Quotes from Margaret Atwood

I tell, therefore you are.

But it can put a lot of pressure on a person to be told they need to be strong.

That is what you have to do before you kill, I thought. You have to create an it, where none was before.

This is the solstice, the still point of the sun, its cusp and midnight, the year's threshold and unlocking, where the past lets go of and becomes the future; the place of caught breath, the door of a vanished house left ajar...

I am tempted to think that to be despised by her sex is a very great compliment to a woman.

When I was younger I used to think that if I could hug myself tight enough I could make myself smaller, because there was never enough room for me, at home or anywhere, but if I was smaller then I would fit in.

Then sail, my fine lady, on the billowing wave - The water below is as dark as the grave, And maybe you'll sink in your little blue boat - It's hope, and hope only, that keeps us afloat

All observations of life are harsh, because life is. I lament that fact, but I cannot change it.

Kill what you can't save what you can't eat throw out what you can't throw out bury What you can't bury give away what you can't give away you must carry with you, it is always heavier than you thought.

I'll make you mine, lovers said in old books. They never said, I'll make you me.

I am alive, I live, I breathe, I put my hand out, unfolded, into the sunlight.

Falling in love, although it resulted in altered body chemistry and was therefore real, was a hormonally induced delusional state, according to him. In addition it was humiliating, because it put you at a disadvantage, it gave the love object too much power. As for sex per se, it lacked both challenge and novelty, and was on the whole a deeply imperfect solution to the problem of intergenerational genetic transfer.

Nobody is any authority on the fucks other people give

What breaks in daybreak? Is it the night? Is it the sun, cracked in two by the horizon like an egg, spilling out light?

Her glass wings are gone.

To go from a familiar thing, however undesirable, into the unknown, is always a matter for apprehension, and I suppose that is why so many people are afraid to die.

When power is scarce, a little of it is tempting.

We've learned to see the world in gasps.

I am not my childhood,' Snowman says out loud.

It's Paradise, but we can't get out of it. And anything you can't get out of is Hell.

Never mind. Point being that you don't have to get too worked up about us, dear educated minds. You don't have to think of us as real girls, real flesh and blood, real pain, real injustice. That might be too upsetting. Just discard the sordid part. Consider us pure symbol. We're no more real than money.

While he writes, I feel as if he is drawing me; or not drawing me, drawing on me - drawing on my skin - not with the pencil he is using, but with an old-fashioned goose pen, and not with the quill end but with the feather end. As if hundreds of butterflies have settled all over my face, and are softly opening and closing their wings.

Better not to invent her in her absence. Better to wait until she's actually here. Then he can make her up as she goes along.

As all historians know, the past is a great darkness, and filled with echoes. Voices may reach us from it; but what they say to us is imbued with the obscurity of the matrix out of which they come; and try as we may, we cannot always decipher them precisely in the clearer light of our day.