Quotes from Margaret Atwood

You think I'm not a goddess? Try me. This is a torch song. Touch me and you'll burn.

Nothing changes instantaneously: in a gradually heating bathtub you'd be boiled to death before you knew it.

Knowing was a temptation. What you don't know won't tempt you.

Maybe the life I think I'm living is a paranoid delusion...Sanity is a valuable possession; I hoard it the way people once hoarded money. I save it, so I will have enough, when the time comes.

All you have to do, I tell myself, is keep your mouth shut and look stupid. It shouldn't be that hard.

I knew what love was supposed to be: obsession with undertones of nausea.

Happiness is a garden walled with glass: there's no way in or out. In Paradise there are no stories, because there are no journeys. It's loss and regret and misery and yearning that drive the story forward, along its twisted road.

There were a lot of gods. Gods always come in handy, they justify almost anything.

We yearned for the future. How did we learn it, that talent for insatiability?

I lie on the floor, washed by nothing and hanging on. I cry at night. I am afraid of hearing voices, or a voice. I have come to the edge, of the land. I could get pushed over.

If I love you, is that a fact or a weapon?

I believe in the resistance as I believe there can be no light without shadow; or rather, no shadow unless there is also light.

When I am lonely for boys it's their bodies I miss. I study their hands lifting the cigarettes in the darkness of the movie theaters, the slope of a shoulder, the angle of a hip. Looking at them sideways, I examine them in different lights. My love for them is visual: that is the part of them I would like to possess. Don't move, I think. Stay like that, let me have that.

The Eskimo has fifty-names for snow because it is important to them; there ought to be as many for love.

Nobody dies from the lack of sex. It's lack of love we die from.

I exist in two places, here and where you are.

People cry at weddings for the same reason they cry at happy endings: because they so desperately want to believe in something they know is not credible.

This is how the girl who couldn't speak and the man who couldn't see fell in love.

I want everything back, the way it was. But there is no point to it, this wanting.

In the end, we'll all become stories.

He doesn't know which is worse, a past he can't regain or a present that will destroy him if he looks at it too clearly. Then there's the future. Sheer vertigo.

To want is to have a weakness.

Beginnings are sudden, but also insidious. They creep up on you sideways, they keep to the shadows, they lurk unrecognized. Then, later, they spring.

You don't believe the sky is falling until a chunk of it falls on you.