an illusion, and also a warning: there’s a dark side to beauty, as with poisonous butterflies.”
Margaret Atwood
Stone Mattress
“The best way of being kind to bears is not to be very close to them.”
Margaret Atwood
MaddAddam
“The best way of keeping a secret is to pretend there isn’t one.”
Margaret Atwood
The Blind Assassin
“The body is so easily damaged, so easily disposed of, water and chemicals is all it is, hardly more to it than a jellyfish, drying on sand.”
Margaret Atwood
The Handmaid’s Tale
“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 Robber Bride
“The collective memory is notoriously faulty, and much of the past sinks into the ocean of time to be drowned forever; but once in a while the waters part, allowing us to glimpse a flash of hidden treasure, if only for a moment.”
Margaret Atwood
The Testaments
“The corrupt and blood-smeared fingerprints of the past must be wiped away to create a clean space for the morally pure generation that is surely about to arrive. Such is the theory.”
Margaret Atwood
The Testaments
“The doctors, the dentists, the lawyers, the accountants: in the new world of Gilead, as in the old, their sins are frequently forgiven them.”
Margaret Atwood
The Testaments
“The door of Reverend Verringer’s impressive manse is opened by an elderly female with a face like a pine plank; the Reverend is unmarried, and has need of an irreproachable housekeeper. Simon is ushered into the library. It is so self-consciously the right sort of library that he has an urge to set fire to it.”
Margaret Atwood
Alias Grace
“The edge of the forest. She’d like to avoid going in there, among the trees. Nature may be dumb as a sack of hammers, Zeb used to say, but it’s smarter than you.”
Margaret Atwood
The Year of the Flood
“The freezing rain sifts down, handfuls of shining rice thrown by some unseen celebrant. Wherever it hits, it crystallizes into a granulated coating of ice.”
Margaret Atwood
Stone Mattress
“The Gardeners were right about that part: reading someone else’s secret words does give you power over them.”
Margaret Atwood
The Year of the Flood
“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
In Other Worlds
“The heart of Jesus glowed, because it was holy. Holy things glowed in general.”
Margaret Atwood
The Robber Bride
“The heart with letters on it shining like a light bulb through the trim hole painted in the chest, art history.”
Margaret Atwood
Surfacing
“The hearts gone bubonic with jealousy and greed, glinting through the vests and sweaters of anyone at all.”
Margaret Atwood
Murder in the Dark
“The house, and all the objects in it, crackled with static electricity; undertows washed through it, the air was heavy with things that were known but not spoken. Like a hollow log, a drum, a church, it was amplified, so that conversations whispered in it sixty years ago can be half-heard today.”
Margaret Atwood
Bluebeard’s Egg
“The Human moral keyboard is limited, Adam One used to say: there’s nothing you can play on it that hasn’t been played before. And, my dear Friends, I am sorry to say this, but it has its lower notes.”
Margaret Atwood
The Year of the Flood
“The idea of exploration appealed to her then: to get onto a boat and just go somewhere, somewhere mapless, off into the unknown. To launch yourself into frights; to find things out. There was something daring and noble about it, despite all of the losses and failures, or perhaps because of them.”
Margaret Atwood
Wilderness Tips
“The inventor of the mirror did few of us any favours: we must have been happier before we knew what we looked like.”
Margaret Atwood
The Testaments
“The light only shines for some,” she said, kindly and sadly. “And even for them it’s not all the time. The rest of the time you’re alone.”
Margaret Atwood
Wilderness Tips
“The lock splits. The iron gate swings open. She emerges, raises her arms towards the suddenly chilled moon. The world changes.”
Margaret Atwood
Wilderness Tips
“The memos that came from above telling him he’d done a good job meant nothing to him because they’d been dictated by semi-literates; all they proved was that no one at AnooYou was capable of appreciating how clever he had been. He came to understand why serial killers sent helpful clues to the police.”
Margaret Atwood
Oryx and Crake
“The moment of betrayal is the worst, the moment when you know beyond any doubt that you’ve been betrayed: that some other human being has wished you that much evil”
Margaret Atwood
The Handmaid’s Tale
“The months passed; my life of tiptoeing and eavesdropping continued. I worked hard at seeing without being seen and hearing without being heard. I discovered the cracks between door frames and nearly closed doors, the listening posts in hallways and on stairs, the thin places in walls. Most of what I heard came in fragments and even silences, but I was becoming good at fitting these fragments together and filling in the unsaid parts of sentences.”
