Margaret Atwood citations

Page 3

“Si jeunesse savait, si vieillesse pouvait - Estienne; C'est de quoi j'ai le plus de peur que la peur - Montaigne; (…) L'histoire, cette vieille dame exaltée et menteuse - de Maupassant.”

“You can think clearly only with your clothes on.”

“I am not your justification for existence.”

“Forgiving men is so much easier than forgiving women.”

“If we were all on trial for our thoughts, we would all be hanged.”

“If he wants to be an asshole, it's a free country. Millions before him have made the same life choice.”

“Potential has a shelf life.”

“A home filled with nothing but yourself. It's heavy, that lightness. It's crushing, that emptiness.”

“What am I living for and what am I dying for are the same question.”

“You think I'm not a goddess?
Try me.
This is a torch song.
Touch me and you'll burn.”

“I want to be held and told my name. I want to be valued, in ways that I am not; I want to be more than valuable. I repeat my former name; remind myself of what I once could do, how others saw me. I want to steal something.”

“There were a lot of gods. Gods always come in handy, they justify almost anything.”

“I knew what love was supposed to be: obsession with undertones of nausea.”

“The Eskimo has fifty-two names for snow because it is important to them; there ought to be as many for love.”

“I feel like the word shatter.”

“I lie on the floor, washed by nothing and hanging on. I cry at night. I am afraid of hearing voices, or a voice. I have come to the edge, of the land. I could get pushed over.”

“Happiness is a garden walled with glass: there's no way in or out. In Paradise there are no stories, because there are no journeys. It's loss and regret and misery and yearning that drive the story forward, along its twisted road.”

“People cry at weddings for the same reason they cry at happy endings: because they so desperately want to believe in something they know is not credible.”

“This is how the girl who couldn't speak and the man who couldn't see fell in love.”

“Nobody dies from the lack of sex. It's lack of love we die from.”

“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?”

“Maybe the life I think I'm living is a paranoid delusion… Sanity is a valuable possession; I hoard it the way people once hoarded money. I save it, so I will have enough, when the time comes.”

“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.”