Quotes from Margaret Atwood

You want the truth, of course. You want me to put two and two together. But two and two doesn't necessarily get you the truth. Two and two equals a voice outside the window. Two and two equals the wind. The living bird is not its labeled bones.

I believe that everyone else my age is an adult whereas I am merely in disguise.

If I thought this would never happen again I would die. But this is wrong, nobody dies from lack of sex. It's lack of love we die from.

Toast was a pointless invention from the Dark Ages. Toast was an implement of torture that caused all those subjected to it to regurgitate in verbal form the sins and crimes of their past lives. Toast was a ritual item devoured by fetishists in the belief that it would enhance their kinetic and sexual powers. Toast cannot be explained by any rational means. Toast is me. I am toast.

We are survivors, of each other. We have been shark to one another, but also lifeboat. That counts for something.

Our heaven is their hell, said God. I like a balanced universe.

When you're unhinged, things make their way out of you that should be kept inside, and other things get in that ought to be shut out. The locks lose their powers. The guards go to sleep. The passwords fail.

I planned my death carefully, unlike my life, which meandered along from one thing to another, despite my feeble attempts to control it.

A man is just a woman's strategy for making other women.

So much for endings. Beginnings are always more fun. True connoisseurs, however, are known to favor the stretch in between, since it's the hardest to do anything with. That's about all that can be said for plots, which anyway are just one thing after another, a what and a what and a what.

But in the end, back she comes. There's no use resisting. She goes to him for amnesia, for oblivion. She renders herself up, is blotted out; enters the darkness of her own body, forgets her name. Immolation is what she wants, however briefly. To exist without boundaries.

Genius is an infinite capacity for causing pain.

The night is mine, my own time, to do with it as I will, as long as I am quiet. As long as I don't move. As long as I lie still. The difference between lie and lay . Lay is always passive.

And how easily a hand becomes a fist.

So this was the rest of his life. It felt like a party to which he'd been invited, but at an address he couldn't actually locate. Someone must be having fun at it, this life of his; only, right at the moment, it wasn't him.

Now that I am dead, I know everything.

Ah men, why do you want all this attention? I can write poems for myself, make love to a doorknob if absolutely necessary. What do you have to offer me I can't find otherwise except humiliation? Which I no longer need.

He doesn't understand yet that guilt comes to you not from the things you've done, but from the things that others have done to you.

It wasn't so easy though, ending the war. A war is a huge fire; the ashes from it drift far, and settle slowly.

There's always something to occupy the inquiring mind.

The small details of life often hide a great significance.

Can I be blamed for wanting a real body, to put my arms around? Without it I too am disembodied. I can listen to my own heartbeat against the bedsprings...but there's something dead about it, something deserted.

Little girls are cute and small only to adults. To one another they are not cute. They are life sized.

When they're gone out of his head, these words, they'll be gone, everywhere, forever. As if they had never been.