Quotes from Margaret Atwood

Now here's a good one: you're lying on your deathbed. You have one hour to live. Who is it, exactly, you have needed all these years to forgive?

Nor does she attend conventions any more: she's seen enough kids dressed up like vampires and bunnies and Star Trek , and especially like the nastier villains of Alphinland. She really can't bear one more inept impersonation of Milzreth of the Red Hand – yet another apple-cheeked innocent in quest of his inner wickedness.

while he himself puts them on, like a sock over a foot, onto the stub of himself, his extra, sensitive thumb, his tentacle, his delicate, stalked slug's eye, which extrudes, expands, winces, and shrivels back into himself when touched wrongly, grows big again, bulging a little at the tip, traveling forward as if along a leaf, into them, avid for vision.

But it wasn't more honestly that would have saved me, I thought; it was more dishonesty. In my experience, honesty and expressing your feelings could lead to only one thing. Disaster.

By contrast, no one in Alphinland ever demanded a blowjob. But then, no one in Alphinland had a toilet either. Toilets weren't necessary. Why waste time on that kind of routine bodily function when there were giant scorpions invading the castle?

It's those other escapes, the ones you can open in yourself, given a cutting edge.

It did make a mess; but then, I don't think I'll ever be a very tidy person.

I wonder if I should let my hair go grey so my advice will be better.

the young are idealistic, have an underdeveloped sense of their own mortality, and are afflicted with an exaggerated thirst for justice.

It's theatre, Felix protests now, in his head. The art of true illusions! Of course it deals in traumatic situations! It conjures up demons in order to exorcise them! Haven't you read the Greeks? Does the word catharsis mean anything to you?

Let's pretend this, let's pretend that. 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.

She found herself stepping into ritual as if into a pair of stone shoes.

I don't sing like this often. It makes my throat hurt.

Where there are wars, there will be crows, the carrion-fanciers. And ravens too, the warbirds, the eyeball gourmands. And vultures, the holy birds of yore, old connoisseurs of rot.

What he couldn't have in life he might still catch sight of through his art: just a glimpse, from the corner of his eye

We use butter, I said. When we can get it. Or margarine. A lot of the time it's margarine. Butter, he said, musing. That's very clever. Butter. He laughed. I could have slapped him.

Well of course people cross genres all the time. You could have something called science-fiction-fantasy. Some galaxy far, far away and in another time with spaceships, but also dragons. And there's no rule that says you can't do that.

The light flickers on all of us and makes us look softer and more beautiful than we really are. But sometimes it makes us darker and scarier too, when the faces go into shadow and you can't see the eyes, only the eye sockets. Deep pools of blackness welling out of our heads. My

I'd been reading modern French novels, and William Faulkner as well. I knew what love was supposed to be: obsession, with undertones of nausea.

Roz is telling a story. That's what they will do, increasingly in their lives: tell stories. Tonight their stories will be about Zenia.

All of these men are thinking mostly about ruling and rulers. Who should rule, and how. Who should have power, how they should get it, and how they should use it.

B?rak?yorum, aks?n gözyaÅŸlar?m. Olan bu, aÄŸlama deÄŸil. Bir sandalyede oturup bir sünger gibi su s?zd?r?yorum.

They are entering the forest of amnesia, where things have lost their names.

Break the link in time between one generation and the next, and it's game over forever.