Quotes from Margaret Atwood

Attack, voracious eating, and flight: it's a sound routine for staying alive on edges.

I'm sorry there is so much pain in this story. I'm sorry it's in fragments, like a body caught in crossfire or pulled apart by force. But there is nothing I can do to change it.

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

In the gap between desire and enactment, noun and verb, intention and infliction, want and have, compassion begins.

In the old days, trouble was kept in the family, which is still the best place for it, not that there's ever a best place for trouble. Why stir everything up again after that many years, with all concerned tucked, like tired children, so neatly into their graves?

Do you hunger for me, do you burn for me

Five members of the heretical sect of Quakers have been arrested, he says, smiling blandly, and more arrests are anticipated.

She is dying because she said. She is dying for the sake of the word. It is her body, silent and fingerless, writing this poem.

In any case, time is not a thing that passes, said Pilar: it's a sea on which you float.

But hatred and viciousness are addictive.

Watch out for art, Crake used to say. As soon as they start doing art, we're in trouble. Symbolic thinking of any kind would signal downfall, in Crake's view. Next they'd be inventing idols, and funerals, and grave goods, and the afterlife, and sin, and Linear B, and kings, and then slavery and war.

I worked transferring books to computer discs, to cut down on storage space and replacement costs, they said. Discers, we called ourselves. We called the library a discotheque, which was a joke of ours. After the books were transferred they were supposed to go to the shredder, but sometimes I took them home with me. I liked the feel of them, and the look. Luke said I had the mind of an antiquarian. He liked that, he liked old things himself. It's

Shiny new toes make you feel all fresh and sparkling: if someone wants to suck your toes, those toes should be worth sucking.

Does naming a sphere of nothingness transmute it into being?

Children were vehicles for passing things along. These things could be kingdoms, rich wedding gifts, stories, grudges, blood feuds.

call attention of course to the breasts. Some of these women have been within inches of getting Ed to put his head down on their chests, right there in Sally's living room. Watching all this out of the corners of her eyes while serving the liqueurs, Sally feels the Aztec rise within her. Trouble with your heart? Get it removed, she thinks. Then you'll have no more problems.

It's impossible to say something exactly the way it was, because what you say can never be exact, because what you say can never be exact, you will always leave something out, there are too many parts, sides, crosscurrents, nuances; too many gestures, which could be this or that, too many shapes which can never be fully described, too many flavors, in the air or on the tongue, half-colors, too many.

A man is just a woman's strategy for making other women. Not

Those years were just an anomaly, historically speaking, the Commander said, just a fluke. All we've done is return things to Nature's norm.

Maybe it's about who can do what to whom and be forgiven for it. Never tell me it amounts to the same thing.

But we lived as usual. Everyone does, most of the time. Whatever is

I avoid looking down at my body, not so much because it's shameful or immodest but because I don't want to see it. I don't want to look at something that determines me so completely.   I

How furious she must be, now that she's been taken at her word.

No romance, he says. Okay? That would have meant something else, once. Once it would have meant: no strings. Now it means: no heroics. It means: don't risk yourself for me, if it should come to that.