Quotes from Margaret Atwood

I'm developing a knack for this, I can sniff out hidden misery in others now with hardly any effort at all.

I buy licorice whips, jelly beans, many-layered blackballs with the seed in the middle, packages of fizzy sherbet you suck up through a straw. I dole them out equally, these offerings, these atonements, into the waiting hands of my friends. In the moment just before giving, I am loved.

This above all, to refuse to be a victim. Unless I can do that, I can do nothing. I have to recant, give up the old belief that I am powerless and and because of it nothing I can do will ever hurt anyone. A lie which was always more disastrous than the truth would have been.

Romania, for instance, had anticipated Gilead in the eighties by banning all forms of birth control, imposing compulsory pregnancy tests on the female population, and linking promotion and wage increases to fertility.

Blood is thinner than money.

The palliative care nurses welcome him: he's a spot of brightness, they claim he keeps the patients interested in life. We don't think of the clients here as dying, one of them said to him on his first visit. After all everyone's dying, just some of us more slowly.

Nothing safer than dead

With you I could have more than one skin, a blank interior, a repertoire of untold stories, a fresh beginning.

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.

the wife was as old as her own mother, almost, and women like that did not really have lives.

Chewing with my mind full. Stuff comes out my mouth." And

It's like a fart in church.

My mother had a thing for blue in tableware; she said it warded off any evil eyes intent on ruining the food.

It was love, after all, that rubbed the skins from their gray cheeks, crippled their fingers, snarled their hair, brown or dull gold. Hate would merely have smashed them.

It is better to journey than to arrive, as long as we journey in firm faith and for selfless ends.

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

The books I was given to learn from were about a boy and a girl called Dick and Jane. The books were very old, and the pictures had been altered at Ardua Hall. Jane wore long skirts and sleeves, but you could tell from the places where the paint had been applied that her skirt had once been above her knees and her sleeves had ended above her elbows. Her hair had once been uncovered.

Acting up , a peculiar phrase. It's what people say to minimize the gravity of their condition. It implies that the offending part (heart, stomach, liver, whatever) is a fractious, bratty child, which can be brought into line with a slap or a sharp word. At the same time, that these symptoms--these tremors and pains, these palpitations--are mere theatrics, and that the organ in question will soon stop capering about and making a spectacle of itself, and resume its placid, off-stage existence.

You can see it in her eyes: I am not there. But she exists, in her white dress. She grows and lives. Isn't that a good thing? A blessing? Still, I can't bear it, to have been erased like that.

I'm eating a wing. It's the wing of a tame turkey, the stupidest bird in the world. So stupid it can't even fly anymore. I am eating lost flight.

I had no direction in life, and I felt numb inside, like an orphan.

Mom, who knew the dirt, and hid the dirt, and did the dirty work, and never saw herself or us as clean enough – and who believed that there was other dirt you shouldn't tell to children, and didn't tell it, which was dangerous only later.

I knew his hug was acting, but at that moment I didn't care. I really did feel almost as if he was my first boyfriend. It wasn't much, but it was something.

We miss you, Mom, though you were reviled to great profit in magazines and books for ruining your children – that would be us – by not loving them enough, by loving them too much, by wanting too much love from them, by some failure of love –