Quotes from Margaret Atwood

that's what Hiltler exemplified: not the triumph of evil but the failure of reason.

What restless woman can resist a man with a shovel in one hand and a glowing rose bush in the other, and a moderately crazed glitter in his eyes that might be mistaken for love?

For years I wanted to be older, and now I am.

Now the flesh arranges itself differently. I'm a cloud, congealed around a center object, the shape of a pear, which is hard and more real than I am and glows red within its translucent wrapping. Inside it is a space, huge as the sky at night and dark and curved like that, though black-red rather than black. Pinpoints of light swell, sparkle, burst and shrivel within it, countless as stars. Every month there is a moon, gigantic, round, heavy, an omen.

She who pays the undertaker calls the tune.

But it seems she'd wanted children after all, because when she was told she'd been accidentally sterilized she could feel all the light leaking out of her.

For the children with their greedy little mouths represent the future, which like time itself will devour all now alive.

I guess you get all my money, I said. And I'm not even dead. I was trying for a joke, but it came out sounding macabre. Hush, he said. He was still kneeling on the floor. You know I'll always take care of you. I thought, already he's starting to patronize me. Then I thought, already you're starting to get paranoid.

If there were no emptiness, there would be no life.

She had her reasons. Not that they were the same as anybody else's reasons.

I admired my mother in some ways, although things between us were never easy. She expected too much from me, I felt. She expected me to vindicate her life for her, and the choices she'd made. I didn't want to live my life on her terms. I didn't want to be the model offspring, the incarnation of her ideas. We used to fight about that. I am not your justification for existence, I said to her once.

If you can't say anything nice, don't say anything at all.

A voice is a human gift; it should be cherished and used, to utter fully human speech as possible. Powerlessness and silence go together.

Walking along past the store windows, into which she peers with her usual eagerness, her usual sense that maybe, today, she will discover behind them something that will truly be worth seeing, she feels as if her feet are not on cement at all but on ice. The blade of the skate floats, she knows, on a thin film of water, which it melts by pressure and which freezes behind it. This is the freedom of the present tense, this sliding edge.

Some people write letters, in the library.

There are to be no toeholds for love. We are two-legged wombs, that's all: sacred vessels, ambulatory chalices.

And sometimes it happened, for a time. That kind of love comes and goes and is hard to remember afterwards, like pain. You would look at the man one day and you would think, I loved you, and the tense would be past, and you would be filled with a sense of wonder, because it was such an amazing and precarious and dumb thing to have done; and you would know too why your friends had been evasive about it, at the time. There is a good deal of comfort, now, in remembering this.

Her metaphors for her children included barnacles encrusting a ship and limpets clinging to a rock.

Nature full strength is more than we can take, Adam One used to say. It's a potent hallucinogen, a soporific, for the untrained Soul. We're no longer at home in it. We need to dilute it. We can't drink it straight. And God is the same. Too much God and you overdose. God needs to be filtered.

The tulips along the border are redder than ever, opening, no longer wine cups but chalices; thrusting themselves up, to what end? They are, after all, empty. When they are old they turn themselves inside out, explode slowly, the petals thrown like shards.

That way nobody feels exploited." "Wait a minute," says Stan. "Nobody's exploited?" "I said nobody feels exploited," says Budge. "Different thing.

The way love feels is always only approximate. 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.

though the real question is whether or not I will make you immortal.

On the edge of sleep I thought: It's as if I never existed, because no trace of me remains, I have left no marks. And that way I cannot be followed. It is almost the same as being innocent. And then I slept.