Margaret Atwood: Trending quotes (page 8)

“I avoid looking down at my body, not so much because it’s shameful or immodest but because I don’t want to see it. I don’t want to look at something that determines me so completely.”

“When any civilization is dust and ashes," he said, "art is all that's left over. Images, words, music. Imaginative structures. Meaning—human meaning, that is—is defined by them. You have to admit that.”

“It wasn't so easy though, ending the war. A war is a huge fire; the ashes from it drift far, and settle slowly.”

“When they're gone out of his head, these words, they'll be gone, everywhere, forever. As if they had never been.”

“I believe that everyone else my age is an adult whereas I am merely in disguise.”

“When you're unhinged, things make their way out of you that should be kept inside, and other things get in that ought to be shut out. The locks lose their powers. The guards go to sleep. The passwords fail.”

“A man is just a woman’s strategy for making other women.”

“Waste not want not. I am not being wasted. Why do I want?”

“We are survivors, of each other. We have been shark to one another, but also lifeboat. That counts for something.”

“Neither of us says the word love, not once. It would be tempting fate; it would be romance, bad luck.”

“If I waited for perfection, I would never write a word.”

“You want the truth, of course. You want me to put two and two together. But two and two doesn’t necessarily get you the truth. Two and two equals a voice outside the window. Two and two equals the wind. The living bird is not its labeled bones.”

“Today on the way home, it snows. Big, soft caressing flakes fall onto our skin like cold moths; the air fills with feathers.”

“How easy it is to invent a humanity, for anyone at all.”

“I see that there will be no end to imperfection, or to doing things the wrong way. Even if you grow up, no matter how hard you scrub, whatever you do, there will always be some other stain or spot on your face or stupid act, somebody frowning.”

“Ordinary, said Aunt Lydia, is what you are used to. This may not seem ordinary to you now, but after a time it will. It will become ordinary.”

“So this was the rest of his life. It felt like a party to which he'd been invited, but at an address he couldn't actually locate. Someone must be having fun at it, this life of his; only, right at the moment, it wasn't him.”

“Now that I am dead, I know everything.”

“Little girls are cute and small only to adults. To one another they are not cute. They are life sized.”