Margaret Atwood
The Testaments
“The moon is a stone and the sky is full of deadly hardware, but oh God, how beautiful anyway.”
Margaret Atwood
The Handmaid’s Tale
“The muscles of my face were beginning to hurt. Under some conditions, smiling is a workout.”
Margaret Atwood
The Testaments
“The new world of money, in his eyes, is the City of Destruction, and the most important thing you can do is to make your way out of it as fast as possible.”
Margaret Atwood
Payback
“The newspaper journalists like to believe the worst; they can sell more papers that way, as one of them told me himself; for even upstanding and respectable people dearly love to read ill of others.”
Margaret Atwood
Alias Grace
“The objects I chose were designed to hold something, but I didn’t fill them up. They remained empty. They were little symbolic shrines to thirst.”
Margaret Atwood
Moral Disorder and Other Stories
“The only sure camouflage was unpredictability.”
Margaret Atwood
MaddAddam
“The only way you can write the truth is to assume that what you set down will never be read. Not by any other person, and not even by yourself at some later date. Otherwise you begin excusing yourself. You must see the writing as emerging like a long scroll of ink from the index finger of your right hand; you must see your left hand erasing it.”
Margaret Atwood
The Blind Assassin
“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.”
Margaret Atwood
The Heart Goes Last
“The past isn’t quaint while you’re in it. Only at a safe distance, later, when you can see it as décor, not as the shape your life’s been squeezed into.”
Margaret Atwood
Cat’s Eye
“The picture is of happiness, the story not. Happiness is a garden walled with glass: there’s no way in or out. In Paradise there are no stories, because there are no journeys. It’s loss and regret and misery and yearning that drive the story forward, along its twisted road.”
Margaret Atwood
The Blind Assassin
“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
MaddAddam
“The proper study of Mankind is Everything.”
Margaret Atwood
Oryx and Crake
“The prospect of his future life stretched before him like a sentence; not a prison sentence, but a long-winded sentence with a lot of unnecessary subordinate clauses”
Margaret Atwood
Oryx and Crake
“The question at this age is what kind of dog you will shortly resemble. She will be a beagle, Prue a terrier. Pamela will be an Afghan, or something equally unearthly.”
Margaret Atwood
Wilderness Tips
“The reason they invented coffins, to lock the dead in, preserve them, they put makeup on them; they didn’t want them spreading or changing into anything else. The stone with the name and date was on them to weight them down.”
Margaret Atwood
Surfacing
“The rest of his life. How long that time had once felt to him. How quickly it has sped by. How much of it has been wasted. How soon it will be over.”
Margaret Atwood
Hag-Seed
“The rest of the park was plain grass, which had turned yellow; it crackled underfoot. This day was going to be like the one before, windless and oppressive. The sky was cloudless but not clear: the air hung heavily, like invisible steam, so that the colours and outlines of objects in the distance were blurred.”
Margaret Atwood
The Edible Woman
“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
The Handmaid’s Tale
“The small details of life often hide a great significance.”
Margaret Atwood
Alias Grace
“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
The Handmaid’s Tale
“The tension between her lack of control and her attempt to suppress it is horrible. It’s like a fart in church.”
Margaret Atwood
The Handmaid’s Tale
“The trickle-down theory of economics has it that it’s good for rich people to get even richer because some of their wealth will trickle own, through their no doubt lavish spending, upon those who stand below them on the economic ladder. Notice that the metaphor is not that of a gushing waterfall but of a leaking tap: even the most optimistic endorsers of this concept do not picture very much real flow, as their language reveals.”
Margaret Atwood
Payback
“The trouble some people have being German, I thought, I have being human. In a way it was stupid to be more disturbed by a dead bird than by those other things, the wars and riots and the massacres in the newspapers. But for the wars and riots there was always an explanation, people wrote books about them saying why they happened: the death of the heron was causeless, undiluted.”
Margaret Atwood
Surfacing
“The truth can cause a lot of trouble for those who are not supposed to know it.”
Margaret Atwood
The Testaments
“The truth is seldom welcome, especially at dinner.”
Margaret Atwood
Morning in the Burned House
“The way I understand things, the Bible may have been thought out by God, but it was written down by men. And like everything men write down, such as the newspapers, they got the main story right but some of the details wrong.”
Margaret Atwood
Alias Grace
“The ways of God are not the ways of man, and they are most emphatically not the ways of woman.”
Margaret Atwood
The Testaments
“The whole play takes place on an island,” says Felix, standing beside his whiteboard. “But what kind of island is it? Is it magic in itself? We never really know. It’s different for each one of the people who’s landed on it. Some of them fear it, some of them want to control it. Some of them just want to get away from it.”
