Quotes from Margaret Atwood

There are some women who seem to be born without fear, just as there are people who are born without the ability to feel pain...Providence appears to protect such women, maybe out of astonishment.

A place with no handholds,no landmarks,no past at all:That would have been too much like dying

It's outrageous, one woman said, but without belief. What was it about this that made us feel we deserved it?   When

For once in their lives, they loved themselves.

This may not seem ordinary to you now, but after a time it will. It will become ordinary.

I could spell it, I say. Write it down. He hesitates at this novel idea. Possibly he doesn't remember I can. I've never held a pen or a pencil, in this room, not even to add up the scores. Women can't add, he once said, jokingly. When I asked him what he meant, he said, For them, one and one and one and one don't make four. What

they were awful without being believable. They were too melodramatic, they had a dimension that was not the dimension of our lives.

They were too melodramatic, they had a dimension that was not the dimension of our lives. We were the people who were not in the papers. We lived in the blank white spaces at the edges of print. It gave us more freedom. We lived in the gaps between the stories.

This thing I'm doing can hardly be called living. Instead I'm lying dormant, like a bacterium in a glacier. Getting time over with. That's all.

As for you, she'd say to me, you're just a backlash. Flash in the pan. History will absolve me. But

We would lie in those afternoon beds, afterwards, hands on each other, talking it over. Possible, impossible. What could be done? We thought we had such problems. How were we to know we were happy?

Why is it that night falls, instead of rising, like the dawn? Yet if you look east, at sunset, you can see night rising, not falling; darkness lifting into the sky, up from the horizon, like a black sun behind cloud cover. Like smoke from an unseen fire, a line of fire just below the horizon, brushfire or a burning city. Maybe night falls because it's heavy, a thick curtain pulled up over the eyes.

Guess it's the climate change," says Sam. That's what people say, the way they used to say, We've angered God.

It's like Janine, though, to take it upon herself, to decide the baby's flaws were due to her alone. But people will do anything rather than admit that their lives have no meaning. No use, that is. No plot.   One

How potent was that word. With. He could never get used to her, she was fresh every time, she was a casketful of secrets. Any moment now she would open herself up, reveal to him the essential thing, the hidden thing at the core of life, or of her life, or of his life – the thing he was longing to know. The thing he'd always wanted. What would it be?

A wall that cannot be defended is no sooner built than ended.

quién puede recordar el dolor una vez que éste ha desaparecido? Todo lo que queda de él es una sombra, ni siquiera en la mente o en la carne. El dolor deja una marca demasiado profunda para que se vea, una marca que queda fuera del alcance de la vista y de la mente.

In the desert there is no sign that says, 'Thou shalt not eat stones.

I walk away from her, guilt on my hands, absolving myself: I'm a good person. She could have been dying. No one else stopped. I'm a fool, to confuse this with goodness. I am not good. I know too much to be good. I know myself. I know myself to be vengeful, greedy, secretive and sly

In the dark parlor we move away from each other, slowly, as if pulled towards each other by a force, current, pulled apart also by hands equally strong. I

But by that time Janine was like a puppy that's been kicked too often, by too many people, at random: she'd roll over for anyone, she'd tell anything, just for a moment of approbation. (...) Janine looked down at the floor. Whatever it was, she knew she would not be blamed for it, she was blameless. But what use had that been to her in the past, to be blameless? So at the same time she felt guilty, and as if she was about to be punished.

History, as I recall, was never this winsome, and especially not this clean, but the real thing would never sell: most people prefer a past in which nothing smells.

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.

Charis tried not to mind, since nothing that was or had been would perish, and the farm was still inside her, it was still hers because places belonged to the people who loved them.