Quotes from Margaret Atwood

Those walls and bars are there for a reason," said Crake. "Not to keep us out, but to keep them in. Mankind needs barriers in both cases." "Them?" "Nature and God." "I thought you didn't believe in God," said Jimmy. "I don't believe in Nature either," said Crake. "Or not with a capital N.

I hunger to commit the act of touch.

Good writing takes place at intersections, at what you might call knots, at places where the society is snarled or knotted up.

Death is much too high a price to pay for the satisfaction of curiosity, needless to say.

Even sex was no longer what it had once been, though he was still as addicted to it as ever. He felt jerked around by his own dick, as if the rest of him was merely an inconsequential knob that happened to be attached to one end of it. Maybe the thing would be happier if left to roam around on its own.

People need such stories, because however dark, a darkness with voices in it is better than a silent void.

Walking into the crowd was like sinking into a stew - you became an ingredient, you took on a certain flavour.

How tedious is a tyranny in the throes of enactment. It's always the same plot.

I have periods now, like normal girls; I too am among the knowing, I too can sit out volleyball games and go to the nurse's for aspirin and waddle along the halls with a pad like a flattened rabbit tail wadded between my legs, sopping with liver-colored blood.

In theory I can do almost anything; certainly I have been told how. In practice I do as little as possible. I pretend to myself that I would be quite happy in a hermit's cave, living on gruel, if someone else would make the gruel. Gruel, like so many other things, is beyond me.

We may call Eurydice forth from the world of the dead, but we cannot make her answer; and when we turn to look at her we glimpse her only for a moment, before she slips from our grasp and flees. 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 own day.

Moira was like an elevator with open sides. She made us dizzy.

I don't want to look at something that determines me so completely.

When you alter yourself, the alterations become the truth...

But if you happen to be a man, sometime in the future, and you've made it this far, please remember: you will never be subject to the temptation or feeling you must forgive, a man, as a woman. It's difficult to resist, believe me. But remember that forgiveness too is a power. To beg for it is a power, and to withhold or bestow it is a power, perhaps the greatest.

Your friend is intellectually honourable, Jimmy's mother would say. He doesn't lie to himself.

This puts him in an instructive mood, and I can see he is going to teach me something, which gentlemen are fond of doing.

But sins must not be overlooked simply because the sinner is skilled.

But reality has too much darkness in it. Too many crows

His father was self-made, but his mother was constructed by others, and such edifices are notoriously fragile.

I suppose it's everyone's fate to be reduced to quaintness by those younger than themselves.

You couldn't leave words lying around where our enemies might find them.

And then she began to cry, and when I asked her why she was doing that, she said it was because I was to have a happy ending, and it was just like a book; and I wondered what books she'd been reading.

You don't believe the sky is falling until a chunk of it falls on you.