Quotes from Margaret Atwood

I know why there is no glass, in front of the watercolour picture of blue irises, and why the window only opens partly and why the glass in it is shatterproof. It isn't running away they're afraid of. We wouldn't get far. It's those other escapes, the ones you can open in yourself, given a cutting edge.

Speculations about what the world would be like after human control of it ended had been – long ago, briefly – a queasy form of popular entertainment. There had even been online TV shows about it: computer-generated landscape pictures with deer grazing in Times Square, serves-us-

My own hair reposes in a cardboard box in a steamer trunk in my mother's cellar, where I picture it becoming duller and more brittle with each passing year, and possibly moth-eaten; by now it will look like the faced wreaths of hair in Victorian funeral jewelry. Or it may have developed a dry mildew; inside its tissue-paper wrappings it glows faintly, in the darkness of the trunk.

How easy it is to invent humanity, for anyone at all. What an available temptation.

I had not been exposed to these kinds of situations, so this event was not trivial to me. Instead it was horrifying. It was also shameful: when a shameful thing is done to you, the shamefulness rubs off on you. You feel dirtied.

You must observe the risings of the Sun and the changings of the Moon, because to everything there is a season. On

The aliens arrive. We like the part where we get saved. We like the part where we get destroyed. Why do those feel so similar? Either way, it's an end.

There were places you didn't want to walk, precautions you took that had to do with locks on windows and doors, drawing the curtains, leaving on lights. These things you did were like prayers; you did them and you hoped they would save you. And for the most part they did. Or something did; you could tell by the fact that you were still alive. But all of that was pertinent only in the night, and had nothing to do with the man you loved, at least in daylight.

For every rule there is always an exception: this too can be depended upon.

I don't want to remember. The past has become discontinuous, like stones skipped across water, like postcards: I catch an image of myself, a dark blank, an image, a blank.

I want to protect myself from any further, darker memories of hers, get myself out of here gracefully before something embarrassing happens. She's balanced on the edge of an artificial hilarity that could topple over at any moment into its opposite, into tears and desperation.

I admit I relish it, this lick of dissipation.

Nothing changes instantaneously: in a gradually heating bathtub you'd be boiled to death before you knew it.

Outside we see a shrivelling, but from within, as felt by heart and breath and inner skin, how different, how vast how calm how part of everything how starry dark. Last breath. Divine perhaps. Perhaps relief. The lovers caught and sealed inside a cavern, voices raised in one last hovering duet, until the small wax light goes out. Well anyway I held your hand and maybe you held mine as the stone or universe closed in around you. Though not me. I'm still outside.

Non temono che ce ne andiamo di nascosto. Non arriveremmo lontano. Temono altre fughe, quelle che puoi aprirti dentro, se hai un oggetto con un bordo tagliente.

Exploited, they'd say. Yes, any way you cut it, but I've a choice of how, and I'll take the money.

What could she have been thinking about? Not much, I guess; not back then, not at the time. She was thinking about how not to think. The times were abnormal. She took pride in her appearance. She did not believe he was a monster. He was not a monster, to her. Probably he had some endearing trait: he whistled, offkey, in the shower, he had a yen for truffles, he called his dog Liebchen and made it sit up for little pieces of raw steak. How easy it is to invent a humanity, for anyone at all.

Quién puede resistirse a la tentación de ser considerado indispensable?

he was like smog: there were always some of his molecules in the air.

I waver, I waver. But tomorrow is another day.

She was so pliable. He could do anything with her, arrange her as he pleased, and she would say yes. Not just yes. Oh yes!

Noi eravamo la gente di cui non si parlava nei giornali. Vivevamo nei vuoti spazi bianchi ai margini dei fogli e questo ci dava più libertà. Vivevamo tra gli interstizi di storie altrui.

Bearing false witness was not the exception, it was common. Beneath its outer show of virtue and purity, Gilead was rotting.

If it hurts and you feel sick and it's making you ugly, take this, from HelthWyzer; if you're ugly and it hurts and you feel sick about it, take that, from AnooYoo.