Quotes from Margaret Atwood

Toast was a pointless invention from the Dark Ages. Toast was an implement of torture that caused all those subjected to it to regurgitate in verbal form the sins and crimes of their past lives. Toast was a ritual item devoured by fetishists in the belief that it would enhance their kinetic and sexual powers. Toast cannot be explained by any rational means.

What would I have done if I had been my mother? She must have realized what was happening to me, or that something was. Even toward the beginning she must have noted my silences, my bitten fingers, the dark scabs on my lips where I'd pulled off patches of the skin. If it were happening now, to a child of my own, I would know what to do. But then? There were fewer choices, and a great deal less was said.

the beige should not wear beige.

The tide of human desire, the desire for more and better, would overwhelm them. It would take control and drive events, as it had in every large change throughout history.

I will say you ... You can mean more than one. You can mean thousands. I'm not in immediate danger, I'll say to you. I'll pretend you can hear me. But its no good, because I know you can't.

What will it do to Jimmy's state of mind if he opens his eyes and sees three of his former beloveds bending over him like the three Fates? Demanding his everlasting love, his apologies, his blood in a cat food saucer?

I wish I had a pig ball.

Is there no end to his disguises, of benevolence?

Art is what you can get away with, said somebody or other, which makes it sound like shoplifting or some other minor crime. And maybe that's all it ever was, or is: a kind of stealing. A hijacking of the visual.

But who can remember pain, once its over? All that remains of it is a shadow, not in the mind even, in the flesh. Pain marks you, but too deep to see.

I try not to think too much. Like other things now, thought must be rationed.

She's like my own reflection, in a mirror from which I am moving away. In

Why would I care about the tittle-tattle of the uninformed? Ignorant gossip.

Miss Scace died years ago." "Appearances can be deceptive. She only looks dead.

The penalty for rape, as you know, is death. Deuteronomy 22:23–29. I

Like stage magic, knowledge before you knew it took place before your very eyes, but you were looking elsewhere.

All this is pure speculation. I don't really know what men used to say. I had only their words for it.

He feels like saying that of course there's lint on Mr. Wiggly, or dust at any rate, or maybe rust; what does she expect, because as she is well aware Mr. Wiggly has been on the shelf for some time.

no new system can impose itself upon a previous one without incorporating many of the elements to be found in the latter... ...to institute an effective totalitarian system or indeed any system at all, you must offer some benefits and freedoms, at least to a privileged few, in return to those you remove...

Heaven, for the Presbyterians, must resemble a banking establishment, with each soul tagged and docketed, and placed in the appropriate pigeonhole.

I sink down into my body as into a swamp, fenland, where only I know the footing. Treacherous ground, my own territory.

I'm not going to have a husband anyway, said Laura. I'm going to live by myself in the garage.

whatever else women want to see, it's not themselves; not in their worst light anyway.

I was tired of her getting away with being so young.