The best quotes by the author we have brought to you
“A bird of the air will carry the voice.” (The Testaments Quotes)
Margaret Atwood
The Testaments
“All that was necessary was a law degree and a uterus: a lethal combination.”
Margaret Atwood
The Testaments
“And how easily a hand becomes a fist.”
Margaret Atwood
The Testaments
“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
“As they say, history does not repeat itself, but it rhymes.”
Margaret Atwood
The Testaments
“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
“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
“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
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
“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
“Forbidden things are open to the imagination.”
Margaret Atwood
The Testaments
“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
“Giving up was the new normal, and I have to say it was catching.”
Margaret Atwood
The Testaments
“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 tedious is a tyranny in the throes of enactment. It’s always the same plot.”
Margaret Atwood
The Testaments
“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 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 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.” (The Testaments Quotes)
Margaret Atwood
The Testaments
“I made choices, and then, having made them, I had fewer choices.”
Margaret Atwood
The Testaments
“I was buying time. One is always buying something.”
Margaret Atwood
The Testaments
“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
“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
“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’s a gamble every time you get up in the morning,”
Margaret Atwood
The Testaments
“It’s better that way, and I am a great proponent of better. In the absence of best.”
Margaret Atwood
The Testaments
“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
“Keep your friends close but your enemies closer. Having no friends, I must make do with enemies.”
Margaret Atwood
The Testaments
“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
The Testaments
“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
“Nobody has any authority on the fucks that other people give.”
Margaret Atwood
The Testaments
“Once a story you’ve regarded as true has turned false, you begin suspecting all stories.”
Margaret Atwood
The Testaments
“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 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 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
“She was a more charitable person than I was; I admired her in that, but I could not emulate her.”
Margaret Atwood
The Testaments
“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
“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
“The ability to concoct plausible lies is a talent not to be underestimated”
Margaret Atwood
The Testaments
“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 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 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 muscles of my face were beginning to hurt. Under some conditions, smiling is a workout.”
Margaret Atwood
The Testaments
“The truth can cause a lot of trouble for those who are not supposed to know it.”
Margaret Atwood
The Testaments
“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 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
“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.” (The Testaments Quotes)
Margaret Atwood
The Testaments
“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 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
“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 was the story of the Concubine Cut into Twelve Pieces.”
Margaret Atwood
The Testaments
“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
The Testaments
“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
“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’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
“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
“When a shameful thing is done to you, the shamefulness rubs off on you. You feel dirtied.”
Margaret Atwood
The Testaments
“When push comes to shove, only one’s own nightmares are of any interest or significance.”
Margaret Atwood
The Testaments
“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 is an emptiness, the mind will obligingly fill it up. Fear is always at hand to supply any vacancies, as is curiosity.”
Margaret Atwood
The Testaments
“You are of course fully in control of what you choose to read.”
Margaret Atwood
The Testaments
“You don’t believe the sky is falling until a chunk of it falls on you.”
Margaret Atwood
The Testaments
“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 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’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
