Quotes from Margaret Atwood

The body may be the home of the soul and the pathway of the spirit, but it is also the perversity, the stubborn resistance, the malign contagion of the material world. Having a body, being in the body, is like being roped to a sick cat.

The subliterary fiction she was churning out was many decades away from being in any way respectable. There was a small group that confessed to reading The Lord of the Rings, though you had to justify it through an interest in Old Norse.

The corrupt and blood-smeared fingerprints of the past must be wiped away to create a clean space for the morally pure generation that is surely about to arrive. Such is the theory.

All writers must go from now to once upon a time; all must take care not to be captured and held immobile by the past.

Nolite te bastardes carborundorum [...] But what did it mean? I said. What?, he said. Oh, it meant 'Don't let the bastards grind you down'. I guess we thought we were pretty smart back then.

am a great proponent of better. In the absence of best. Which is how we live now.

So much for endings. Beginnings are always more fun. True connoisseurs, however, are known to favor the stretch in between, since it's the hardest to do anything with.

Sauve qui peut. To survive we'd all turn thief and rascal, or so says the fox, with her coat of an elegant scoundrel, her white knife of a smile, who knows just where she's going: to steal something that doesn't belong to her - some chicken, or one more chance, or other life.

When the water's moving faster than the boat, you can't control a thing.

But I envy the Commander's Wife her knitting. It's good to have small goals that can be easily attained.

All stories are about wolves. All worth repeating, that is. Anything else is sentimental drivel. All of them? Sure, he says. Think about it. There's escaping from the wolves, fighting the wolves, capturing the wolves, taming the wolves. Being thrown to the wolves, or throwing others to the wolves so the wolves will eat them instead of you. Running with the wolf pack. Turning into a wolf. Best of all, turning into the head wolf. No other decent stories exist. I

I thought of myself as an itinerant brain--the equivalent of a strolling player of Elizabethan times, or else a troubadour, clutching my university degree like a cheap lute.

Was every Heathcliff a Linton in disguise?

Now I can see how that can happen. You can fall in love with anybody — a fool, a criminal, a nothing. There are no good rules.

Despite all that she did for me, Melanie had a distant smell. She smelled like a floral guest soap in a strange house I was visiting.

Their faces were the way women's faces are when they've been talking about you behind your back and they think you've heard: embarrassed, but also a little defiant, as if it were their right.

Symbolic thinking of any kind would signal downfall, in Crake's view. Next they'd be inventing idols, and funerals, and grave goods, and the afterlife, and sin, and Linear B, and kings, and then slavery and war.

Fuck that shit, I told them, I've started this and I'm going to finish it.

If the stock market exists, so must previous lives.

Men are sex machines, said Aunt Lydia, and not much more. They only want one thing. You must learn to manipulate them, for your own good.

A shadow flits before me, Not thou, but like to thee. Ah, Christ, that it were possible For one short hour to see The souls we loved, that they might tell us What and where they be! —ALFRED, LORD TENNYSON, Maud, 1855.

I don't think they'll ever replace the living and breathing," says Gary. "They said that about e-books," says Kevin. "You can't stop progress.

Possibly, then, writing has to do with darkness, and a desire or perhaps a compulsion to enter it, and, with luck, to illuminate it, and to bring something back out to the light.

She who cannot control herself cannot control the path to duty. Do not fight the waves of anger, use the anger as your fuel. Inhale. Exhale. Sidestep. Circumvent. Deflect.