Quotes from Margaret Atwood

All hearts float in their own deep oceans of no light, wetblack and glimmering, their four mouths gulping like fish. Hearts are said to pound: this is to be expected, the heart's regular struggle against being drowned.

She expected too much from me, I felt. She expected me to vindicate her life for her, and the choices she'd made. I didn't want to live my life on her terms. I didn't want to be the model offspring, the incarnation of her ideas. We used to fight about that. I am not your justification for existence, I said to her once.

He doesn't know what is worse, a past he can't regain or a present that will destroy him it he looks at it too clearly.

Death makes me hungry. Maybe it's because I've been emptied; or maybe it's the body's way of seeing to it that I remain alive, continue to repeat its bedrock prayer: I am, I am. I am, still.

There is something subversive about this garden of Serena's, a sense of buried things bursting upwards, wordlessly, into the light, as if to point, to say: Whatever is silenced will clamor to be heard, though silently.

She had an idea, but it was the wrong idea. It was hardly even an idea, just a white idea balloon with no writing inside it.

She's afraid of men and it's simple, it's rational, she's afraid of men because men are frightening.

You pride yourself on being a realist, I told myself, so face the facts. There's been a coup, here in the United States, just as in times past in so many other countries. Any forced change of leadership is always followed by a move to crush the opposition. The opposition is led by the educated, so the educated are the first to be eliminated. You're a judge, so you are the educated, like it or not. They won't want you around.

There was always that shadowy twin, thin when i was fat, fat when i was thin, myself in silvery narrative...

Becka said that spelling was not reading. Reading, she said, was when you could hear the words as if they were a song.

Just remember, dear Friends, What am I living for and what am I dying for are the same question.

Everybody knew. Nobody admitted to knowing. If other people began to discuss it, you tuned them out, because what they were saying was both so obvious and so unthinkable.

people believed, then, that Culture could make you better – a better person. They believed it could uplift you, or the women believed it. They hadn't yet seen Hitler at the opera house.

What I have always assumed in him to be bravery may be merely an ignorance of consequences. He thinks he is safe, because he is what he says he is. But he's out in the open, and surrounded by strangers.

A breath would blow you away, they beam down at her silently. You wish, thinks Tony, smiling up. Many have blown. She

He put his arms around me. We were both feeling miserable. How were we to know we were happy, even then? Because we at least had that: arms, around.

I am not being wasted. Why do I want?

In ten years, you'll be on a stamp / where anyone at all can lick you.

I wish this story were different. I wish it were more civilized. I wish it showed me in a better light, if not happier, then at least more active, less hesitant, less distracted by trivia. I wish it had more shape. I wish it were about love, or about sudden realizations important to one's life, or even about sunsets, birds, rainstorms, or snow.

Debt . . . . that peculiar nexus where money, narrative or story, and religious belief intersect, often with explosive force.

There's nothing more for me to see. The bridge is only a bridge, the river a river, the sky is a sky. This landscape is empty now, a place for Sunday runners. Or not empty: filled with whatever it is by itself, when I'm not looking.

Chemistry can be like magic. It can be merciless.

It's strange to remember how we used to think, as if everything were available to us, as if there were no contingencies, no boundaries; as if we were free to shape and reshape forever the everexpanding perimeters of our lives. I was like that too, I did that too.

What do I want? I want you to talk about normal things. No I don't. I want you to look me in the eye and say, I know you're dying.