Margaret Atwood: Likeness (page 2)

“There's nothing like a shovel full of dirt to encourage literacy.”

“There is no fool like an educated fool…”

“Remember,' she'd tell her staff, 'every customer wants to feel like a princess, and princesses are selfish and overbearing.”

“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.”

“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.”

“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?”

“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.”

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

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

“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.”

“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.”

“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.”

“How old do you have to get before wisdom descends like a plastic bag over your head and you learn to keep your big mouth shut? Maybe never. Maybe you get more frivolous with age.”

“Sex is like a drink, it's bad to start brooding about it too early in the day.”

“Nor did I make any distinctions between great literature and any other kind. I just liked reading.”

“If you don't like it, change it, we said, to each other and to ourselves. And so we would change for the man, for another one. Change, we were sure, was for the better always. We were revisionists; what we revised was ourselves.”

“To take that risk, to offer life and remain alive, open yourself like this and become whole.”

“I soon had a few thousand people I didn’t know sending me messages like “OMG! Is it really you?” “I love it when old ladies blog,” one early follower remarked. … and they really shone when, during the Olympics, I said that "Own the podium" was too brash to be Canadian, and suggested "A podium might be nice." Their own variations poured onto a feed tagged #cpodium: "A podium! For me?" "Rent the podium, see if we like it." "Mind if I squeeze by you to get onto that podium?"”