Quotes from Margaret Atwood

I already told you," said Adam. "There is no need to swear." "Sorry, it just fucking slipped out," said Zeb.

But how else can we live, these days, except in the midst of ruin?

As any bank robber can tell you (Nell would say), the best thing to do when running away is not to run. Just walk. Just stroll. A combination of ease and purposefulness is desirable. Then no one will notice you're running. In addition to which, don't carry heavy suitcases, or canvas bags full of money, or packsacks with body parts in them. Leave everything behind you except what's in your pockets. Lightest is best.

Yes, it does feel deceptively safer with two; but Thou is a slippery character. Every Thou I've known has had a way of going missing. They skip town or turn perfidious, or else the drop like flies and then where are you?

When in doubt, when flat on your back, you can look at the ceiling. Who knows what you may see, up there? Funeral wreaths and angels, constellations of dust, stellar or otherwise, the puzzles left by spiders. There's always something to occupy the inquiring mind.

She finds this objectivity of hers, this clarity, almost more depressing than she can bear, not because there is anything hideous or repellant about this man but because he has now returned to the ordinary level, the level of things she can see, in all their amazing and complex particularity, but cannot touch.

The moon on the breast of the new-fallen snow. The sky is clear but hard to make out, because of the searchlight; but yes, in the obscured sky a moon does float, newly, a wishing moon, a sliver of ancient rock, a goddess, a wink. The moon is a stone and the sky is full of deadly hardware, but oh God, how beautiful anyway.

I sink down into my body as into a swamp, fenland, where only I know the footing. Treacherous ground, my own territory. I become the earth I set my ear against, for rumors of the future.

like a cat that crawls onto the page when you're trying to read.

We are containers, it's only the insides of our bodies that are important.

Every month there is a moon, gigantic, round, heavy, an omen. IT transits, pauses, continues on and passes out of sight, and I see despair coming towards me like famine. To feel that empty, again, again. I listen to my heart, wave upon wave, salty and red, continuing on and on, marking time.

Stretch your hand towards those gentle eyes that regard you with such trust

We're using up the Earth. It's almost gone. You can't live with such fears and keep on whistling. The waiting builds up in you like a tide. You start wanting it to be done with. You find yourself saying to the sky, Just do it. Do your worst. Get it over with.

I was nervous. How was I to know he loved me? It might be just an affair. Why did we ever say just? Though at that time men and women tried each other on, casually, like suits, rejecting whatever did not fit.

How I would like to have them back, those pointless afternoons - the boredom, the aimlessness, the unformed possibilities.

The CorpSeCorps always substituted rumour for action, if action would cost them anything. They believed in the bottom line.

And the Internet was such a jumble of false and true factoids that no one believed what was on it any more, or else they believed all of it, which amounted to the same thing.

There I am, in the Grade Six class picture, smiling broadly. Happy as a clam , is what my mother says for happy. I am happy as a clam: hardshelled, firmly closed.

Here is a handful of shadow I have brought back to you: this decay, this hope, this mouth- ful of dirt, this poetry.

Such a cruel thing, memory. We can't remember what it is that we've forgotten. That we have been made to forget. That we've had to forget, in order to pretend to live here in a normal way.

Had he been a lunatic or an intellectually honourable man who'd thought things through to their logical conclusion? And was there any difference?

Bless you. Be careful. Anyone intending to meddle with words needs such blessing, such warning.

What good is it to throw yourself in front of a steamroller out of moral principles and then be crushed flat like a sock emptied of its foot?

So many crucial events take place behind people's backs, when they aren't in a position to watch: birth and death, for instance. And the temporary oblivion of sex. "Don't even think about it," he tells himself. Sex is like drink, it's bad to start brooding about it too early in the day.