Quotes from Margaret Atwood

Just what the doctor ordered, he says. A bottle of lemonade, a hard-boiled egg, and Thou.

The genres, it is thought, have other designs on us. They want to entertain, as opposed to rubbing our noses in the daily grit produced by the daily grind. Unhappily for realistic novelists, the larger reading public likes being entertained.

You need a certain amount of nerve to be a writer.

Fuck , thinks Stan. She knows about the chickens.

the hearts gone bubonic with jealousy and greed, glinting through the vests and sweaters of anyone at all.

He's humanoid, he's hominid, he's an aberration, he's abominable; he'd be legendary, if there were anyone left to relate legends.

I decided she was naive. I was the age at which parents suddenly transform from people who know everything into people who know nothing.

Love is not a profession genteel or otherwise sex is not dentistry the slick filling of aches and cavities you are not my doctor you are not my cure, nobody has that power, you are merely a fellow/traveler.

house divided against itself could not stand.

Change, we were sure, was for the better always. We were revisionists; what we revised was ourselves.

Change can be accommodated by any system depending on its rate, Crake used to say. Touch your head to a wall, nothing happens, but if the same head hits the wall at ninety miles an hour, it's red paint. We're in a speed tunnel, Jimmy. When the water's moving faster than the boat, you can't control a thing.

We thought we could do better. Better? I say, in a small voice. How can he think this is better? Better never means better for everyone, he says. It always means worse, for some.

I and the girl in the picture have ceased to be the same person. I am her outcome, the result of the life she once lived headlong; whereas she, if she can be said to exist at all, is composed only of what I remember. I have the better view - I can see her clearly, most of the time. But even if she knew enough to look, she can't see me at all.

If anyone else told her to lower her voice, Roz would know what to do: scream louder.

He's coming to hate the gratitude of women. It is like being fawned on by rabbits, or like being covered with syrup: you can't get it off.

He's got his cigarette going. He offers her one; this time she takes it. Brief match-flare insider their cupped hands. Red finger-ends. She thinks, Any more flame and we'd see the bones. It's like X-rays. We're just a kind of haze, just coloured water. Water does what it likes. It always goes downhill.

For if the world treats you well, Sir, you come to believe you are deserving of it. Mary

A Sister, dipped in blood

It can't last forever. Others have thought such things, in bad times before this, and they were always right, they did get out one way or another, and it didn't last forever. Although for them it may have lasted all the forever they had.

She didn't make the world the way it was, and she had been my mother, and I had loved her and she had loved me.

The leader had a beard and was wearing a caftan that looked as if it had been sewn by elves on hash.

I pray silently: Nolite te bastardes carborundorum. I don't know what it means, but it sounds right, and it will have to do, because I don't know what else I can say to God.

How long were you supposed to mourn, and what did they say? Make your life a tribute to the loved one.

It's my fault. I am forgetting too much.