Margaret Atwood citations

Page 7

“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.”

“Perhaps its not the world that is soundless but we who are deaf.”

“You can’t buy it, but it has a price,” said Oryx. “Everything has a price.”

“I’m not sure which is worse: intense feeling, or the absence of it.”

“All observations of life are harsh, because life is. I lament that fact, but I cannot change it.”

“Better not to invent her in her absence. Better to wait until she's actually here. Then he can make her up as she goes along.”

“Her glass wings are gone.”

“I am not my childhood,' Snowman says out loud.”

“They seemed to be able to choose. We seemed to be able to choose, then. We were a society dying of too much choice.”

“Madness is only an amplification of what you already are.”

“It was like being in an elevator cut loose at the top. Falling, falling, and not knowing when you will hit.”

“Every night when I go to bed I think, In the morning I will wake up in my own house and things will be back the way they were.
It hasn’t happened this morning, either.”

“How furious she must be, now that she's been taken at her word.”

“By telling you anything at all I'm at least believing in you, I believe you're there, I believe you into being.”

“Where do the words go
when we have said them?”

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

“Whatever is silenced will clamor to be heard, though silently.”

“How were we to know we were happy?”

“Kill what you can't save
what you can't eat throw out
what you can't throw out bury

What you can't bury give away
what you can't give away you must carry with you,
it is always heavier than you thought.”

“That is what you have to do before you kill, I thought. You have to create an it, where none was before.”

“You refuse to own yourself, you permit others to do it for you”

“… we must be a beacon of hope, because if you tell people there's nothing they can do, they will do worse than nothing.”

“I'll make you mine, lovers said in old books. They never said, I'll make you me.”

“One of the gravestones in the cemetery near the earliest church has an anchor on it and an hourglass, and the words In Hope.

In Hope. Why did they put that above a dead person? Was it the corpse hoping, or those still alive?”

“There's blood, a taste I remember. It tastes of orange popsicles, penny gumballs, red licorice, gnawed hair, dirty ice.”

“Inside the peach, there is a stone.”

“Just because there's a silence it doesn't mean that nothing is going on.”

“Why is it he feels some line has been crossed, some boundary transgressed? How much is too much, how far is too far?”

“There is no fool like an educated fool…”

“So much better to travel than to arrive.”