Quotes from Margaret Atwood

I still have it in me to feel sorry for him. Moira is right, I am a wimp.

all around the walls there are bookcases. They're filled with books. Books and books and books, right out in plain view, no locks, no boxes. No wonder we can't come in here. It's an oasis of the forbidden.

you can't change the past, Aunt Lou used to say. Oh, but I wanted to; that was the one thing I really wanted to do

But also I'm hungry. This is monstrous, but nevertheless it's true. 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. I want to go to bed, make love, right now. I think of the word relish. I could eat a horse.

Blessed be those that mourn, for they shall be comforted. Nobody said when.

After having imposed itself on us like the egomaniac it is, clamouring about its own needs, foisting upon us its own sordid and perilous desires, the body's final trick is simply to absent itself. Just when you need it, just when you could use an arm or a leg, suddenly the body has other things to do. It falters, it buckles under you; it melts away as if made of snow, leaving nothing much. Two lumps of coal, an old hat, a grin made of pebbles. The bones dry sticks, easily broken.

Possible, impossible. What could be done? We thought we had such problems. How were we to know we were happy?

I am not scoffing at goodness, which is far more difficult to explain than evil, and just as complicated. But sometimes it's hard to put up with.

Our problem right now is that we're so specialized that if the lights go out, there are a huge number of people who are not going to know what to do. But within every dystopia there's a little utopia.

Words are so often like window curtains, a decorative screen put up to keep the neighbours at a distance.

Saved by childbearing, I think. What did we suppose would save us, in the time before?

Dream steals from its lair towards its prey.

Hell we can make for ourselves.

By extension, anyone who liked smelling the daisies, and having daisies to smell, and eating mercury-free fish, and who objected to giving birth to three-eyed infants via the toxic sludge in their drinking water was a demon-possessed Satanic minion of darkness, hell-bent on sabotaging the American Way and God's Holy Oil, which were one and the same.

There is a little verse I remember from a child: Needles and pins, needles and pins, When a man marries his trouble begins. It doesn't say when a woman's trouble begins.

His view of the world featured swift disasters set against a background of lurking doom, my cooking did nothing to contradict it.

You think you can get rid of things, and people too--leave them behind. You don't know yet about the habit they have, of coming back.

How much longer can I be so fucking cute?

We are two-legged wombs, that's all: sacred vessels, ambulatory chalices.

A man is just a woman's strategy for making other women.

We lived, as usual, by ignoring. Ignoring isn't the same as ignorance, you have to work at it. Nothing

Moira had power now, she'd been set loose, she'd set herself loose. She was now a loose woman. I think we found this frightening.

But remember that forgiveness too is a power.

a few brown leaves are stuck to the outside of the glass like leather tongues.