Margaret Atwood
Hag-Seed
“The world is being run by people my age, men my age, with falling-out hair and health worries, and it frightens me. When the leaders were older than me I could believe in their wisdom, I could believe they had transcended rage and malice and the need to be loved. Now I know better. I look at the faces in newspapers, in magazines, and wonder: what greeds, what furies drive them on?”
Margaret Atwood
Cat’s Eye
“The world that we think we see is only our best guess.”
Margaret Atwood
Dearly
“The world was no longer solid and dependable, it was porous and deceptive. Anything could disappear. At the same time, everything I looked at was very clear. It was like one of those surrealist paintings we’d studied in school the year before. Melted clocks in the desert, solid but unreal.”
Margaret Atwood
The Testaments
“The written word is so much like evidence like something that can be used against you later.”
Margaret Atwood
Negotiating with the Dead
“The young habitually mistake lust for love, they’re infested with idealism of all kinds.”
Margaret Atwood
The Blind Assassin
“The young ones are often the most dangerous, the most fanatical, the jumpiest with their guns. They haven’t yet learned about existence through time.”
Margaret Atwood
The Handmaid’s Tale
“Then she was happy, sure of herself, her plain face almost luminous. She wanted to cause joy. at these times she was loved, at others merely trusted.”
Margaret Atwood
Wilderness Tips
“There is indeed something delightful about being able to combine obedience and disobedience in the same act.”
Margaret Atwood
The Penelopiad
“There is more than one kind of freedom,” said Aunt Lydia. “Freedom to and freedom from. In the days of anarchy, it was freedom to. Now you are being given freedom from. Don’t underrate it.”
Margaret Atwood
The Handmaid’s Tale
“There is no fool like an educated fool…”
Margaret Atwood
Alias Grace
“There is no way I can lose you when you are lost already.”
Margaret Atwood
Power Politics
“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
The Heart Goes Last
“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 with.”
Margaret Atwood
The Handmaid’s Tale
“There must be a certain freedom in not having a good name to lose.”
Margaret Atwood
Alias Grace
“There was also, as it turned out, the dismay of my parents to be reckoned with: their tolerance about caterpillars and beetles and other non-human life forms did not quite extend to artists.”
Margaret Atwood
Negotiating with the Dead
“There were a lot of gods. Gods always come in handy, they justify almost anything.”
Margaret Atwood
The Blind Assassin
“There were consequence after all; but they were the consequences to things you didn’t even know you’d done.”
Margaret Atwood
Wilderness Tips
“There were swings in one of the parks, but because of our skirts, which might be blown up by the wind and then looked into, we were not to think of taking such a liberty as a swing. Only boys could taste that freedom; only they could swoop and soar; only they could be airborne. I have still never been on a swing. It remains one of my wishes.” (Margaret Atwood Quotes)
Margaret Atwood
The Testaments
“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
Stone Mattress
“There’s always a black market, there’s always something that can be exchanged.”
Margaret Atwood
The Handmaid’s Tale
“There’s an epigram tacked to my office bulletin board, pinched from a magazine “Wanting to meet an author because you like his work is like wanting to meet a duck because you like pâté.”
Margaret Atwood
Negotiating with the Dead
“There’s blood, a taste I remember. It tastes of orange popsicles, penny gumballs, red licorice, gnawed hair, dirty ice.”
Margaret Atwood
Cat’s Eye
“There’s more than one way to skin a cat, my father used to say; it bothered me, I didn’t see why they would want to skin a cat even one way.”
Margaret Atwood
Surfacing
“There’s nothing like a shovel full of dirt to encourage literacy.”
Margaret Atwood
The Blind Assassin
“There’s something to be said for hunger: at least it lets you know you’re still alive.”
Margaret Atwood
Oryx and Crake
“There’s the story, then there’s the real story, then there’s the story of how the story came to be told. Then there’s what you leave out of the story. Which is part of the story too.”
Margaret Atwood
MaddAddam
“There’s time to spare. This is one of the things I wasn’t prepared for – the amount of unfilled time, the long parentheses of nothing. Time as white sound.”
Margaret Atwood
The Handmaid’s Tale
“These albums were thick with babies, but my replicas thinned out as I grew older, as if the population of my duplicates had been hit with some plague.”
Margaret Atwood
The Handmaid’s Tale
“These things sneak up on him for no reason, these flashes of irrational happiness. It’s probably a vitamin deficiency.”
