Margaret Atwood Quotes

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“I am afraid of falling into hopeless despair, over my wasted life, and I am still not sure how it happened.”

“But I began then to think of time as having a shape, something you could see, like a series of liquid transparencies, one laid on top of another.”

“Gardening is not a rational act.”

“I'm working on my own life story. I don't mean I'm putting it together; no, I'm taking it apart.”

“What is your favorite word?”
“And. It is so hopeful.”

“The moon is a stone and the sky is full of deadly hardware, but oh God, how beautiful anyway.”

“i sometimes felt as if these marks on my body were a kind of code, which blossomed, then faded, like invisible ink held to a candle. But if they were a code, who held the key to it? I was sand, I was snow—written on, rewritten, smoothed over.”

“Everyone thinks writers must know more about the inside of the human head, but that's wrong. They know less, that's why they write. Trying to find out what everyone else takes for granted.”

“Nevertheless, blood is thicker than water, as anyone knows who has tasted both.”

“It’s a lifelong failing: she has never been prepared. But how can you have a sense of wonder if you’re prepared for everything? Prepared for the sunset. Prepared for the moonrise. Prepared for the ice storm. What a flat existence that would be.”

“Don't misunderstand me. I am not scoffing at goodness, which is far more difficult to explain than evil, and far more complicated. But sometimes it's hard to put up with.”

“Time rises and rises, and when it reaches the level of your eyes you drown.”

“We've learned to see the world in gasps.”

“He stops, looks up at this window, and I can see the white oblong of his face. We look at each other. I have no rose to toss, he has no lute. But it's the same kind of hunger.”

“If you want what's in the package you should at least know how to get the string off, is what I say.”

“Anyway, maybe there weren't any solutions. Human society, corpses and rubble. It never learned, it made the same cretinous mistakes over and over, trading short-term gain for long-term pain.”

“The alcohol smell is on my fingers, cold and remote, piercing like a steel pin going in. It smells like white enamel basins. When I look up at the stars in the nighttime, cold and white and sharp, I think they must smell like that.”

“What breaks in daybreak? Is it the night? Is it the sun, cracked in two by the horizon like an egg, spilling out light?”

“expectation isn't the same as desire”

“Where were we? I've forgotten.
He was deciding whether to cut her throat or love her forever.
Right. Yes. The usual choices.”

“You can wipe your feet on me, twist my motives around all you like, you can dump millstones on my head and drown me in the river, but you can’t get me out of the story. I’m the plot, babe, and don’t ever forget it.”

“I tell, therefore you are.”

“Last year I abstained
this year I devour

without guilt
which is also an art”

“Your hand is a warm stone I hold between two words.”

“If you get hungry enough, they say, you start eating your own heart.”

“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.”

“The animals have no need for speech, why talk when you are a word.”

“Without the protection of surliness and levity, all children would be crushed by the past—the past of others, loaded onto their shoulders. Selfishness is their saving grace.”

“I used to think of my body as an instrument, of pleasure, or a means of transportation, or an implement for the accomplishment of my will.”

“I am certain that a Sewing Machine would relieve as much human suffering as a hundred Lunatic Asylums, and possibly a good deal more.”

“I thought my heart was pure. We do like to have such good opinions of our own motives when we're about to do something harmful, to someone else.”