Quotes from Margaret Atwood

You are the sun in reverse, all energy flows into you and is abolished

Language, like the mouths that hold and release it, is wet & living, each   word is wrinkled with age, swollen with other words, with blood, smoothed by the numberless flesh tongues that have passed across it.   Your language hangs around your neck, a noose, a heavy necklace; each word is empire, each word is vampire and mother.

Then I find I'm not ashamed after all. I enjoy the power; power of a dog bone, passive but there.

they lurk passively, like vampire sheep

You should never let your picture be in a magazine or newspaper if you can help it, as you never know what ends your face may be made to serve, by others, once it has got out of your control.

And so I step up, int the darkness within; or else the light.

The people in the chaos cannot learn. They cannot understand what they are doing to the sea and the sky and the plants and the animals. They cannot understand that they are killing them, and that they will end by killing themselves. And there are so many of them, and each one of them is doing part of the killing, whether they know it or not. And when you tell them to stop, they don't hear you.

It was also shameful: when a shameful thing is done to you, the shamefulness rubs off on you. You feel dirtied.

There were pockets within pockets, with a CorpSeCorps hand in each one of them.

Maybe acting as if she believes in such a future will help to create it, which is the kind of thing the Gardeners used to say.

All I can hear now is the sound of my own heart, opening and closing, opening and closing, opening

It's like Janine, though, to take it upon herself, to decide the baby's flaws were due to her alone. But people will do anything rather than admit that their lives have no meaning. No use, that is. No plot.

Don't interfere with false gods, you'll get the gold paint all over your hands.

Most hearts say, I want, I want, I want, I want. My heart is more duplicitous, though to twin as I once thought. It says, I want, I don't want, I want, and then a pause. It forces me to listen

She had loved him, uselessly.

What confronts us, now the excitement's over, is our own failure.

Constance did not have a bun. She didn't need one. She more or less was a bun: neat and contained, and then so tumultuous when unleashed.

I can listen to my own heartbeat against the bedsprings, I can stroke myself, under the dry white sheets, in the dark, but I too am dry and white, hard, granular; it's like running my hand over a plateful of dried rice; it's like snow. There's something dead about it, something deserted. I am like a room where things once happened and now nothing does, except the pollen of the weeds that grow up outside the window, blowing in as dust across the floor.   Here

Do you think anyone will believe it?" Aunt Elizabeth asked. "They will believe whatever is in the best interests of Ardua Hall," I said firmly. "Which is the same as their own best interests.

All fathers except mine are invisible in daytime; daytime is ruled by mothers. But fathers come out at night. Darkness brings home the fathers, with their real, unspeakable power. There is more to them than meets the eye.

My mother took the train to Halifax to see my father off. It was crammed with men en route to the Front; she could not get a sleeper, so she travelled sitting up. There were feet in the aisles, and bundles, and spittoons; coughing, snoring - drunken snoring, no doubt. As she looked at the boyish faces around her, the war became real to her, not as an idea but as a physical presence.

You don't take a hammer – not to mention an electric screwdriver and a pipe wrench – to a guy's computer without being quite angry.

You always do good ones. We trust you, Mr. Duke, Says Dylan. Foolish lads, thinks Felix: never trust a professional ham.

Moira had power now, she'd been set loose, she'd set herself loose. She was now a loose woman. I think we found this frightening. Moira was like an elevator with open sides. She made us dizzy. Already we were losing the taste for freedom, already we were finding these walls secure. In the upper reaches of the atmosphere you'd come apart, you'd vaporize, there would be no pressure holding you together.