Margaret Atwood
Oryx and Crake
“These things you did were like prayers; you did them and you hoped they would save you. And for the most part they did. Or something did; you could tell by the fact that you were still alive.”
Margaret Atwood
The Handmaid’s Tale
“They are as happy as they can be, given who they are. Though if they’d been different people they might have been happier.”
Margaret Atwood
The Robber Bride
“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
The Blind Assassin
“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
The Robber Bride
“They meet in church basements and offer bandages to those wounded by the shrapnel of exploding families.”
Margaret Atwood
Life Before Man
“They say that a nightmare can frighten you to death, that your heart can literally stop. Will this bad dream kill me, one of these nights? Surely it will take more than that.”
Margaret Atwood
The Testaments
“They seemed to be able to choose. We seemed to be able to choose, then. We were a society dying of too much choice.”
Margaret Atwood
The Handmaid’s Tale
“They spent the first three years of school getting you to pretend stuff and then the rest of it marking you down if you did the same thing.”
Margaret Atwood
Oryx and Crake
“They wanted her to use her head and discard her heart; but it wasn’t so easy, because the heart goes last”
Margaret Atwood
The Heart Goes Last
“They were both in their own ways earnest; they both wanted to achieve some worthy end or other, change the world for the better. Such alluring, such perilous ideals!”
Margaret Atwood
The Blind Assassin
“They were wearing camouflage gear direct from central casting, and if it hadn’t been for the guns I might have laughed, not yet realizing that female laughter would soon be in short supply.”
Margaret Atwood
The Testaments
“They will not let you have peace, they don’t want you to have anything they don’t have themselves.”
Margaret Atwood
Surfacing
“Things might have been different if she hadn’t been able to drift; if she’d had to concentrate on her next meal, instead of dwelling on all the injuries she felt we’d done her. An unearned income encourages self-pity in those already prone to it.”
Margaret Atwood
The Blind Assassin
“Things written down can cause a great deal of harm. All too often, people don’t consider that.”
Margaret Atwood
The Blind Assassin
“Think of me as a guide. Think of yourself as a wanderer in a dark wood. It’s about to get darker.”
Margaret Atwood
The Testaments
“This above all, to refuse to be a victim. Unless I can do that I can do nothing.”
Margaret Atwood
Surfacing
“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
The Edible Woman
“This has been her problem all her life: picturing other people’s responses. She’s too good at it. She can picture the response of anyone–other people’s reactions, their emotions, their criticisms, their demands–but somehow they don’t reciprocate. Maybe they can’t. Maybe they lack the gift, if it is one.”
Margaret Atwood
The Robber Bride
“This is how the girl who couldn’t speak and the man who couldn’t see fell in love.”
Margaret Atwood
The Blind Assassin
“This is perhaps why Dante chooses the poet Virgil to be his guide in the Inferno; in visiting a strange location, it’s always best to go with someone who’s been there before, and – most important of all on a sightseeing tour of Hell – who might also know how to get you out again.”
Margaret Atwood
Negotiating with the Dead
“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
Cat’s Eye
“This is what Elizabeth cannot forgive. She can’t forgive her own treachery. Auntie Muriel must not be allowed to get away with it. She must, for Elizabeth’s benefit, visibly suffer. At last.”
Margaret Atwood
Life Before Man
“This is what I miss, Cordelia: not something that’s gone, but something that will never happen. Two old women giggling over their tea.”
Margaret Atwood
Cat’s Eye
“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
Cat’s Eye
“This puts him in an instructive mood, and I can see he is going to teach me something, which gentlemen are fond of doing.”
Margaret Atwood
Alias Grace
“This was the story of the Concubine Cut into Twelve Pieces.”
Margaret Atwood
The Testaments
“Those who have been in trouble themselves are alert to it in others”
Margaret Atwood
Alias Grace
“Though as he’d say, what is ‘belief’ but a willingness to suspend the negatives?”
Margaret Atwood
MaddAddam
“Time has not stood still. It has washed over me, washed me away, as if I’m nothing more than a woman of sand, left by a careless child too near the water.”
Margaret Atwood
The Handmaid’s Tale
“Time is going faster and faster; the days of the week whisk by like panties.”
Margaret Atwood
Wilderness Tips
“Time is not a line but a dimension, like the dimensions of space. If you can bend space you can bend time also, and if you knew enough and could move faster than light you could travel backward in time and exist in two places at once.”
Margaret Atwood
Cat’s Eye
“Time rises and rises, and when it reaches the level of your eyes you drown.”
