Quotes from Margaret Atwood

All those paintings of women, in art galleries, surprised at private moments. Nymph Sleeping. Susanna and the Elders. Woman bathing, one foot in a tin tub - Renoir, or was it Degas? both, both women plump. Diana and her maidens, a moment before they catch the hunter's prying eyes. Never any paintings called Man Washing Socks in Sink.)

the urges of men were terrible things and those urges needed to be curbed. The man eyes that were always roaming here and there like the eyes of tigers, those searchlight eyes, needed to be shielded from the alluring and indeed blinding power of us—

She'd love to go over him with a fine-toothed comb. Rummage around in him. Turn him upside down. Empty him out.

Why do you want to talk about ugly things?" she said. Her voice was silvery, like a music box. She waved one hand in the air to dry the nails. "We should think only beautiful things, as much as we can. There is so much beautiful in the world if you look around. You are looking only at the dirt under your feet, Jimmy. It's not good for you.

When it came to love, wasn't believing the same as the real thing?

A sad pretty girl inspires the urge to console, unlike a sad old crone.

Maybe all women should be robots, he thinks with a tinge of acid: the flesh-and-blood ones are out of control.

Excuse this digression. At my age you indulge in these apocalyptic visions. You say, The end of the world is at hand. You lie to yourself - I'm glad I won't be around to see it - when in fact you'd like nothing better, as long as you can watch it through the little secret window, as long as you won't be involved. But why bother about the end of the world? It's the end of the world every day, for someone. Time rises and rises, and when it reaches the level of your eyes you drown.

So we couldn't mingle with them, but we could eavesdrop. We got our knowledge that way--we caught it like germs.

She has never been in the presence, before, of two people who are in love with each other. She feels like a stray child, ragged and cold, with her nose pressed to a lighted window. A toy-store window, a bakery window, with fancy cakes and decorated cookies. Poverty prevents her entrance. These things are for other people; nothing for her.

then she smiled and said that we were precious flowers, and who ever heard of a rebellious flower?

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. She didn't go on to say anything about inheriting the earth. I

The more difficult it was to love the particular man beside us, the more we believed in Love, abstract and total.

Betty's now have a patio garden, where the tourists can sit in the sun and fry to a crisp; it's in the back, that little square of cracked cement where they used to keep the garbage cans. They offer tortellini and cappuccino, boldly proclaimed in the window as if everyone in town just naturally knows what they are. Well, they do by now; they've had a try, if only to acquire sneering rights.

But how can she ever get out of it, her life, except through him?

At our school, pink was for spring and summer, plum was for fall and winter, white was for special days: Sundays and celebrations. Arms covered, hair covered, skirts down to the knee before you were five and no more than two inches above the ankle after that, because the urges of men were terrible things and those urges needed to be curbed.

Your legacy from him is the realm of infinite speculation. You're free to reinvent yourself at will.

Have they forgotten that I'm in here? They'll have to bring more food, or at least more water, or else I will starve, I will shrivel, my skin will dry out, all yellow like old linen; I will turn into a skeleton, I will be found months, years, centuries from now on, and they will say Who is this, she must have slipped our mind, Well sweep all those bones and rubbish into the corner, but save the buttons, no sense in having them go to waste, there's no help for it now.

One day you will wake up and everything, the stones by the driveway, the brick houses, each brick, each leaf of each tree, your own body, will be glowing from within, lit up, so bright you can hardly look. You will reach out in any direction and you will touch the light itself.

Women collect grievances, hold grudges and change shape. They pass hard, legitimate judgments, unlike the purblind guesses of men, fogged with romanticism and ignorance and bias and wish. Women know too much, they can neither be deceived nor trusted.

But it will take a considerable amount of work. Women have been told for so long that they can achieve equality in the professional and public spheres. They will not welcome the…" I sought for a word. "The segregation." "It was always a cruelty to promise them equality," he said, "since by their nature they can never achieve it. We have already begun the merciful task of lowering their expectations.

More recently, some of us have been able to infiltrate the new ethereal-wave system that now encircles the globe, and to travel around that way, looking out at the world through the flat, illuminated surfaces that serve as domestic shrines. Perhaps that's how the gods were able to come and go as quickly as they did back then—they must have had something like that at their disposal.

An odd thing souvenir-hunting: now becomes then even while it is still now.

After all you've been through, you deserve whatever I have left, which is not much but includes the truth.