Margaret Atwood citations

Page 4

“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.”

“Truly amazing, what people can get used to, as long as there are a few compensations.”

“is a futile word. It's about what didn't happen. It belongs in a parallel universe. It belongs in another dimension of space.”

“Every habit he's ever had is still there in his body, lying dormant like flowers in the desert. Given the right conditions, all his old addictions would burst into full and luxuriant bloom.”

“They spent the first three years of school getting you to pretend stuff and then the rest of it marking you down if you did the same thing.”

“What we share may be a lot like a traffic accident but we get one another. We are survivors of each other. We have been shark to one another, but also lifeboat. That counts for something.”

“It isn't running away they're afraid of. We wouldn't get far. It's those other escapes, the ones you can open in yourself, given a cutting edge.”

“You can't help what you feel, but you can help how you behave”

“Why is it we want so badly to memorialize ourselves? Even while we're still alive. We wish to assert our existence, like dogs peeing on fire hydrants.”

“And yet it disturbs me to learn I have hurt someone unintentionally. I want all my hurts to be intentional.”

“Old lovers go the way of old photographs, bleaching out gradually as in a slow bath of acid: first the moles and pimples, then the shadings. Then the faces themselves, until nothing remains but the general outlines.”

“I believe in the resistance as I believe there can be no light without shadow; or rather, no shadow unless there is also light.”

“Happy as a clam, is what my mother says for happy. I am happy as a clam: hard-shelled, firmly closed.”

“What fabrications they are, mothers. Scarecrows, wax dolls for us to stick pins into, crude diagrams. We deny them an existence of their own, we make them up to suit ourselves -- our own hungers, our own wishes, our own deficiencies.”

“Nature is to zoos as God is to churches.”

“Nothing changes instantaneously: in a gradually heating bathtub you'd be boiled to death before you knew it.”

“Why does the mind do such things? Turn on us, rend us, dig the claws in. If you get hungry enough, they say, you start eating your own heart. Maybe it's much the same.”

“The true story is vicious and multiple and untrue after all. Why do you need it? Don’t ever ask for the true story.”

“They wore blouses with buttons down the front that suggested the possibilities of the word. These women could be undone; or not. They seemed to be able to choose.”

“To want is to have a weakness.”

“All it takes,” said Crake, “is the elimination of one generation. One generation of anything. Beetles, trees, microbes, scientists, speakers of French, whatever. Break the link in time between one generation and the next, and it’s game over forever.”

“I feel like cotton candy: sugar and air. Squeeze me and I’d turn into a small sickly damp wad of weeping pinky-red.”

“After everything that's happened, how can the world still be so beautiful? Because it is.”

“Modesty is invisibility… Never forget it. To be seen—to be—is to be… penetrated. What you must be girls, is impenetrable.”

“Time folds you in its arms and gives you one last kiss, and then it flattens you out and folds you up and tucks you away until it's time for you to become someone else's past time, and then time folds again.”

“Cleverness is a quality a man likes to have in his wife as long as she is some distance away from him. Up close, he'll take kindness any day of the week, if there's nothing more alluring to be had.”

“In the end, we'll all become stories.”

“I was sand, I was snow—written on, rewritten, smoothed over.”

“They will not let you have peace, they don't want you to have anything they don't have themselves.”

“We thought we were running away from the grownups, and now we are the grownups.”