Quotes from Margaret Atwood

I knelt to examine the floor, and there it was, in tiny writing, quite fresh it seemed, scratched with a pin or maybe just a fingernail, in the corner where the darkest shadow fell: Nolite te bastardes carborundorum.

I think that this is what God must look like: an egg. The life of the moon may not be on the surface, but inside.

But why bother about the end of the world? It's the end of the world every day, for someone. Time rises and rises, and when it reaches the level of your eyes you drown.

I had a boyfriend once who sent me--in a plastic bag, so it wouldn't drip--a real cow's heart with a real arrow stuck through it. As you may divine, he knew I was interested in poetry.

A Tennyson garden, heavy with scent, languid; the return of the word swoon.

You'll have to forgive me. I'm a refugee from the past, and like other refugees I go over the customs and habits of being I've left or been forced to leave behind me, and it all seems just as quaint, from here, and I am just as obsessive about it. Like a White Russian drinking tea in Paris, marooned in the twentieth century, I wander back, try to regain those distant pathways; I become too maudlin, lose myself. Weep. Weeping is what it is, not crying. I sit in this chair and ooze like a sponge.

Now maybe I wouldn't do it, but I was a child then, said Oryx more softly. Why are you so angry? I don't buy it, said Jimmy. Where was her rage, how far down was it buried, what did he have to do to dig it up? You don't buy what? Your whole fucking story. All this sweetness and acceptance and crap. If you don't want to buy that, Jimmy, said Oryx, looking at him tenderly, what is it that you would like to buy instead? (167)

I do not say making love, because this is not what he's doing. Copulating too would be inaccurate, because it would imply two people and only one is involved. Nor does rape cover it: nothing is going on here that I haven't signed up for. There wasn't a lot of choice, but there was some, and this is what I chose.

Farewells can be shattering, but returns are surely worse.

I am alive, I live, I breathe, I put my hand out, unfolded, into the sunlight. Where I am is not a prison but a privilege...

The stains on the mattress. Like dried flower petals. Not recent. Old love; there's no other kind of love in this room now.

A language is everything you do.

It's lack of love we die from.

I have failed once again to fulfill the expectations of others, which have become my own.

But mostly she likes the fact that there's a reason for every death, and only one murderer at a time, and things get figured out at the end, and the murderer always gets caught.

There's time to spare. This is one of the things I wasn't prepared for - the amount of unfilled time, the long parentheses of nothing. Time as white sound.

Already my childhood seemed far away—a remote age, faded and bittersweet, like dried flowers. Did I regret its loss, did I want it back? I didn't think so.

It's hard to be afraid of a man who is sitting watching you put on hand lotion.

My parents are like younger, urchinlike brothers and sisters whose faces are dirty and who blurt out humiliating things that can neither be anticipated nor controlled. I sigh and make the best of it. I feel I'm older than they are, much older. I feel ancient.

It isn't chic for women to be drunk. Men drunks are more excusable, more easily absolved, but why? It must be thought they have better reasons.

In case you're wondering, vanity never ends.

So few people understand about anything.

I don't even glance at the herbal teas, I go straight for the real, vile coffee. Jitter in a cup. It cheers me up to know I'll soon be so tense.

You need to be strong. They were trying to make things better. But it can put a lot of pressure on a person to be told they need to be strong.