Margaret Atwood
The Blind Assassin
“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
Alias Grace
“To go from a familiar thing, however undesirable, into the unknown, is always a matter for apprehension, and I suppose that is why so many people are afraid to die.”
Margaret Atwood
Alias Grace
“To pronounce the name of the dead is to make them live again, said the ancient Egyptians: not always what one might wish.”
Margaret Atwood
The Blind Assassin
“To want is to have a weakness.”
Margaret Atwood
The Handmaid’s Tale
“Today on the way home, it snows. Big, soft caressing flakes fall onto our skin like cold moths; the air fills with feathers.”
Margaret Atwood
Cat’s Eye
“Today she wears her habitual expression of strained anxiety; she smells of violets.”
Margaret Atwood
Alias Grace
“Too friendly, too eager to be on message, man is obsolete, dooming ourselves to extinction, restore the balance of nature and babble babble, he overdid it so much that he sounded preposterous, and in an outfit like Bearlift, with its full quota of preposterous green-hued furfuckers, that took some effort.”
Margaret Atwood
MaddAddam
“Torture is like dancing: I’m too old for it. Let the younger ones practice their bravery.”
Margaret Atwood
The Testaments
“Totalitarianisms may crumble from within, as they fail to keep the promises that brought them to power; or they may be attacked from without; or both. There are no sure-fire formulas, since very little in history is inevitable” (Margaret Atwood Quotes)
Margaret Atwood
The Testaments
“Touch comes before sight, before speech. It is the first language and the last, and it always tells the truth.”
Margaret Atwood
The Blind Assassin
“Truly amazing, what people can get used to, as long as there are a few compensations.”
Margaret Atwood
The Handmaid’s Tale
“Two roads diverged in a yellow wood, and I took the one most travelled by. It was littered with corpses, as such roads are. But as you will have noticed, my own corpse is not among them.”
Margaret Atwood
The Testaments
“Unlike some other religions, we have never felt it served a higher purpose to lie to children about geology.”
Margaret Atwood
The Year of the Flood
“Vanity is becoming a nuisance, I can see why women give it up, eventually. But I’m not ready for that yet.”
Margaret Atwood
Cat’s Eye
“Virginia Woolf said that writing a novel is like walking through a dark room, holding a lantern which lights up what is already in the room anyway.”
Margaret Atwood
Negotiating with the Dead
“Walking along past the store windows, into which she peers with her usual eagerness, her usual sense that maybe, today, she will discover behind them something that will truly be worth seeing, she feels as if her feet are not on cement at all but on ice. The blade of the skate floats, she knows, on a thin film of water, which it melts by pressure and which freezes behind it. This is the freedom of the present tense, this sliding edge.”
Margaret Atwood
Bluebeard’s Egg
“Wars happen because the ones who start them think they can win.”
Margaret Atwood
Morning in the Burned House
“Water does not resist. Water flows. When you plunge your hand into it, all you feel is a caress. Water is not a solid wall, it will not stop you. But water always goes where it wants to go, and nothing in the end can stand against it. Water is patient. Dripping water wears away a stone. Remember that, my child. Remember you are half water. If you can’t go through an obstacle, go around it. Water does.”
Margaret Atwood
The Penelopiad
“We are a society dying, said Aunt Lydia, of too much choice.”
Margaret Atwood
The Handmaid’s Tale
“We are containers, it’s only the insides of our bodies that are important.”
Margaret Atwood
The Handmaid’s Tale
“We are survivors, of each other. We have been shark to one another, but also lifeboat. That counts for something.”
Margaret Atwood
Cat’s Eye
“We battled in secret, undeclared, and after a while I no longer fought back because I never won. The only defense was flight, invisibility.”
Margaret Atwood
Surfacing
“We begin to climb and my husband catches up with me again, making one of the brief appearances, framed memories he specializes in: crystal-clear image enclosed by a blank wall.”
Margaret Atwood
Surfacing
“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 Edible Woman
“We lived, as usual by ignoring. Ignoring isn’t the same as ignorance, you have to work at it.”
Margaret Atwood
The Handmaid’s Tale
“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
Dancing Girls and Other Stories
“We must continue to remind ourselves of the wrong turnings taken in the past so we do not repeat them.”
Margaret Atwood
The Testaments
“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
Oryx and Crake
“We shouldn’t have been so scornful; we should have had compassion. But compassion takes work, and we were young.”
Margaret Atwood
The Year of the Flood
“We understand more than we know.”
