Margaret Atwood: Trending quotes (page 13)

“Maybe I don't really want to know what's going on. Maybe I'd rather not know. Maybe I couldn't bear to know. The Fall was a fall from innocence to knowledge.”

“This above all, to refuse to be a victim. Unless I can do that I can do nothing.”

“I am alive, I live, I breathe, I put my hand out, unfolded, into the sunlight.”

“Craziness was considered funny, like all other things that were in reality frightening and profoundly shameful.”

“We shouldn't have been so scornful; we should have had compassion. But compassion takes work, and we were young.”

“Ten days after the war ended, my sister Laura drove a car off a bridge. The bridge was being repaired: she went right through the Danger sign. The car fell a hundred feet into the ravine, smashing through the treetops feathery with new leaves, then burst into flames and rolled down into the shallow creek at the bottom. Chunks of the bridge fell on top of it. Nothing much was left but charred smithereens.”

“The best way of being kind to bears is not to be very close to them.”

“I could end this with a moral,
as if this were a fable about animals,
though no fables are really about animals.”

“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.”

“What a moron I was to think you were sweet and innocent, when it turns out you were actually college-educated the whole time!”

“I would rather dance as a ballerina, though faultily, than as a flawless clown.”

“Like the trains, she's never on time and always departing.”

“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.”

“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.”

“A prison does not only lock its inmates inside, it keeps all others out. Her strongest prison is of her own construction.”

“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.”

“By telling you anything at all I'm at least believing in you, I 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.”

“I walk away from him. It's enormously pleasing to me, this walking away. It's like being able to make people appear and vanish, at will.”

“She had no images of this love. She could offer no anecdotes. It was a belief rather than a memory.”