Margaret Atwood: Trending quotes (page 7)

“She knows herself to be at the mercy of events, and she knows by now that events have no mercy.”

“I'm not senile," I snapped. "If I burn the house down it will be on purpose.”

“Faith is only a word, embroidered.”

“One and one and one and one doesn't equal four. Each one remains unique, there is no way of joining them together. They cannot be exchanged, one for the other. They cannot replace each other.”

“The young habitually mistake lust for love, they're infested with idealism of all kinds.”

“Most mothers worry when their daughters reach adolescence but I was the opposite. I relaxed, I sighed with relief. Little girls are cute and small only to adults. To one another they are not cute. They are life sized.”

“You can wet the rim of a glass and run your finger around the rim and it will make a sound. This is what I feel like: this sound of glass. I feel like the word shatter. I want to be with someone.”

“I'm a fool, to confuse this with goodness. I am not good.
I know too much to be good. I know myself.
I know myself to be vengeful, greedy, secretive and sly.”

“Immortality,' said Crake, ' is a concept. If you take 'mortality' as being, not death, but the foreknowledge of it and the fear of it, then 'immortality' is the absence of such fear. Babies are immortal. Edit out the fear, and you'll be…”

“There's the story, then there's the real story, then there's the story of how the story came to be told. Then there's what you leave out of the story. Which is part of the story too.”

“As all historians know, the past is a great darkness, and filled with echoes.”

“We understand more than we know.”

“You can forget who you are if you're alone too much.”

“There's something to be said for hunger: at least it lets you know you're still alive.”

“The answers you get from literature depend on the questions you pose.”

“Our heaven is their hell, said God. I like a balanced universe.”

“These things sneak up on him for no reason, these flashes of irrational happiness. It's probably a vitamin deficiency.”

“Ah men,
why do you want
all this attention?
I can write poems for myself, make
love to a doorknob if absolutely
necessary. What do you have to offer me
I can't find otherwise
except humiliation? Which I no longer
need.”

“Which of us can resist the temptation of being thought indispensable?”