Quotes from Margaret Atwood

Siempre es una imprudencia interponerse entre un hombre y el reflejo de su propia inteligencia

Having fun has always been high on my mother's agenda. She has as much fun as possible, but what she means by this phrase cannot be understood without making an adjustment, an allowance for the great gulf across which this phrase must travel before it reaches us. It comes from another world, which, like the stars that originally sent out the light we see hesitating in the sky above us these nights, may be or is already gone.

The pain gave me something definite to think about, something immediate. It was something to hold onto.

I want to keep on living, in any form. I resign my body freely, to the uses of others. They can do what they like with me. I am abject. I feel, for the first time, their true power.

Why don't women have to prove to one another that they are women?

In queste occasioni leggo velocemente, con voracità, saltando qualche parola e cercando di riempirmi la testa il più possibile prima di un nuovo, lungo periodo di astinenza. Se fossero un genere commestibile queste letture smorzerebbero l'ingordigia dell'affamato, se fossero sesso equivarrebbero a un veloce amplesso furtivo, in qualche vicolo.

When your main game's over, you can always move your chessboard elsewhere.

hippo. Like something that basks, anyway. Even her knitting is going better than

know what you mean, we'd say. Or, a quaint expression you sometimes hear, still, from older people: I hear where you're coming from, as if the voice itself were a traveler, arriving from a distant place. Which it would be, which it is.

All that speech-making can bloat a man up. I've watched the process, many times now. It's those kinds of words, the kind they use in speeches. They have a fermenting effect on the brain. You can see it on television, during the political broadcasts - the words coming out of their mouths like bubbles of gas.

You shouldn't have forged my handwriting," I said to Laura privately. "I couldn't forge Richard's. It's too different from ours. Yours was a lot easier." "Handwriting is a personal thing. It's like stealing.

I try to remember if the past was exactly like this. I'm not sure, now. I know it contained these things, but somehow the mix is different. A movie about the past is not the same as the past.

The bathrobe was magenta, a colour that still makes him anxious whenever he sees it.

When I start feeling shaky I lie down, expecting nothing, and it arrives, washing over me in a wave of black vacancy

At first I was given centuries to wait in caves, in leather tents, knowing you would never come back

In the moment just before giving, I am loved.

As with so much else, she was convinced that an exception would be made in her case.

I long for periods without saying anything at all. I can be free of words now, I can lapse back into wordlessness, I can sink back into the rhythyms of transience as if into bed.

I watched your snapshot fade for twenty years.

We play two games. Larynx, I spell. Valance. Quince. Zygote. I hold the glossy counters with their smooth edges, finger the letters. The feeling is voluptuous. This is freedom, an eyeblink of it. Limp, I spell. Gorge. What a luxury. The counters are like candies, made of peppermint, cool like that. Humbugs, those were called. I would like to put them into my mouth. They would taste also of lime. The letter C. Crisp, slightly acid on the tongue, delicious. I

But unshed tears can turn you rancid. So can memory. So can biting your tongue.

You have made your escape, your known addresses crumple in the wind, the city unfreezes with relief traffic shifts back to its routines, the swollen buildings return to normal, I walk believably from house to store, nothing remembers you but the bruises on my thighs and the inside of my skull.

Because we have no history I construct one for you making use of what there is, parts of other people's lives, paragraphs I invent, now and then an object, a watch, a picture you claim as yours

What to do with such a sorrow? It was like an enormous black cloud boiling up over the horizon. No: it was like a blizzard. No: it was like nothing he could put into language. He couldn't face it head-on. He had to transform it, or at the very least enclose it.