Quotes from Margaret Atwood

I stand holding the apple in both hands. It feels precious, like a heavy treasure. I lift it up and smell it. It has such an odour of outdoors on it I want to cry.

No one ever told you greed and hunger are not the same.

Love was like a steamroller. There was no avoiding it, it went over you and you came out flat.

Then I find I'm not ashamed after all. I enjoy the power; power of a dog bone, passive but there. I hope they get hard at the sight of us and have to rub themselves against the painted barriers, surreptitiously. They will suffer, later, at night, in their regimented beds. They have no outlets now except themselves, and that's a sacrilege.

Falling in love,' we said; 'I fell for him.' We were falling women. We believed in it, this downward motion; so lovely, like flying, and yet at the same time so dire, so extreme, so unlikely. 'God is love,' they once said, but we reversed that, and love, like heaven, was always just around the corner. The more difficult it was to love the particular man beside us, the more we believed in Love, abstract and total. We were waiting, always, for the incarnation. That word, made flesh.

It was Crake preserving his dignity, because the alternative would have been losing it.

Each thing is valid and really there. It is through a field of such valid objects that I must pick my way, every day and in every way. I put a lot of effort into making such distinctions. I need to make them. I need to be very clear, in my own mind.

Writing is work. It's also gambling. You don't get a pension plan. Other people can help you a bit, but ­essentially you're on your own. ­Nobody is making you do this: you chose it, so don't whine.

At the very least we want a witness. We can't stand the idea of our own voices falling silent finally, like a radio running down.

I was unfair to him, of course, but where would I have been without unfairness? In thrall, in harness. Young women need unfairness, it's one of their few defenses. They need their callousness, they need their ignorance. They walk in the dark, along the edges of high cliffs, humming to themselves, thinking themselves invulnerable.

What do you want me to do?" he whispers into the empty air. It's hard to know. Oh Jimmy, you were so funny. Don't let me down. From habit he lifts his watch; it shows him its blank face. Zero hour, Snowman thinks. Time to go.

According to Tobias, it was more difficult to seduce a stupid woman than an intelligent one because stupid women could not understand innuendo or even connect cause with effect.

To be rendered unconscious; to lie exposed, without shame, at the mercy of others; to be touched, incised, plundered, remade - this is what they are thinking of when they look at him, with their widening eyes and slightly parted lips.

You shouldn't do that, said Laura. You could set yourself on fire.

Is it real? No, it is not real. What is this not real? Not real can tell us about real.

She would roll up her sleeves and dispense with sentimentality, and do whatever blood-soaked, bad-smelling thing had to be done. She would become adept with axes.

A thing is valued, only if it is rare and hard to get.

There had been something willed about it though, his ignorance. Or not willed, exactly: structured. He'd grown up in walled spaces, and then he had become one. He had shut things out.

When you focus on details like this - close up, really clear, totally useless - you know you're in shock

Knowing this secret, being the only one chosen to know, makes me feel important in a way. But it's a negative importance, it's the importance of a blank sheet of paper. I can know because I don't count. I feel singled out, but also bereft.

The human moral keyboard is limited, Adam One used to say: there's nothing you can play on it that hasn't been played before. And, my dear Friends, I am sorry to say this, but it has its lower notes.

She gives him an LED smile: light, but no heat.

My life had a tendency to spread, get flabby, to scroll and festoon like the frame of a baroque mirror, which came from following the line of least resistance. I wanted my death, by contrast, to be neat and simple, understated, even a little severe, like a Quaker church or the basic black dress with a single strand of pearls...

her face might be kindly if she would smile