Quotes from Margaret Atwood

left lipstick imprints the shape of grateful, rubbery sighs...

Men don't like to think about makeup, they like to think everything about you is genuine. Unless of course they want to think you're a slut and everything about you is fake.

because that was the effect love had on you. It snuck up on you, grabbed hold of you before you know it, and then there was nothing you could do. Once you were in it - in love - you would be swept away, regardless. Or so the books had it.

Every habit he's ever had is still there in his body, lying dormant like flowers in the desert. Given the right conditions, all his old addictions would burst into full and luxuriant bloom. He

I'M STARVED FOR YOU

His drawings were not originals then, only copies. He must have been doing them as a sort of retirement hobby, he was an incurable amateur and enthusiast; if he'd become hooked (on these rock paintings) he would have combed the area for them, collecting them with his camera, pestering experts by letter whenever he found one; an old man's delusion of usefulness.

at a time, a quick move of the head, up and down, to the side and back. We have learned to see the world

She sees where she is, she's here, by herself, she's stranded in the future. She doesn't know how to get back.

Charis disapproves of crass words like shit. Roz has offered poop , but Charis rejected it as too babyish. Her alimentary canal products? Tony has suggested. No, that sounds too coldly intellectual, said Charis. Her Gifts to the Earth.

Arms up in the air now; let's pretend we're trees.

Everyone believed him of course, but you always knew with Salome that if anyone's head was going to roll it wouldn't be hers.

I was to be Martha, keeping busy with household chores in the background; she was to be Mary, laying pure devotion at Alex's feet. (Which does a man prefer? Bacon and eggs, or worship? Sometimes one, sometimes the other, depending how hungry he is.)

In a fairy tale I would be one of the two stupid sisters who open the forbidden door and are shocked by the murdered wives, not the third, clever one who keeps to the essentials: presence of mind, foresight, the telling of watertight lies. I told lies but they were not watertight. My mind was not disciplined, as Arthur sometimes pointed out.

Maybe that was the real Bernice, I thought - kind and innocent. Maybe she was truly like that inside, and all the fighting we used to do and all her sharp and unpleasant edges - that was her way of struggling to get out of the hard skin she'd grown all over herself like a beetle shell. But no matter how she hit out and raged, she'd been stuck in there. That thought made me feel so sorry for her that I cried.

I no longer think that anything can happen. I no longer want to think that way. Happen is what you wait for, not what you do; and anything is a large category.

Young girls have such sweet tooths. Or is that sweet teeth?

You say, Do you / love me, do you love me / I answer you: / I stretch your arms out / one to either side, / your head slumps forward.

On these occasions I read quickly, voraciously, almost skimming, trying to get as much into my head as possible before the next long starvation. If it were eating it would be the gluttony of the famished; if it were sex it would be a swift furtive stand-up in an alley somewhere.

Lilies used to be a movie theatre, before. Students went there a lot; every spring they had a Humphrey Bogart festival, with Lauren Bacall or Katherine Hepburn, women on their own, making up their minds. They wore blouses with buttons down the front that suggested the possibilities of the word 'undone'. These women could not be undone; or not. They seemed to be able to choose.

Whatever our shapes and features, we were snares and enticements despite ourselves, we were the innocent and blameless causes that through our very nature could make men drunk with lust, so that they'd stagger and lurch and topple over the verge - The verge of what? we wondered. Was it like a cliff? - and go plunging down in the flames, like snowballs made of burning sulphur hurled by the angry hand of God.

Health and Beauty, the two seductive twins joined at the navel, singing their eternal siren songs.

All that time, blowing away in the summer breeze. It was daisies for love though, and we did that too

And the vampires. You used to know where you stood with them – smelly, evil, undead – but now there are virtuous vampires and disreputable vampires, and sexy vampires and glittery vampires, and none of the old rules about them are true any more. Once you could depend on garlic, and on the rising sun, and on crucifixes. You could get rid of the vampires once and for all. But not any more.

Life is not about hair...hair is about life. It is the flame of the body's candle, and as it dwindles the body shrinks and melts away.