Margaret Atwood
Oryx and Crake
“We were the people who were not in the papers. We lived in the blank white spaces at the edges of print. It gave us more freedom. We lived in the gaps between the stories.”
Margaret Atwood
The Handmaid’s Tale
“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
The Year of the Flood
“We yearned for the future. How did we learn it, that talent for insatiability?”
Margaret Atwood
The Handmaid’s Tale
“We’re stretched thin, all of us; we vibrate; we quiver, we’re always on the alert. Reign of terror, they used to say, but terror does not exactly reign. Instead it paralyzes. Hence the unnatural quiet.”
Margaret Atwood
The Testaments
“Were my kindliness and essential femininity being trotted out for their inspection? Were they being told in a round-about way that I was harmless, that they could expect to be talked to by me, but not devoured?”
Margaret Atwood
Bluebeard’s Egg
“What a lost person needs is a map of the territory, with his own position marked on it so he can see where he is in relation to everything else. Literature is not only a mirror; it is also a map, a geography of the mind. Our literature is one such map, if we can learn to read it as our literature, as the product of who and where we have been. We need such a map desperately, we need to know about here, because here is where we live. For the members of a country or a culture, shared knowledge of their place, their here, is not a luxury but a necessity. Without that knowledge we will not survive.”
Margaret Atwood
Survival
“What a moron I was to think you were sweet and innocent, when it turns out you were actually college-educated the whole time!”
Margaret Atwood
The Edible Woman
“What am I living for and what am I dying for are the same question.”
Margaret Atwood
The Year of the Flood
“What good is it to throw yourself in front of a steamroller out of moral principles and then be crushed flat like a sock emptied of its foot?”
Margaret Atwood
The Testaments
“What good is it to throw yourself in front of a steamroller out of moral principles and then be crushed flat like a sock emptied of its foot? Better to fade into the crowd, the piously praising, unctuous, hate-mongering crowd. Better to hurl rocks than to have them hurled at you. Or better for your chances of staying alive.”
Margaret Atwood
The Testaments
“What he really wanted was revenge. But against whom, and for what? Even if he had the energy for it, even if he could focus and aim, such a thing would be less than useless.”
Margaret Atwood
Oryx and Crake
“What I need is perspective. The illusion of depth, created by a frame, the arrangement of shapes on a flat surface. Perspective is necessary. Otherwise there are only two dimensions. Otherwise you live with your face squashed up against a wall, everything a huge foreground, of details, close-ups, hairs, the weave of the bedsheet, the molecules of the face. Your own skin like a map, a diagram of futility, criscrossed with tiny roads that lead nowhere. Otherwise you live in the moment. Which is not where I want to be.”
Margaret Atwood
The Handmaid’s Tale
“What 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
The Heart Goes Last
“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
The Year of the Flood
“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
The Blind Assassin
“What we consider real is also imagined; every life lived is also an inner life, a life created.”
Margaret Atwood
Negotiating with the Dead
“What we prayed for was emptiness, so we would be worthy to be filled: with grace, with love, with self-denial, semen and babies.”
Margaret Atwood
The Handmaid’s Tale
“What we share may be a lot like a traffic accident but we get one another. We are survivors of each other. We have been shark to one another, but also lifeboat. That counts for something.”
Margaret Atwood
Cat’s Eye
“Whatever is silenced will clamor to be heard, though silently.”
Margaret Atwood
The Handmaid’s Tale
“What’s the difference between vision and a vision? The former relates to something it’s assumed you’ve seen, the latter to something it’s assumed you haven’t. Language is not always dependable either.”
Margaret Atwood
Murder in the Dark
“When a shameful thing is done to you, the shamefulness rubs off on you. You feel dirtied.”
Margaret Atwood
The Testaments
“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
Stone Mattress
“When I am lonely for boys it’s their bodies I miss. I study their hands lifting the cigarettes in the darkness of the movie theaters, the slope of a shoulder, the angle of a hip. Looking at them sideways, I examine them in different lights. My love for them is visual: that is the part of them I would like to possess. Don’t move, I think. Stay like that, let me have that.”
Margaret Atwood
Cat’s Eye
“When I was younger I used to think that if I could hug myself tight enough I could make myself smaller, because there was never enough room for me, at home or anywhere, but if I was smaller than I would fit in.”
Margaret Atwood
Alias Grace
“When it came to love, wasn’t believing the same as the real thing?”
Margaret Atwood
Stone Mattress
“When push comes to shove, only one’s own nightmares are of any interest or significance.”
