Quotes from Margaret Atwood

gazing up at the stars through the gently moving leaves. They seem close, the stars, but they're far away. Their light is millions, billions of years out of date. Messages with no sender.

I've learned to do without a lot of things. If you have a lot of things, said Aunt Lydia, you get too attached to this material world and you forget about spiritual values. You must cultivate poverty of spirit. Blessed are the meek.

The truth is that very few understand the truth about forgiveness. It is not the culprits who need to be forgiven; rather it is the victims, because they are the ones who cause all the trouble. If they were only less weak and careless, and more foresightful, and if they would keep from blundering into difficulties, think of all the sorrow in the world that would be spared.

It was the central thing; it was the way you understood yourself; if it never happened to you, not ever, you would be like a mutant, a creature from outer space. Everyone knew that. Falling

I don't want a man around, what use are they except for ten seconds' worth of half babies

What thumbsuckers we all are...when it comes to mothers.

I'd wanted to leave home, but have it stay in place, waiting for me, unchanged, so I could step back into it at will.

The sky darkens from ultramarine to indigo. God bless the namers of oil paints and high-class women's underwear, Snowman thinks. Rose-Petal Pink, Crimson Lake, Sheer Mist, Burnt Umber, Ripe Plum, Indigo, Ultramarine – they're fantasies in themselves, such words and phrases. It's comforting to remember that Homo sapiens sapiens was once so ingenious with language, and not only with language. Ingenious in every direction at once.

She did not believe he was a monster. He was not a monster, to her. Probably he had some endearing trait: he whistled, offkey, in the shower, he had a yen for truffles, he called his dog Liebchen and made it sit up for little pieces of raw steak. How easy it is to invent a humanity, for anyone at all. What an available temptation.

It's fun to be different, but not too different!

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

God is love, they once said, but we reversed that, and love, like heaven, was always just around the corner. The more difficult it was to love the particular man beside us, the more we believed in Love, abstract and total. We were waiting, always, for the incarnation. That word, made flesh.

he was the kind of boy for whom cleverness was female.

How young they are, how frisky! I thought. How touchingly innocent! Was I ever like that? I could not remember.

He keeps his voice kindly but remote. A cross between a pedagogue, soothsayer, and a benevolent uncle – that should be his tone.

She'd stepped out of sex as if out of a loose dress. Now she was brisk, decisive, no nonsense.

Stupid, stupid, stupid: I'd believed all that claptrap about life, liberty, democracy, and the rights of the individual I'd soaked up at law school. These were eternal verities and we would always defend them. I'd depended on that, as if on a magic charm.

The night is mine, my own time, to do with it as I will, as long as I am quiet. As long as I don't move. As long as I lie still.

We lived, as usual, by ignoring. Ignoring isn't the same as ignorance, you have to work at it.

He owes me, but that could prove a liability. Some people do not enjoy being indebted.

I suffer from my own multiplicity. Two or three images would have been enough, or four, or five. That would be allowed for a firm idea: This is she. As it is, I'm watery, I ripple, from moment to moment I dissolve into my other selves.

The future is in your hands, she resumed. She held her own hands out to us, the ancient gesture that was both an offering and an invitation, to come forward, into an embrace, an acceptance. In your hands, she said, looking down at her own hands as if they had given her the idea. But there was nothing in them. They were empty. It was our hands that were supposed to be full, full of the future; which could be held but not seen.

But despite everything, we didn't do badly by one another, we did as well as most. I wish she were here, so I could tell her I finally know this.

Her strongest prison is of her own construct.