The best quotes by the author we have brought to you
“A divorce is like an amputation, you survive but there’s less of you.” (Surfacing Quotes)
Margaret Atwood
Surfacing
“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
“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
“From any rational point of view I am absurd; but there are no longer any rational points of view.”
Margaret Atwood
Surfacing
“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
“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 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 would rather dance as a ballerina, though faultily, than as a flawless clown.”
Margaret Atwood
Surfacing
“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’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
“Language divides us into fragments, I wanted to be whole.”
Margaret Atwood
Surfacing
“Madness is only an amplification of what you already are.”
Margaret Atwood
Surfacing
“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
“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.” (Surfacing Quotes)
Margaret Atwood
Surfacing
“Stupidity is the same as evil if you judge by the results.”
Margaret Atwood
Surfacing
“The animals have no need for speech, why talk when you are a word.”
Margaret Atwood
Surfacing
“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 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 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
“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
“They will not let you have peace, they don’t want you to have anything they don’t have themselves.”
Margaret Atwood
Surfacing
“This above all, to refuse to be a victim. Unless I can do that I can do nothing.”
Margaret Atwood
Surfacing
“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
“When you can’t tell the difference between your own pleasure and your pain then you’re an addict.”
Margaret Atwood
Surfacing
