Quotes from Margaret Atwood

By now you must have guessed: I come from another planet. But I will never say to you, "Take me to your leaders." ... Instead I will say, "Take me to your trees. Take me to your breakfasts, your sunsets, your bad dreams, your shoes, your nouns. Take me to your fingers; take me to your deaths." These are worth it. These are what I have come for.

Nevertheless there was something about Crake. That kind of cool slouchiness always impressed Jimmy, coming from another guy: it was the sense of energies being held back, held in reserve for something more important than present company.

But there's something missing in them, even the nice ones. It's like they're permanently absent-minded, like that can't quite remember who they are.

Writing poetry is a state of free float

Maybe it's about who can do what to whom and be forgiven for it.

I remember Queen Victoria's advice to her daughter. Close your eyes and think of England.

There was also, as it turned out, the dismay of my parents to be reckoned with: their tolerance about caterpillars and beetles and other non-human life forms did not quite extend to artists.

I don't want to see it. I don't want to look at something that determines me so completely.

It took me a long time to figure out that the youngest in a family of dragons is still a dragon from the point of view of those who find dragons alarming.

She rents herself a large, empty apartment on the top floor of a house. She has no long-term plans. At night she listens to the radio and cooks subsistence meals, and cries onto her plate.

The moment of betrayal is the worst, the moment when you know beyond any doubt that you've been betrayed: that some other human being has wished you that much evil. It was like being in an elevator cut loose at the top. Falling, falling, and not knowing when you will hit.

Live in the present, make the most of it, it's all you've got.

I've forgotten about these things all winter, but here they are again, and when I see them I remember them, I know them, I greet them as if they are home.

I will never be that old, thinks Joanne. I will die before I'm thirty. She knows this absolutely. It's a tragic but satisfactory thought. If necessary, if some wasting disease refuses to carry her off, she'll do it herself, with pills. She is not at all unhappy but she intends to be, later. It seems required.

Language is not morally neutral because the human brain is not neutral in its desires. Neither is the dog brain. Neither is the bird brain: crows hate owls. We like some things and dislike others, we approve of some things and disapprove of others. Such is the nature of being an organism.

Backward glances are not encouraged.

This is perhaps why Dante chooses the poet Virgil to be his guide in the Inferno; in visiting a strange location, it's always best to go with someone who's been there before, and – most important of all on a sightseeing tour of Hell – who might also know how to get you out again.

Nothing should be carelessly thrown away, not even wine from sinful places. There was no such thing as garbage, trash, or dirt, only matter that hadn't been put to a proper use.

He can see the point of venison, of killing to eat, but to have a cut-off head on your wall? What does it prove, except that a deer can't pull a trigger?

Other women Ã¢â'¬â€œ women in the past, tougher women Ã¢â'¬â€œ have dealt with babies in confined spaces, such as ocean ships and covered wagons. But maybe not cars. It's hard to get smells out of car upholstery, so you'd have to be extra careful about the spitting up and so forth. —

I want to keep on living, in any form. I resign my body freely, to the uses of others. They

Rachel; and he said, Am I in God's stead, who hath withheld from thee the fruit of the womb?   And she said, Behold my maid Bilhah

Sex and violence, he thinks now. A lot of the songs were about that. We didn't even notice. We thought it was art.

Nothing wrecks your nails like a lethal pandemic plague