Margaret Atwood
The Testaments
“When they’re gone out of his head, these words, they’ll be gone, everywhere, forever. As if they had never been.”
Margaret Atwood
Oryx and Crake
“When we think of the past it’s the beautiful things we pick out. We want to believe it was all like that.”
Margaret Atwood
The Handmaid’s Tale
“When you alter yourself, the alterations become the truth…”
Margaret Atwood
The Robber Bride
“When you are in the middle of a story it isn’t a story at all, but only a confusion; a dark roaring, a blindness, a wreckage of shattered glass and splintered wood; like a house in a whirlwind, or else a boat crushed by the icebergs or swept over the rapids, and all aboard powerless to stop it. It’s only afterwards that it becomes anything like a story at all. When you are telling it, to yourself or to someone else.”
Margaret Atwood
Alias Grace
“When you can’t tell the difference between your own pleasure and your pain then you’re an addict.”
Margaret Atwood
Surfacing
“When you’re young, you think everything you do is disposable. You move from now to now, crumpling time up in your hands, tossing it away. You’re your own speeding car. You think you can get rid of things, and people too – leave them behind. You don’t yet know about the habit they have, of coming back.”
Margaret Atwood
The Blind Assassin
“Where there is an emptiness, the mind will obligingly fill it up. Fear is always at hand to supply any vacancies, as is curiosity. I have had ample experience with both.”
Margaret Atwood
The Testaments
“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
Alias Grace
“Where to start is the problem, because nothing begins when it begins and nothing’s over when it’s over, and everything needs a preface: a preface, a postscript, a chart of simultaneous events.”
Margaret Atwood
The Robber Bride
“Which of us can resist the temptation of being thought indispensable?”
Margaret Atwood
The Penelopiad
“Why do men want to kill the bodies of other men? Women don’t want to kill the bodies of other women.”
Margaret Atwood
Stone Mattress
“Why is it always such a surprise? thinks Toby. The moon. Even though we know it’s coming. Every time we see it, it makes us pause, and hush.”
Margaret Atwood
MaddAddam
“Why is it we want so badly to memorialize ourselves? Even while we’re still alive. We wish to assert our existence, like dogs peeing on fire hydrants.”
Margaret Atwood
The Blind Assassin
“Why is war so much like a practical joke? she thinks. Hiding behind bushes, leaping out, with not much difference between Boo! and Bang! Except the blood.”
Margaret Atwood
MaddAddam
“Why should the other ones in this play get a second chance at life, but not him? Why’s he have to suffer so much for being what he is? It’s like he’s, you know, black or Native or something. Five strikes against him from Day One. He never asked to get born.”
Margaret Atwood
Hag-Seed
“William sits opposite her, drinking water from a Murray’s glass with a trace of lipstick on the rim. His fingers hold the glass, his other hand lies on the table, his neck comes out of his shirt collar, which is light green, and on top of that is his head. His eyes are blue and he has two of them. This is the sum total of William in the present tense.”
Margaret Atwood
Life Before Man
“With no orders to follow, she occupies her mind by painting her nails, which is a very soothing thing to do when you’re anxious and keyed up. Some people like to throw objects, such as glasses of water or rocks, but nail painting is more positive. If more world leaders would take it up there would be less overall suffering, in her opinion.”
Margaret Atwood
The Heart Goes Last
“Within each of these categories, the principle was the same: rarity and beauty increased value.”
Margaret Atwood
Payback
“Women collect grievances, hold grudges and change shape. They pass hard, legitimate judgments, unlike the purblind guesses of men, fogged with romanticism and ignorance and bias and wish. Women know too much, they can neither be deceived nor trusted.”
Margaret Atwood
Cat’s Eye
“Women do not usually write novels of the type favoured by men but men are known to write novels of the type favoured by women. Some people find this odd.”
Margaret Atwood
Murder in the Dark
“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
The Blind Assassin
“Words are so often like window curtains, a decorative screen put up to keep the neighbours at a distance.”
Margaret Atwood
The Robber Bride
“Yet each flower, each twig, each pebble, shines as though illuminated from within, as once before, on her first day in the Garden. It’s the stress, it’s the adrenalin, it’s a chemical effect: she knows this well enough. But why is it built in? She thinks. Why are we designed to see the world as supremely beautiful just as we’re about to be snuffed? Do rabbits feel the same as the fox teeth bite down on their necks? Is it mercy?” (Margaret Atwood Quotes)
Margaret Atwood
The Year of the Flood
“You are a woman with a man inside watching a woman. You are your own voyeur.”
