Margaret Atwood: Trending quotes (page 5)

“Tell, rather than write, because I have nothing to write with and writing is in any case forbidden. But if it’s a story, even in my head, I must be telling it to someone. You don’t tell a story only to yourself. There’s always someone else.
Even when there is no one.”

“All you have to do, I tell myself, is keep your mouth shut and look stupid. It shouldn't be that hard.”

“We yearned for the future. How did we learn it, that talent for insatiability?”

“Never pray for justice, because you might get some.”

“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.”

“Vanity is becoming a nuisance, I can see why women give it up, eventually. But I'm not ready for that yet.”

“Beginnings are sudden, but also insidious. They creep up on you sideways, they keep to the shadows, they lurk unrecognized. Then, later, they spring.”

“I want everything back, the way it was. But there is no point to it, this wanting.”

“Knowing was a temptation. What you don't know won't tempt you.”

“If I love you, is that a fact or a weapon?”

“Truly amazing, what people can get used to, as long as there are a few compensations.”

“is a futile word. It's about what didn't happen. It belongs in a parallel universe. It belongs in another dimension of space.”

“Every habit he's ever had is still there in his body, lying dormant like flowers in the desert. Given the right conditions, all his old addictions would burst into full and luxuriant bloom.”

“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.”

“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.”

“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.”

“You can't help what you feel, but you can help how you behave”

“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.”

“And yet it disturbs me to learn I have hurt someone unintentionally. I want all my hurts to be intentional.”