Quotes from Margaret Atwood

This is what I feel like: this sound of glass. I feel like the word shatter. I want to be with someone

The world was no longer solid and dependable, it was porous and deceptive. Anything could disappear. At the same time, everything I looked at was very clear. It was like one of those surrealist paintings we'd studied in school the year before. Melted clocks in the desert, solid but unreal.

Like a White Russian drinking tea in Paris, marooned in the twentieth century, I wander back, try to regain hose distant pathways; I become too maudlin, lose myself. Weep...I sit in the chair and ooze like a sponge.

It's simple,' Kat told them. 'You bombard them with images of what they ought to be, and you make them feel grotty for being the way they are. You're working with the gap between reality and perception. That's why you have to hit them with something new, something they've never seen before, something they aren't. Nothing sells like anxiety.

Gods always come in handy, they justify almost anything

But some people can't tell where it hurts. They can't calm down. They can't ever stop howling.

Ger says that Kat has a tendency to push things to extremes, to go over the edge, merely from a juvenile desire to shock, which is hardly a substitute for wit. One of these days, he says, she will go way too far. Too far for him, is what he means.

Yes, good, kind Crake. Please stop singing or I can't go on with the story.

He was wrong about the sadness though: far better to have it when you're young. A sad pretty girl inspires the urge to console, unlike a sad old crone.

Because citizens were always a bit like inmates and inmates were always a bit like citizens, so Consilience and Positron have only made it official.

Confronted by too much emptiness, said Adam One, the brain invents. Loneliness creates company as thirst creates water. How many sailors have been wrecked in pursuit of islands that were merely a shimmering?

Though at that time men and women tried each other on, casually, like suits, rejecting whatever did not fit.

There is more than one kind of freedom. Freedom to and freedom from. In the day of anarchy, it was freedom to. Now you are being given freedom from. Don't underrate it.

Nature may be dumb as a sack of hammers, Zeb used to say, but it's smarter than you.

Orpheus 2 He has been trying to sing Love into existence again And he has failed.

Here's a health to our Captain, so gallant and free Whether stuck on a rock or asleep 'neath a tree Or rolled in the arms of some nymph of the sea Which is where we would all like to be, man!

Boys with their first beards can be a thorough pain in the neck.

I am a blank, here, between parentheses. Between other people.

Because if you weren't an Aunt or a Martha, said Aunt Vidala, what earthly use were you if you didn't have a baby?

She longs for tonight, she longs to skip the day that's just begun and plunge headlong into the night as if into a pool; a pool with the moon reflected in it. She longs to swim in liquid moonlight.

there is something in your throat that wants to get out and you won't let it.

I wonder why trying to transcend time never even succeeds in stopping it...

Are you there? I whisper. Large as life and twice as ugly, Moira whispers back.

Thinking he knows can be a trap. An ex-professor once told him he had a diamond-hard intellect and he'd been flattered at the time. Now he considers the nature of diamonds. Although sharp and glittering and useful for cutting glass, they shine with reflected light only. They're no use at all in the dark