Quotes from Margaret Atwood

Instead I will say, Take me to your trees. Take me to your breakfasts, your sunsets, your bad dreams, your shoes, your nouns. Take me to your fingers; take me to your deaths. These are worth it. These are what I have come for.

Lions don't know they are lions. They don't know how brave they are.

Eating Fire Eating fire is your ambition: to swallow the flame down take it into your mouth and shoot it forth, a shout or an incandescent tongue, a word exploding from you in gold, crimson, unrolling in a brilliant scroll To be lit up from within vein by vein To be the sun

But who can remember pain, once it's over?

He's lost something, some illusion I used to think was necessary to him. He's come to realize he too is human. Or is this a performance, for my benefit, to show me he's up-to-date? Maybe men shouldn't have been told about their own humanity. It's only made them uncomfortable. It's only made them trickier, slier, more evasive, harder to read.

You know I love you. You're the only one. She isn't the first woman he's ever said that to. He shouldn't have used it up so much earlier in his life, he shouldn't have treated it like a tool, a wedge, a key to open women. By the time he got around to meaning it, the words sounded fraudulent to him and he'd been ashamed to pronounce them.

When you can't tell the difference between your own pleasure and your pain then you're an addict.

I'm sorry there is so much pain in this story. I'm sorry it's in fragments, like a body caught in crossfire or pulled apart by force. But there is nothing I can do to change it. I've tried to put some of the good things in as well. Flowers, for instance, because where would we be without them?

a handful of crumpled stars

Can a single ant be said to be alive, in any meaningful sense of the word, or does it only have relevance in terms of its anthill?

I intend to get out of here. It can't last forever. Others have thought such things, in bad times before this, and they were always right, they did get out one way or another, and it didn't last forever. Although for them it may have lasted all the forever they had.

it's doors I'm afraid of because I can't see through them, its the door opening by itself in the wind I'm afraid of.

Things that are falling apart encourage me: whatever else, I'm in better shape than they are.

To take that risk, to offer life and remain alive, open yourself like this and become whole.

Art is long and life is brief and mortality looms.

Nature is an expert in cost-benefit analysis,' she says. 'Although she does her accounting a little differently. As for debts, she always collects in the long run...

Some of the best things are done by those with nowhere to turn, by those who don't have time, by those who truly understand the word helpless. they dispense no thought with the calculation of risk and profit, they take no thought for the future, they're forced to spearpoint into the present tense. Thrown over a precipice, you fall or else you fly; you clutch at any hope, however unlikely; however - if I may use such an overworked word - miraculous. What we mean by that is, Against all odds.

How can I have behaved so badly, so cruelly, so stupidly? you will ask. You yourself would never have done such things! But you yourself will never have had to.

Is that how we lived, then? But we lived as usual. Everyone does, most of the time. Whatever is going on is as usual. Even this is as usual, now. We lived, as usual, by ignoring. Ignoring isn't the same as ignorance, you have to work at it.

It was the thumbprints of human imperfection that used to move him, the flaws in the design: the lopsided smile, the wart next to the navel, the mole, the bruise. Was it consolation he'd had in mind, kissing the wound to make it better?

We battled in secret, undeclared, and after a while I no longer fought back because I never won. The only defense was flight, invisibility.

Not real can tell us about real.

There's more than one way to skin a cat, my father used to say; it bothered me, I didn't see why they would want to skin a cat even one way.

Soon it will be daybreak. Soon the day will break. I can't stop it from breaking in the same way it always does, and then from lying there broken; always the same day, which comes around again like clockwork. It begins with the day before the day before, and then the day before, and then it's the day itself. A Saturday. The breaking day. The day the butcher comes.