The best quotes by the author we have brought to you
“Art is long and life is brief and mortality looms.” (The Robber Bride Quotes)
Margaret Atwood
The Robber Bride
“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
“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
“Extreme good, extreme evil: the abilities required are similar.”
Margaret Atwood
The Robber Bride
“Genius is an infinite capacity for causing pain.”
Margaret Atwood
The Robber Bride
“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
“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
“If anyone else told her to lower her voice, Roz would know what to do: scream louder.”
Margaret Atwood
The Robber Bride
“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
“Just because there’s a silence it doesn’t mean that nothing is going on.”
Margaret Atwood
The Robber Bride
“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
“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
“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.” (The Robber Bride Quotes)
Margaret Atwood
The Robber Bride
“The heart of Jesus glowed, because it was holy. Holy things glowed in general.”
Margaret Atwood
The Robber Bride
“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 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
“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
“When you alter yourself, the alterations become the truth…”
Margaret Atwood
The Robber Bride
“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
“Words are so often like window curtains, a decorative screen put up to keep the neighbours at a distance.”
Margaret Atwood
The Robber Bride
“You are a woman with a man inside watching a woman. You are your own voyeur.”
Margaret Atwood
The Robber Bride
