Quotes from Margaret Atwood

They'd like to see through me, but nothing is more opaque than absolute transparency.

Per il Paradiso abbiamo bisogno di Te. L'Inferno ce lo possiamo fare da soli.

Yes, they know her. They touch her lips, gather her words, fly away with the message, disappear into the dark. Pass through the membrane that separates this world from the unseen world that lies just underneath it.

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.

xxx all souls are equal in heaven. Only in heaven, I thought. And this is not heaven. This is a place for snakes and ladders, and though I was once high up on a ladder propped up against the Tree of Life, now I've slid down a snake. How gratifying for the others to witness my fall!

But the body had its own cultural forms. It had its own art. Executions were its tragedies, pornography was its romance.

Each of the five tribes claims to have been the victorious attacker. Each recalls the slaughter with relish. Each believes it was ordained by their own god as righteous vengeance, because of the unholy practices carried on in the city. Evil must be cleansed with blood, they say. On that day the blood ran like water, so afterwards it must have been very clean.

But I began then to think of time as having a shape, something you could see, like a series of liquid transparencies, one laid on top of another. You don't look back along time but down through it, like water. Sometimes this comes to the surface, sometimes that, sometimes nothing, Nothing goes away.

Why couldn't the two of them have gone on and on forever? Himself and Constance, sun and moon, each one of them shining, though in different ways. Instead of which he's here, forsaken by her, abandoned. In time, which fails to sustain him. In space, which fails to cradle him.

The Aunts had their methods, and their informants: no walls were solid for them, no doors locked.

None of them were the men we knew. The newspaper stories were like dreams to us, bad dreams dreamt by others.

They were concentrating first on the others. They got them more or less under control before they started in on everybody else.

They may not like me, but they respect me. Respect is better than like.

I used to jog but it's bad for the knees. Too much beta carotene turns you orange, too much calcium gives you kidney stones. Health kills.

In times of extremes, extremists win. Their ideology becomes a religion, anyone who doesn't puppet their views is seen as an apostate, a heretic or a traitor, and moderates in the middle are annihilated. Fiction writers are particularly suspect because they write about human beings, and people are morally ambiguous. The aim of ideology is to eliminate ambiguity.

There was always an element of melancholy involved in sex. After his indiscriminate adolescence he'd preferred sad women, delicate and breakable, women who'd been messed up and who needed him.

Homelessness is a nationality now.

All this will happen because people have neglected the basic lessons of Science, they have gone in for politics and religion and wars instead, and sought out passionate excuses for killing one another. Science on the other hand is dispassionate and without bias, it is the only universal language. The language is numbers. When at last we are up to our ears in death and garbage, we will look to Science to clean up our mess.

for it is the fate of a woman Long to be patient and silent, to wait like a ghost that is speechless, Till some questioning voice dissolves the spell of its silence. Hence is the inner life of so many suffering women Sunless and silent and deep, like subterranean rivers Running through caverns of darkness.… —HENRY WADSWORTH LONGFELLOW, "The Courtship of Miles Standish," 1858.

What was in them was promise. They dealt in transformations; they suggested an endless series of possibilities, extending like the reflections in two mirrors set facing one another, stretching on, replica after replica, to the vanishing point.

They say that a nightmare can frighten you to death, that your heart can literally stop. Will this bad dream kill me, one of these nights? Surely it will take more than that.

It is not only the body that travels, Adam One used to say, it is also the Soul. And the end of one journey is the beginning of another.

Falling in love, although it resulted in altered body chemistry and was therefore real, was a hormonally induced delusional state.

I've often wondered," I said. "If you were an animal, what animal would you be?" She leaned back, puzzled. "I can't say I've given it any thought," she said. "Since God did not make me an animal." "Indulge me," I said. "For instance: fox or cat?" ... Obviously I was both, since—unlike many—here I still am. I still have a bag of tricks. And I'm still high in the tree.