Quotes from Margaret Atwood

I tell myself it doesn't matter, your name is like your telephone number, useful only to others; but what I tell myself is wrong, it does matter.

How dare she be anything he was annoyed with her for not being?

I am like a room where things once happened and now nothing does, except the pollen of the weeds that grow up inside the window, blowing in as dust across the floor.

First the leaders and the led, then the tyrants and the slaves, then the massacres. That's how it's always gone.

I'd like another dimension of space, and also the tombs and the dead women, please.

That was the original idea, but once you've got a controlled population with a wall around it and no oversight, you can do anything you want.

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

Poetry deals with the core of human existence: life, death, renewal, change; as well as fairness and unfairness, injustice and sometimes justice. The world in all its variety.

Human beings- I've observed- are hot-wired for score keeping, and since they like to win, they're always going one better than the other fellow.

In reduced circumstances you have to believe all kinds of things. I believe in thought transference now, vibrations in the ether, that sort of junk. I never used to.

But if it's a story, even in my head, I must be telling it to someone. You don't tell a story only to yourself. There's always someone else. Even when there is no one.

Is that what writing amounts to? The voice your ghost would have, if it had a voice?

Behind the studied blankness of her gaze, revolt must have been simmering. I recognized that surliness, that stubbornness, that captive-princess indignation, which must be kept hidden until enough weapons have been collected.

she doesn't want to begin, she wants to continue. No: she wants to go back.

So by the time the morning came, Odysseus and I were indeed friends, as Odysseus had promised we would be. Or let me put it another way: I myself had developed friendly feelings towards him - more than that, loving and passionate ones - and he behaved as if he reciprocated them. Which is not quite the same thing.

There were signs and I missed them. For instance, Crake said once, Would you kill someone you loved to spare them pain? You mean, commit euthanasia? said Jimmy. Like putting down your pet turtle? Just tell me, said Crake. I don't know. What kind of love, what kind of pain?

This form of love is like the pain of childbirth: so intense it's hard to remember afterwards

Girls did that then – knocked themselves out to support some man's notion of his own genius. What was Gavin doing to help pay the rent? Not much, though she suspected him of dealing pot on the side. Once in a while they even smoked some of that, though not often, because it made Constance cough. It was all very romantic.

Breasts were one thing: they were in front, where you could have some control over them. Then there were bums, which were behind, and out of sight, and thus more lawless. Apart from loosely gathered skirts, nothing much could be done about them.

The imprint left on her mind by the long famished body that had seemed in the darkness to consist of nothing by sharp crags and angles, the memory of its painfully-defined almost skeletal ribcage, a pattern of ridges like a washboard, was fading as rapidly as any other transient impression on a soft surface.

Why do men want to kill the bodies of other men? Women don't want to kill the bodies of other women.

They meet in church basements and offer bandages to those wounded by the shrapnel of exploding families.

We were a society dying, said Aunt Lydia, of too much choice.

Here are the tulips, budded and full-blown, their swoops and dips, their gloss and poses, the satin of their darks.