Quotes from Margaret Atwood

Don't let the bastards grind you down. I repeat this to myself but it conveys nothing. You might as well say, Don't let there be air; or, Don't be.

How could a person be caught that way, in an instant, by a glance, the lift of an eyebrow, the curve of an arm? But he was.

Why is it that really beautiful people think everyone else in the world exists merely for their amusement?

So this was the rest of his life. It felt like a party to which he'd been invited, but at an address he couldn't actually locate. Someone must be having fun at it, this life of his; only, right at the moment, it wasn't him.

For Adam was first formed, then Eve. 'And Adam was not deceived, but the woman being deceived in the transgression.

Of course Crake wasn't Crake yet, at that time: his name was Glenn. Why did it have two n's instead of the usual spelling? "My dad liked music," was Crake's explanation, once Jimmy got around to asking him about it, which had taken a while. "He named me after a dead pianist, some boy genius with two n's.

At the outset Verna had not intended to kill anyone.

Forbidden things are open to the imagination. That was why Eve ate the Apple of Knowledge, said Aunt Vidala: too much imagination. So it was better not to know some things. Otherwise your petals would get scattered.

Zenia has stolen something from him, the one thing he always kept safe before, from all women, even from Roz. Call it his soul. She slipped it out of his breast pocket when he wasn't looking, easy as rolling a drunk, and looked at it, and bit it to see if it was genuine, and sneered at it for being so small after all, and then tossed it away, because she's the kind of woman who wants what she doesn't have and gets what she wants and then despises what she gets. What

I could just sit here, peacefully. I could withdraw. It's possible to go so far in, so far down and back, they could never get you out.

Maybe I don't really want to know what's going on. Maybe I'd rather not know. Maybe I couldn't bear to know. The Fall was a fall from innocence to knowledge.

I planted him in this country like a flag

That is a reconstruction, too.

Its racist policies, for instance, were firmly rooted in the pre-Gilead period, and racist fears provided some of the emotional fuel that allowed the Gilead takeover to succeed as well as it did. Our

It was true she had never specifically forbidden us to do anything - that would be too crude a violation of her law of nuance - but this only makes me feel I am actually forbidden to do everything.

I've got nothing against telepathy, said Jane; but the telephone is so much more dependable.

Toast cannot be explained by any rational means. Toast is me. I am toast.

Right now I have some choice in the matter. Not whether to die, but when and how. Isn't that a freedom of sort? Oh, and who to take down with me. I have made my list

He could never get used to her, she was fresh every time, she was a casketful of secrets.

I had nightmares myself. Shall I describe on for you? No, I will not....When push comes to shove, only one's own nightmares are of any interest or significance. Last night I had a nightmare....You are of course fully in control of what you choose to read, and may pass over this dream of mine at will.

She was an infallible prophetess, and these powers came from her ability to look into the patterns of the universe.

They thought he was only what they could see. A nice boy but a bit of a goof, a bit of a show-off. Not the brightest star in the universe; not a numbers person, but you couldn't have everything you wanted and at least he wasn't a total washout.

Roughing it builds a boy's character, but only certain kinds of roughing it.

A chair, a table, a lamp. Above, on the white ceiling, a relief ornament in the shape of a wreath, and in the center of it a blank space, plastered over, like the place in a face where the eye has been taken out. There must have been a chandelier, once. They've removed anything you could tie a rope to.