Margaret Atwood
The Robber Bride
“You are of course fully in control of what you choose to read.”
Margaret Atwood
The Testaments
“You are the sun in reverse, all energy flows into you and is abolished”
Margaret Atwood
Power Politics
“You aren’t sick & unhappy only alive & stuck with it.”
Margaret Atwood
Power Politics
“You believed you could transcend the body as you aged, she tells herself. You believed you could rise above it, to a serene, nonphysical realm. But it’s only through ecstasy you can do that, and ecstasy is achieved through the body itself. Without the bone and sinew of wings, no flight. Without that ecstasy you can only be dragged further down by the body, into its machinery. Its rusting, creaking, vengeful, brute machinery.”
Margaret Atwood
Stone Mattress
“You can forget who you are if you’re alone too much.”
Margaret Atwood
The Year of the Flood
“You can only be jealous of someone who has something you think you ought to have yourself.”
Margaret Atwood
The Handmaid’s Tale
“You can think clearly only with your clothes on.”
Margaret Atwood
The Handmaid’s Tale
“You can wipe your feet on me, twist my motives around all you like, you can dump millstones on my head and drown me in the river, but you can’t get me out of the story. I’m the plot, babe, and don’t ever forget it.”
Margaret Atwood
Stone Mattress
“You can’t help what you feel, but you can help how you behave”
Margaret Atwood
The Handmaid’s Tale
“You can’t lead if no one will follow.”
Margaret Atwood
Moral Disorder and Other Stories
“You can’t live with such fears and keep on whistling. The waiting builds up in you like a tide. You start wanting it to be done with. You find yourself saying to the sky, Just do it. Do your worst. Get it over with.”
Margaret Atwood
The Year of the Flood
“You could tell a lot about a person from their fridge magnets, not that he’d thought much about them at the time.”
Margaret Atwood
Oryx and Crake
“You create your own world by your inner attitude, the Gardeners used to say.”
Margaret Atwood
The Year of the Flood
“You don’t believe the sky is falling until a chunk of it falls on you.”
Margaret Atwood
The Testaments
“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
Cat’s Eye
“You may find the subject a little peculiar. It is a little peculiar. Writing itself is a little peculiar.”
Margaret Atwood
Negotiating with the Dead
“You might even provide a Heaven for them. We need You for that. Hell we can make for ourselves.”
Margaret Atwood
The Handmaid’s Tale
“You need to be strong. They were trying to make things better. But it can put a lot of pressure on a person to be told they need to be strong.”
Margaret Atwood
The Testaments
“You pride yourself on being a realist, I told myself, so face the facts. There’s been a coup, here in the United States, just as in times past in so many other countries. Any forced change of leadership is always followed by a move to crush the opposition. The opposition is led by the educated, so the educated are the first to be eliminated.”
Margaret Atwood
The Testaments
“You should never let your picture be in a magazine or newspaper if you can help it, as you never know what ends your face may be made to serve, by others, once it has got out of your control.”
Margaret Atwood
Alias Grace
“You take the first step, and to save yourself from the consequences, you take the next one. In times like ours, there are only two directions: up or plummet.”
Margaret Atwood
The Testaments
“You think I didn’t hate their pity, their forced kindness? And knowing that no matter what I did, how virtuous I was, or hardworking, I would never be beautiful. Not like her, the one who merely had to sit there to be adored. You wonder why I stabbed the blue eyes of my dolls with pins and pulled their hair out until they were bald? Life isn’t fair. Why should I be?”
Margaret Atwood
Good Bones
“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 Blind Assassin
“You want to go back to where the sky was inside us”
Margaret Atwood
Power Politics
“You want your decisions taken away from you so you won’t be responsible for your own actions?”
Margaret Atwood
The Heart Goes Last
“You’d be surprised how quickly the mind goes soggy in the absence of other people. One person alone is not a full person: we exist in relation to others. I was one person: I risked becoming no person.”
Margaret Atwood
The Testaments
“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
Hag-Seed
“Young love, thinks Felix wistfully. So good for the complexion.”
Margaret Atwood
Hag-Seed
“Your kiss no longer literature but fine print, a set of instructions.”
Margaret Atwood
Power Politics
“Your legacy from him is the realm of infinite speculation. You’re free to reinvent yourself at will.”
Margaret Atwood
The Blind Assassin
“You’re working with the gap between reality and perception. That’s why you have to hit them with something new, something they’ve never seen before, something they aren’t. Nothing sells like anxiety.”
Margaret Atwood
Wilderness Tips
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