Quotes from Margaret Atwood

The fact is that I hate this city. I've hated it so long I can hardly remember feeling any other way about it.

Messy love is better than none, I guess. I'm no authority on sane living. Which is all true and no hep at all, because this form of love is like the pain of childbirth: so intense it's hard to remember afterwards, or what kind of screams and grimaces it pushed you into.

Like the trains, she's never on time and always departing. Sympathy from strangers can be ruinous.

One person alone is not a full person: we exist in relation to others.

Every woman is supposed to have the same set of motives, or else to be a monster." —GEORGE ELIOT, DANIEL DERONDA

A]nother thing about myths: they gather in and circumscribe their target audience. They make a collection into a collective.

Aunt Vidala said that best friends led to whispering and plotting and keeping secrets, and plotting and secrets led to disobedience to God, and disobedience led to rebellion, and girls who were rebellious became women who were rebellious, and a rebellious woman was even worse than a rebellious man because rebellious men became traitors, but rebellious women became adulteresses.

It's no good thinking you're invisible if you aren't

She said, What you don't know won't hurt you. A dubious maxim: sometimes what you don't know an hurt you very much.

I didn't want to identify the body, or see it at all. If you don't see the body, it's easier to believe nobody's dead.

Too friendly, too eager to be on message, man is obsolete, dooming ourselves to extinction, restore the balance of nature and babble babble, he overdid it so much that he sounded preposterous, and in an outfit like Bearlift, with its full quota of preposterous green-hued furfuckers, that took some effort.

A puff of air—whuff!—hits his ears, blows out the candle. He can't be bothered relighting it, because the bourbon is taking over. He'd rather stay in the dark. He can sense Oryx drifting towards him on her soft feathery wings. Any moment now she'll be with him. He sits crouched in the chair with his head down on the desk and his eyes closed, in a state of misery and peace.

The sands of time are quicksands, said Adam One. So much can sink into them without a trace. And what a blessing when those things that sink away are needless worries.

No mother is ever, completely, a child's idea of what a mother should be, and I suppose it works the other way around as well. But despite everything, we didn't do badly by one another, we did as well as most.

Where there's a doctor it's always a bad sign. Even when they are not doing the killing themselves it means a death is close, and in that way they are like ravens or crows.

Reign of terror, they used to say, but terror does not exactly reign. Instead it paralyzes. Hence the unnatural quiet.

I want to be held and told my name. I want to be valued, in ways that I am not; I want to be more than valuable.

Being upset is a warmer, close-up feeling, not a chilly distant feeling like laughing at people.

How potent was that word. With.

Sometimes in the dusk he runs up and down on the sand, flinging stones at the ocean and screaming, Shit, shit, shit, shit, shit! He feels better afterwards.

Powerful but insecure men don't take well to rejection. Rage could result.

Humanity is so adaptable, my mother would say. Truly amazing, what people can get used to, as long as there are a few compensations.

Nothing wrecks your nails like a lethal pandemic plague," but we did our nails anyway.

I want anything that breaks the monotony, subverts the perceived respectable order of things.