Quotes from Margaret Atwood

She is the witch you burned by daylight and crept from your home to consult & bribe at night. The love that tortured you you blamed on her.

She's taken to renaming him according to her own analysis of his mood of the day, or his mood of the hour, or his mood of the minute: according to her, he's moody. Each mood is personified and given an honorific, so he's Mr. Grumpy, Mr. Sleepy, Dr. Ironic, Sir Sardonic, and sometimes, when she's being sarcastic or possibly nostalgic, Mr. Romantic.

He was always so plausible. Many people have believed that his version of events was the true one, give or take a few murders, a few beautiful seduct­resses, a few one-eyed monsters. Even I believed him, from time to time. I knew he was tricky and a liar, I just didn't think he would play his tricks and try out his lies on me.

I swam, the sea was boundless, I saw no shore. Tanit was merciless, my prayers were answered. O you who drown in love, remember me. —INSCRIPTION ON A CARTHAGINIAN FUNERARY URN

Being able to read and write did not provide the answers to all questions. It led to other questions, and then to others.

He wouldn't have much of a life out there, picking through garbage dumps and fighting off scavengers, but at least he'd be in charge of himself again.

All you have to do, I tell myself, is keep your mouth shut and look stupid. It shouldn't be that hard.

The bad bones have been bad, so they are better left unsaid. They are better left unsaying. But they were never happy, they always wanted more, they were always hungry. They can smell the words, the words coming out of your mouth all warm and yeasty. They want some words of their own. They'll be back.

Stories are no good, not even the short ones, because by the time you get to the second page he's forgotten the beginning. Where are we without our plots?

Florida's not the hick town you keep saying it is," says Reynolds. "Times have changed; they've got good universities now and a great book festival! Thousands of people come to it!

Here is what I'd like to tell. I'd like to tell a story about how Moira escaped, for good this time. Or if I couldn't tell that, I'd like to say she blew up Jezebel's, with fifty Commanders inside it. I'd like her to end with something daring and spectacular, some outrage, something that would befit her. But as far as I know that didn't happen. I don't know how she ended, or even if she did, because I never saw her again.

That was the trouble with Blood and Roses: it was easier to remember the Blood stuff. The other trouble was that the Blood player usually won, but winning meant you inherited a wasteland. This

If only he could be like that – intellectually honourable. Another baffling item on the cryptic report card his mother toted around in some mental pocket, the report card on which he was always just barely passing.

How little time it takes to change a face: carve it like wood, harden it.

nothing is more opaque than absolute transparency. Look--my feet don't hit the marble! Like breath or a balloon, I'm rising, I hover six inches in the air in my blazing swan-egg of light. You think I'm not a goddess? Try me. This is a torch song. Touch me and you'll burn.

Of course she was very beautiful. It was claimed she'd come out of an egg, being the daughter of Zeus who'd raped her mother in the form of a swan. She was quite stuck-up about it, was Helen. I wonder how many of us really believed that swan-rape concoction?

Are you a smuggler? [...] He laughed. Borders - lines on a map. Things move across, people too. I'm just the delivery boy.

I suppose you're wondering what happened to the mirror,' he said. 'Well …' 'I smashed it. Last week. With the frying-pan.' 'Oh,' she said.

Some of the best things are done by those with nowhere to turn.

History isn't dry, it's sticky, it can get all over your hands.

but it is my true belief that it was the doctor that killed her with his knife; him and the gentleman between them. For it is not always the one that strikes the blow, that is the actual murderder;

God isn't what they say," she said. She said you could believe in Gilead or you could believe in God, but not both.

That is how we writers all started: by reading. We heard the voice of a book speaking to us.

I'm nothing more than a woman of sand, left by a careless child too near the water. I have been obliterated for her. I am only a shadow now, far back behind the glib shiny surface of this photograph. A shadow of a shadow, as dead mothers become. You can see it in her eyes: I am not there.