Quotes from Margaret Atwood

How easy it is to invent a humanity, for anyone at all. What an available temptation.

How can I teach her some way of being human that won't destroy her I would like to tell her, Love is enough, I would like to say, Find shelter in another skin. I would like to say, Dance and be happy. Instead I will say in my crone's voice, Be ruthless when you have to, tell the truth when you can, when you can see it.

I wish I was ignorant, so I didn't know how ignorant I am

They didn't realize that her clumsiness was not the ordinary kind, not poor coordination. It was just because she wasn't sure where the edges of her body ended and the rest of the world began.

There is never only one, of anyone

You are a woman with a man inside watching a woman. You are your own voyeur.

But maybe, underneath, she loves him too much. Maybe it's her excessive love that pushes him away.

Giving up was the new normal, and I have to say it was catching.

underlings given sudden power frequently become the worst abusers of it.

He drowned his sorrows, though like other drowned things they had a habit of floating to the surface when least expected.

He considers me also a little fragile because artistic. I need to be cared for, like a potted plant.

Experiences were what you got when you couldn't get what you wanted.

My own view of myself was that I was small and innocuous, a marshmallow compared to the others. I was a poor shot with a 22, for instance, and not very good with an ax. It took me a long time to figure out that the youngest in a family of dragons is still a dragon from the point of view of those who find dragons alarming.

I, too, was once like you: fatally hooked on life.

I was buying time. One is always buying something.

She doesn't think it's a good idea to know the future, because you can hardly ever change it, so why suffer twice?

I've been prepared for almost anything; except absence, except silence.

What is the real breath of a man — the breathing out or the breathing in?

More powerful than God, more evil than the Devil; the poor have it, the rich lack it, and if you eat it you die?

But thoughtless ingratitude is the armour of the young; without it, how would they ever get through life? The old wish the young well, but they wish them ill also: they would like to eat them up, and absorb their vitality, and remain immortal themselves. Without the protection of surliness and levity, all children would be crushed by the past - the past of others, loaded on their shoulders. Selfishness is their saving grace.

Things might have been different if she hadn't been able to drift; if she'd had to concentrate on her next meal, instead of dwelling on all the injuries she felt we'd done her. An unearned income encourages self-pity in those already prone to it.

and the evening was so beautiful, that it made a pain in my heart, as when you cannot tell wether you are happy or sad; and I thought that if I could have a wish, it would be that nothing would ever change, and we would stay that way forever.

We are a society dying, said Aunt Lydia, of too much choice.

I tried to visualize my jealousy as a yellowy-brown cloud boiling around inside me, then going out through my nose like smoke and turning into a stone and falling down into the ground. That did work a little. But in my visualization a plant covered with poison berries would grow out of the stone, whether I wanted it to or not.