Quotes from Margaret Atwood

It would be nice to believe that love should be dished out in a fair way so that everyone got some. But that wasn't how it was going to be for me.

She takes after Laura in that respect: the same tendency towards absolutism, the same refusal to compromise, the same scorn for the grosser human failings. To get away with that, you have to be beautiful. Otherwise it seems mere peevishness.

Roz added sheep to Heaven. They would be outside the window, naturally.

They all say, Go on to graduate studies, and they give you a bit of money; so you do, and you think, Now I'm going to find out the real truth. But you don't find out, exactly, and things get pickier and pickier and more and more stale, and it all collapses in a welter of commas and shredded footnotes, and after a while it's like anything else: you've got stuck in it and you can't get out, and you wonder how you got there in the first place.

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.

Maybe none of this is about control. Maybe it isn't really about who can own whom, who can do what to whom and get away with it, even as far as death. [...] Maybe it's about who can do what to whom and be forgiven for it. Never tell me it amounts to the same thing.

It wasn't just the sex." A dark smile from her: that's better. "You know I love you. You're the only one." She isn't the first woman he's ever said that to. He shouldn't have used it up so much earlier in his life, he shouldn't have treated it like a tool, a wedge, a key to open women. By the time he got around to meaning it, the words had sounded fraudulent to him and he'd been ashamed to pronounce them.

If you can call it talking, these clipped whispers, projected through the funnels of our white wings. It's more like a telegram, a verbal semaphore. Amputated speech.

Anyone literate can take an implement in hand and make marks on a flat surface. Being a writer, however, seems to be a socially acknowledged role, and one that carries some sort of weight or impressive significance - we hear a capital W on Writer.

I hear where you're coming from, as if the voice itself were a traveler, arriving from a distant place. Which it would be, which it is.

He was not a monster, to her ... How easy to invent a humanity, for anyone at all.

I reproached them all for not having told me of my son's departure, and for not stopping him, until that interfering old biddy Eurycleia confessed that she alone had aided and abetted him.

God be with you is not an unmixed blessing.

The moment of betrayal is the worst, the moment when you know beyond any doubt that you've been betrayed: that some other human being has wished you that much evil.

How soon before there are ancient texts they feel they have to obey but have forgotten how to interpret?

But people will do anything rather than admit that their lives have no meaning.

Why were the bad people doing that? Because of Money. Money was invisible, like Fuck. They thought that Money was their helper; they thought he was a better helper than Fuck. But they were wrong about that. Money was not their helper. Money goes away just when you need it. But Fuck is very loyal.

What is believed in society, is not always the equivalent of what is true;

Everything that went on in your life was thought to be due to some positive or negative power emanating from inside your head.

And if I talk to him, I'll say something wrong, give something away. I can feel it coming, a betrayal of myself.

Fool, he tells himself. She's not here. She was never here. It was imagination and wishful thinking, nothing but that. Resign yourself. He can't resign himself.

I say, leave me alone, this is my winter, I will stay here if I choose

You need a certain amount of nerve to be a writer...an almost physical nerve, the kind you need to walk a log across a river.

It was as if they could read each other's minds. No, not minds: each other's mindlessness.