Quotes from Margaret Atwood

Human understanding is fallible, and we see through a glass, darkly. Any religion is a shadow of God. But the shadows of God are not God.

Just because there's a silence it doesn't mean that nothing is going on.

Freedom, like everything else, is relative.

Canadians are fond of a good disaster, especially if it has ice, water, or snow in it. You thought the national flag was about a leaf, didn't you? Look harder. It's where someone got axed in the snow.

It was like being in an elevator cut loose at the top. Falling, falling, and not knowing when you will hit.

The picture is of happiness, the story not. Happiness is a garden walled with glass: there's no way in or out. In Paradise there are no stories, because there are no journeys. It's loss and regret and misery and yearning that drive the story forward, along its twisted road.

You don't look back along time but down through it, like water. Sometimes this comes to the surface, sometimes that, sometimes nothing. Nothing goes away.

You can't buy it, but it has a price," said Oryx. "Everything has a price.

I wanted to forget the past, but it refused to forget me; it waited for sleep, then cornered me.

he might die for her, but living for her would be quite different.

By telling you anything at all I'm at least believing in you, believe you're there, I believe you into being. Because I'm telling you this story I will your existence. I tell, therefore you are. So I will go on. So I will myself to go on.

Madness is only an amplification of what you already are.

we must be a beacon of hope, because if you tell people there's nothing they can do, they will do worse than nothing.

You aren't sick & unhappy only alive & stuck with it.

He has to find more and better ways of occupying his time. His time, what a bankrupt idea, as if he's been given a box of time belonging to him alone, stuffed to the brim with hours and minutes that he can spend like money. Trouble is, the box has holes in it and the time is running out, no matter what he does with it.

I'm not sure which is worse: intense feeling, or the absence of it.

The inventor of the mirror did few of us any favours: we must have been happier before we knew what we looked like.

But my dreaming self refuses to be consoled. It continues to wander, aimless, homeless, alone. It cannot be convinced of its safety by any evidence drawn from my waking life.

I would like to believe this is a story I'm telling. I need to believe it. I must believe it. Those who can believe that such stories are only stories have a better chance. If it's a story I'm telling, then I have control over the ending. Then there will be an ending, to the story, and real life will come after it. I can pick up where I left off.

Every night when I go to bed I think, In the morning I will wake up in my own house and things will be back the way they were. It hasn't happened this morning, either.

The truth is seldom welcome, especially at dinner.

A man is just a woman's strategy for making other women. Not that your father wasn't a nice guy and all, but... there's something missing in them, even the nice ones. It's like they're permanently absent-minded, like they can't quite remember who they are. They look at the sky too much. They lose touch with their feet. They aren't a patch on a woman except they're better at fixing cars and playing football, just what we need for the improvement of the human race, right?

There's nothing like a shovel full of dirt to encourage literacy.

Perhaps its not the world that is soundless but we who are deaf.