Quotes from Margaret Atwood

Maybe none of this is about control. Maybe it isn't really about who can own whom, who can do what to whom and get away with it, even as far as death. Maybe it isn't about who can sit and who has to kneel or stand or lie down, legs spread open. Maybe it's about who can do what to whom and be forgiven for it. Never tell me it amounts to the same thing.

your name is like your telephone number, useful only to others; but

But once you've climbed a ladder, what use is it? You kick it away, if you don't intend to go down it again.

I try not to think too much. Like other things now, thought must be rationed. There's a lot that doesn't bear thinking about.

Science fiction, to me, has not only things that wouldn't happen, but other planets.

He shouldn't have let himself be caged in here, walled off from freedom. But what does freedom mean any more? And who had caged him and walled him off? He'd done it himself. So many small choices.

I finished my tea. This was the moment, I felt, when I should thank him graciously for his kindness and leave. Otherwise we would have to exchange the stories of our lives and I was too depressed about mine to want to do that.

She resented, too, the nurse, or the many nurses, who had tended my father in the various hospitals. She wished him to owe his recovery to her alone - to her care, to her tireless devotion. That is the other side of selflessness: its tyranny.

whose life am I living. Whose life am I failing to live

Expand your world. (Stories about wizards and spells) are very frequently about power relationships...

I hope she won't destroy him, thought Felix. But he's a con man, don't forget. A con man playing an actor. A double unreality.

When you are sad it is best to change the subject.

Writers are much better behaved nowadays, for a couple of reasons. Once upon a time nobody was thinking of a career, unless you lived in New York, so there wasn't as much pressure to present a respectable exterior. And secondly, there was no social media. So if you were found face down on the floor – people did do that quite a bit; usually men, but not always – or fell through plate glass windows or got into scrapes, it became a rumour, and rumours are hard to pin down.

but after a time it will. It will become ordinary.

The truth may well turn out to be stranger than we think," says Simon. "It may be that much of what we are accustomed to describe as evil, and evil freely chosen, is instead an illness due to some lesion of the nervous system, and that the Devil himself is simply a malformation of the cerebrum.

I would have to go into the tunnel whether I wanted to or not - the tunnel was the road of going on, and there was more of the road on the other side of it - but the entrance was where [my teacher] had to stop. Inside the tunnel was what I was meant to learn

I thought she'd get angry then, but all she said was, "You are not unique in the universe. No one has an easy time in life. But maybe God has effed up—as you put it—your life for a reason." "And I can hardly fucking wait to find out what that is," I said.

He liked to imagine that if he hadn't been a minor, and she his teacher and subject to abuse charges, she'd have been gnawing her way through his bedroom walls to sink her avid fingers into his youthful flesh.

The personal is not political, thinks Tony: the personal is military. War is what happens when language fails.

listen. the leaves no longer rustle, the wind no longer sighs, our hearts no longer beat. They've fallen silent. Fallen, as if into the earth. Or is it we who have fallen? Perhaps it's not the world that is soundless but we who are dear. What membrane seals us off from the music we used to dance to? Why can't we hear?

God made them that way but He did not make you that way. He made you different. It's up to you to set the boundaries.

Mother, I think. Wherever you may be. Can you hear me? You wanted a women's culture. Well, now there is one. It isn't what you meant, but it exists. Be thankful for small mercies.

And it's late at night: a cloudless night, as I observed while walking here. The full moon is out, casting her equivocal corpse-glow over all.

She would rather see for herself; she doesn't trust Tobias to interpret; she suspects him of holding things back.