Quotes from Margaret Atwood

Our big mistake was teaching them to read. We won't make that mistake again.

Kick in the door, and what did I tell you? Caught in the act, sinfully Scrabbling. Quick, eat those words.

We can't always do what we want," said Zilla gently. "Even you." "And sometimes we have to do what we hate," said Vera. "Even you.

You don't understand much, he says. Why do you think I was lost in the impenetrable forest in the first place?

Nothing is ever settled," says Jocelyn. "Every day is different. Isn't it better to do something because you've decided to? Rather than because you have to?

So that made me happy but the part that really made me happy was that you wanted me to be happy. That's what Thank you means.

There has to be an "us" because now there is "them".

This goes along with another belief of mine: that everyone else my age is an adult, whereas I am merely in disguise.

Reenie never went in much for God. There was mutual respect, and if you were in trouble naturally you'd call on him, as with lawyers; but as with lawyers, it would have to be bad trouble. Otherwise it didn't pay to get too mixed up with him.

I would like to say my hair turned white overnight, but it didn't. Instead it was my heart: bleached out like meat in water

One by one I could handle them, but if they combined into a mob of three I would have trouble. Divide and conquer would be my motto.

The pile of stones thus marks both an act of deliberate remembrance, and an act of deliberate forgetting. They're fond of paradox in that region.

I did not yet know that my lack of enjoyment - my distaste, my suffering even - would be considered normal and even desirable by my husband. He was one of those men who felt that if a woman did not experience sexual pleasure this was all to the good, because then she would not be liable to wander off seeking it elsewhere.

I shiver: whose feet are walking on my grave? Time, I plead to the air, just a little more time. That's all I need.

Another of those things that must be true because everyone else agrees they are, although they don't seem so to me.

I sit in the chair and think about the word chair. It can also mean the leader of a meeting. It can also mean a mode of execution. It is the first syllable in charity. It is the French word for flesh. None of these facts has any connection with the others. These are the kinds of litanies I use, to compose myself.

Money isn't the only thing that must flow and circulate in order to have good value: good turns and gifts must flow and circulate . . . for any social system to remain in balance.

So many crucial events take place behind people's backs, when they aren't in a position to watch: birth and death, for instance.

Prayer is wanting. Jesus, Jesus he says, but he's not praying to Jesus, he's praying to you, not to your body or your face but to the space you hold at the centre, which is the shape of the universe. Empty.

If I'd been older I would've asked what it was right away, but I didn't because I wanted to postpone the moment when I would know what it was. In stories I'd read, I'd come across the words nameless dread. They'd just been words then, but now that's exactly what I felt.

History (that list of ballooning wishes, flukes, bent times, plunges and mistakes clutched like parachutes) is rolling itself up in your head at one end unrolling at the other.

Oh yes, In Love , that demented rose-red circus tent whose half-light forgives all visuals, fig-leaves our lovers, and softens our own brains and the pain of our sawdust pratfalls. So tempting, that midway faux-marble arch, both funfair and classical— so Greek, so Barnum, such a beacon, with a sign in gas-blue neon: Love! This way! In!

What she read was a series of short connected lyrics, "Isis in Darkness." The Egyptian Queen of Heaven and Earth was wandering in the Underworld, gathering up pieces of the murdered and dismembered body of her lover Osiris. At the same time, it was her own body she was putting back together; and it was also the physical universe. She was creating the universe by an act of love.

Thinking can hurt your chances, and I intend to last