Quotes from Margaret Atwood

the best and most cost-effective way to control women for reproductive and other purposes was through women themselves.

An odd thing, souvenir-hunting: now becomes then even while it is still now. You don't really believe you're there, and so you nick the proof, or something you mistake for it.

In the east a bank of cloud rises up silently like dark bread.

I wait. I compose myself. My self is a thing I must now compose, as one composes a speech. What I must present is a made thing, not something born.

In this connection a few comments upon the crack female control agency known as the Aunts is perhaps in order. Judd—according to the Limpkin material—was of the opinion from the outset that the best and most cost-effective way to control women for reproductive and other purposes was through women themselves.

You hold it in, whatever it is, until you can make it through the worst part. Then, once you're safe, you can cry all the tears you couldn't waste time crying before.

it is no longer possible to be both human and alive)

too many postponements & regrets

Illness had an element of shame to it; no one wanted to be contaminated by the illness of another. So the father of Oryx was pitied, but also blamed and shunned. His wife tended him with silent resentment.

By telling you anything at all I'm at least believing in you, I believe you're there, I believe you into being. Because I'm telling you this story I will your existence. I tell, therefore you are.

Watch out for art, Crake used to say. As soon as they start doing art, we're in trouble.

A momentary psychotic break," I'd said. "The strain of being in a strange and debilitating environment, such as Canada, can have that effect.

one of them had been limited to nouns, verbs, and roaring.

I was sand, I was snow – written on, rewritten, smoothed over.

But sometimes I see instead the young girl's face I once spent so much time rearranging and deploring, drowned and floating just beneath my present face

He loved her so much when he made her unhappy, or else when she made him unhappy: at these moments he scarcely knew which was which. He would pat her, standing well back as with strange dogs, stretching out his hand, saying, "I'm sorry, I'm sorry." And he was sorry, but there was more to it: he was also gloating, congratulating himself, because he'd managed to create such an effect.

The threat to the planet is us. It's actually not a threat to the planet - it's a threat to us.

But it's difficult to be grateful for the absence of an unknown quantity.

At some indeterminate point in their life cycles, they cause themselves to be placed in artificial stone or wooden cocoons, or chrysalises. They have an idea that they will someday emerge from these in an altered state, which they symbolize with carvings of themselves with wings. However, we did not observe that any had actually done so.

But all my love ever came to was a bad end. Red-hot shoes, barrels studded with nails. That's what it feels like, unrequited love.

The television series has respected one of the axioms of the novel: no event is allowed into it that does not have a precedent in human history.

But in life, a tragedy is not one long scream. It includes everything that led up to it. Hour after trivial hours, day after day, year after year, and then the sudden moment: the knife stab, the shell-burst, the plummet of the car from the bridge.

In restaurants we argue over which of us will pay for your funeral / though the real question is whether or not I will make you immortal.

His generation believed that if there was trouble all you'd have to do was shoot someone and then it would be okay.