Quotes from Margaret Atwood

But when you cross over the border, it is like passing through air, you wouldn't know you'd done it; as the trees on both sides of it are the same.

I had no faith in the wise choices of the Aunts: I feared that I would end up married to a goat on fire.

A Plan to Eliminate the Female Emigrant Problem in the North-Eastern Seaboard Territories. It outlined the steps necessary for the trapping of fugitive Handmaids en route to Canada, and called for the declaration of a National Emergency, plus a doubling of tracker dogs and a more efficient system of interrogation.

But I know this isn't true. It is just passing the buck, as children do, to mothers. I've mourned for her already. But I will do it again, and again.

A universe that includes you cant be all bad, but does it? at this distance you're a mirage

And did you feel protected?

Love comes in waves like the ocean, a sickness which goes on & on, a hollow cave in the head, filling & pounding

the ladies who were going in, frightened by the first signs of droop and pucker, then going out again, buffed and tightened and resurfaced, irradiated and resurfaced. But still frightened, because when might the whole problem - the whole thing - start happening to them again? The whole signs-of-mortality thing. The whole thing thing. Nobody likes it, thought Toby - being a body, a thing.

he often talked to himself and he was the best conversationalist he knew; [...]

The Fall was ongoing, but its trajectory led ever downward. Sucked

The SanctuCare women went over and welcomed them and said, "You're here now, it's all right," and the Gilead women started to cry. At the time I thought, Why cry, you should be happy, you got out. But after all that's happened to me since that day, I understand why. You hold it in, whatever it is, until you can make it through the worst part. Then, once you're safe, you can cry all the tears you couldn't waste time crying before.

We would have children. Although we knew it wasn't too likely we could ever afford it, it was something to talk about, a game for Sundays. Such freedom now seems almost weightless.

Anyway, you don't know what's going to happen. I'm only just thickening the plot. --I'd say it was pretty thick already. Thick plots are my specialty. If you want a thinner kind, look elsewhere.

What well-to-do and once-young, once-beautiful woman or man, cranked up on hormonal supplements and shot full of vitamins but hampered by the unforgiving mirror, wouldn't sell their house, their gated retirement villa, their kids, and their soul to get a second kick at the sexual can?

L'essere sana di mente è un patrimonio che accumulo come un tempo la gente accumulava il denaro. Lo tengo da parte, per quando sarà il momento.

Live performance had suffered in the sabotage panics of the early twenty-first century – no one during those decades had wanted to form part of a large group at a public event in a dark, easily destructible walled space, or no one with any cool or status.

she was beginning to emerge from the initial sex-induced coma created by him through

When did the body first set out on its own adventures? Snowman thinks; after having ditched its old travelling companions, the mind and the soul, for whom it had once been considered a mere corrupt vessel or else a puppet acting out their dramas for them, or else bad company, leading the other two astray.

How did she end up in this madhouse? By putting one foot in front of the other and never taking her eyes off her feet. You could end up anywhere that way.

Words," he said, looking in my direction finally but with his eyes strangely unfocussed, as though he was really looking at a point several inches beneath my skin, "are beginning to lose their meanings.

I didn't want realism anyway: I wanted things to be highly coloured, simple in outline, without ambiguity, which is what most children want when it comes to the stories of their parents. They want a postcard.

Whatever our shapes and features, we were snares and enticements despite ourselves, we were the innocent and blameless causes that through our very nature could make men drunk with lust, so that they'd stagger and lurch and topple over the verge—The verge of what? we wondered. Was it like a cliff?—and go plunging down in flames, like snowballs made of burning sulphur hurled by the angry hand of God.

Time passed. I gardened, I read, and so on. I had already begun—in a modest way, and beginning with a few pieces of animal jewellery from Richard—the trade in second-hand artifacts that, as it turned out, would stand me in good stead in the coming decades. A semblance of normality had been installed. But unshed tears can turn you rancid. So can memory. So can biting your tongue. My bad nights were beginning. I couldn't sleep.

I don't think I've ever changed clothes so fast in my life, but once I got the silver dress off and those clothes on I began to feel more like myself.