Quotes from Margaret Atwood

She's just jealous, people say, as if jealousy is something minor. But it's not, it's the worst, it's the worst feeling there is - incoherent and confused and shameful, and at the same time self-righteous and focused and hard as glass, like a view through a telescope. A feeling of total concentration, but total powerlessness.

Sleep is the only rest we get; It's then we are at peace. We do not have to mop away the floor And wipe away the grease.

Think of an adaptation, any adaptation, and some animal somewhere will have thought of it first.

Canada is built on dead beavers.

There was a time when we didn't hug, after she'd told me about being gay; but then she said I didn't turn her on, reassuring me

Have I been conditioned to believe that if I am not solicitous, if I am not forthcoming, if I am not a never-ending cornicopia of entertaining delights, they will take their collections of milk-bottle tops and their mangy one-eared teddy bears and go away into the woods by themselves to play snipers? Probably. What my mother things was merely cute may have been lethal.

Smiles were hard; they could turn into grimaces or leers, but if you got a smile right, they'd spend extra for it. Amazing to remember, now, what people would once spend extra for.

She] smiles, too, and eats and drinks, and is happy, and outside the kitchen window the wind blows and the world shifts and crumbles and rearranges itself, and time goes on.

They were reducing us to animals—to penned-up animals—to our animal nature. They were rubbing our noses in that nature. We were to consider ourselves subhuman.

There were so many things that could be done to it or go wrong with it, this adult female body, that I was left feeling I would be better off without it.

T]he mothers who had sold their children felt empty and sad. They felt as if this act, done freely by themselves (no one had forced them, no one had threatened them) had not been performed willingly. They felt cheated as well, as if the price had been too low. Why hadn't they demanded more? And yet, the mothers told themselves, they'd had no choice.

The girls in the stories make such fools of themselves. They are so weak. They fall helplessly in love with the wrong men, they give in, they are jilted. Then they cry.

The witch is absolutely necessary.

We continued with lunch—dry sandwiches and something ruinous that had been done to tomatoes

He would like to get out of his own body for a while; he'd like to be somebody else.

Everything in his life was temporary, ungrounded. Language itself had lost its solidity; it had become thin, contingent, slippery, a viscid film on which he was sliding around like an eyeball on a plate. An eyeball that could still see, however. That was the trouble.

I believe in effort, but not in unnecessary effort: Aunt Vidala was most likely negotiating her exit from this world all on her own.

a flayed body untangled string by string and hung to the wall, an agonized banner displayed for the same reason flags are.

The north smells different from the city: clearer, thinner. You can see farther. A sawmill, a hill of sawdust, the teepee shape of a sawdust burner; the smokestacks of the copper smelters, the rocks around them bare of trees, burnt-looking, the heaps of blackened slag: I've forgotten about these things all winter, but here they are again, and when I see them I remember them, I know them, I greet them as if they are home.

Why is it that night falls, instead of rising, like the dawn?

in this world you have to take your bits and ends of kindness where you can find them, as they do not grow on trees.

Placidity and order and everything in its place, with a decorous and sanctioned violence going on underneath everything, like a heavy, brutal shoe tapping out the rhythm on a carpeted floor.

A lot of people call you a feminist painter. What indeed, I say. I hate party lines, I hate ghettos. Anyway. I'm too old to have invented it and you're too young to understand it, so what's the point of discussing it at all?

The problem is huge. We've just added seventy-five million people to the already large proportion of people in the world who are malnourished all the time, whose bodies are being starved.