Quotes from Margaret Atwood

I walk away from him. It's enormously pleasing to me, this walking away. It's like being able to make people appear and vanish, at will.

I am not mad because I'm a woman... I'm mad because you're an asshole.

But hatred and viciousness are addictive. You can get high on them. Once you've had a little, you start shaking if you don't get more.

Maybe I don't really want to know what's going on. Maybe I'd rather not know. Maybe I couldn't bear to know. The Fall was a fall from innocence to knowledge.

Screw poetry, it's you I want, your taste, rain on you, mouth on your skin.

What you don't know won't hurt you. A dubious maxim: sometimes what you don't know can hurt you very much.

Remember that forgiveness too is a power. To beg for it is a power, and to withold or bestow it is a power, perhaps the greatest.

at last you, will say (maybe without speaking) (there are mountains inside your skull garden and chaos, ocean and hurricane; certain corners of rooms, portraits of great-grandmothers, curtains of a particular shade; your deserts; your private dinosaurs; the first woman) all i need to know: tell me everything just as it was from the beginning.

Ten days after the war ended, my sister Laura drove a car off a bridge.

It's better that way, and I am a great proponent of better. In the absence of best.

So Crake never remembered his dreams. It's Snowman that remembers them instead. Worse than remembers: he's immersed in them, he'd wading through them, he's stuck in them. Every moment he's lived in the past few months was dreamed first by Crake. No wonder Crake screamed so much.

I'm not used to girls, or familiar with their customs. I feel awkward around them, I don't know what to say. I know the unspoken rules of boys, but with girls I sense that I am always on the verge of some unforeseen, calamitous blunder.

It's his word against the Commander's, unless he wants to head a posse. Kick in the door, and what did I tell you? Caught in the act, sinfully Scrabbling. Quick, eat those words.

Maybe sadness was a kind of hunger, she thought. Maybe the two went together.

I´ll take care of it, Luke said. And because he said it instead of her, I knew it meant kill. That is what you have to do before you kill, I thought. You have to create an it, where none was before. You do that first, in your head, and then you make it real. So that´s how they do it, I thought. I seemed never to have known that before.

Why are we designed to see the world as supremely beautiful just as we're about to be snuffed? Do rabbits feel the same as the fox teeth bite down on their necks? Is it mercy?

Craziness was considered funny, like all other things that were in reality frightening and profoundly shameful.

If your not annoying somebody, you're not alive.

Your hand is a warm stone I hold between two words.

But this is wrong, nobody dies from lack of sex. It's lack of love we die from.

I was unfair to him, of course, but where would I have been without unfairness? In thrall, in harness. Young women need unfairness, it's one of their few defenses. They need their callousness, they need their ignorance. They walk in the dark, along the edges of high cliffs, humming to themselves, thinking themselves invulnerable.

I don't know why they are all so eager to be remembered. What good will it do them? There are some things that should be forgotten by everyone, and never spoken of again.

I would rather dance as a ballerina, though faultily, than as a flawless clown.

You can't help what you feel, Moira said once, but you can help how you behave.