Quotes from Margaret Atwood

I would like to be without shame. I would like to be shameless. I would like to be ignorant. Then I would not know how ignorant I was.

Time is not a line but a dimension, like the dimensions of space. If you can bend space you can bend time also, and if you knew enough and could move faster than light you could travel backward in time and exist in two places at once.

You refuse to own yourself, you permit others to do it for you

The body is so easily damaged, so easily disposed of, water and chemicals is all it is, hardly more to it than a jellyfish, drying on sand.

People dressed in a certain kind of clothing are never wrong. Also they never fart.

What a moron I was to think you were sweet and innocent, when it turns out you were actually college-educated the whole time!

Nevertheless, blood is thicker than water, as anyone knows who has tasted both.

The objects I chose were designed to hold something, but I didn't fill them up. They remained empty. They were little symbolic shrines to thirst.

I'm working on my own life story. I don't mean I'm putting it together; no, I'm taking it apart.

Happy endings are best achieved by keeping the right doors locked

You can wipe your feet on me, twist my motives around all you like, you can dump millstones on my head and drown me in the river, but you can't get me out of the story. I'm the plot, babe, and don't ever forget it.

We love each other, that's true whatever it means, but we aren't good at it; for some it's a talent, for others only an addiction.

I could see how you could do extreme things for the person you loved. Adam One said that when you loved a person, that love might not always get returned the way you wanted, but it was a good thing anyway because love went out all around you like an energy wave, and a creature you didn't know would be helped by it.

The best way of being kind to bears is not to be very close to them.

What's with her?" says the painter. "She's mad because she's a woman," Jon says. This is something I haven't heard for years, not since high school. Once it was a shaming thing to say, and crushing to have it said about you, by a man. It implied oddness, deformity, sexual malfunction. I go to the living room doorway. "I'm not mad because I'm a woman," I say. "I'm mad because you're an asshole.

Everyone thinks writers must know more about the inside of the human head, but that's wrong. They know less, that's why they write. Trying to find out what everyone else takes for granted.

Remember,' she'd tell her staff, 'every customer wants to feel like a princess, and princesses are selfish and overbearing.

Don't misunderstand me. I am not scoffing at goodness, which is far more difficult to explain than evil, and far more complicated. But sometimes it's hard to put up with.

These things you did were like prayers; you did them and you hoped they would save you. And for the most part they did. Or something did; you could tell by the fact that you were still alive.

What is your favorite word?" "And. It is so hopeful.

This above all, to refuse to be a victim. Unless I can do that I can do nothing.

Come away with me, he said, we will live on a desert island. I said, I am a desert island. It was not what he had in mind.

Karen wasn't hard, she was soft, too soft. A soft touch. Her hair was soft, her smile was soft, her voice was soft. She was so soft there was no resistance. Hard things sank into her, they went right through her, and if she made a real effort, out the other side. Then she didn't have to see them or hear them, or even touch them.

But maybe boredom is erotic, when women do it, for men.