Quotes from Margaret Atwood

I take back what you have stolen, and in your languages I announce I am now nameless. My true name is a growl.

it was at least three weeks before I got the telegram and could start regretting.

But I like my stories to be true to life, which means there have to be wolves in them. Wolves in one form or another.

A rebuke, a palpable rebuke! How dare she? He was already middle-aged when she was born! He could have been her father! He could have been her child molester!

I did not pity her at all. In a way I admired her. I admired her lack of compunction, the courage of her bad manners, the energy of simple rage. Throwing a bag of spaghetti had a simplicity to it, a recklessness, a careless grandeur.

So men had something in their heads that was like fingers, only a sort of fingers girls did not have. And that explained everything, said Aunt Vidala, and we will have no more questions about it.

it is better to journey than to arrive, as long as we journey in firm faith and for selfless ends. Let

For a whole month they'd had to play Barbarian Stomp (See If You Can Change History!). One side had the cities and the riches and the other side had the hordes, and – usually but not always – the most viciousness. Either the barbarians stomped the cities or else they got stomped, but you had to start out with the historical disposition of energies and go on from there.

Sometimes he gets high, on the pot that circulates as freely as cigarettes did once. He thinks he should be enjoying this experience more than he actually does.

The mind, he reflects, is like a house - thoughts which the owner no longer wishes to display, or those which arouse painful memories, are thrust out of sight, and consigned to attic or cellar; and in forgetting, as in the storage of broken furniture, there is surely an element of will at work.

I didn't want you to feel defenseless in the face of life. Life can be harsh. I wanted you to feel protected, and to know that there was a greater power watching over you. That the Universe was taking a personal interest.

He wanted me to play Scrabble with him, and kiss him as if I meant it.

His face is long and mournful, like a sheep's, but with the large full eyes of a dog, spaniel not terrier. His skin is pale and looks unwholesomely tender, like the skin under a scab.

What virtue was once attached to this notion – of going beyond your strength, of not sparing yourself, of ruining your health! Nobody is born with that kind of selflessness: it can be acquired only by the most relentless discipline, a crushing-out of natural inclination, and by my time the knack or secret of it must have been lost. Or perhaps I didn't try, having suffered from the effects it had on my mother.

I locate you on streets, in cities I've never seen, you walk against a background crowded with lifelike detail which crumbles and turns grey when I look too closely.

I hardly hear them any more because I hardly listen.

I've come to enjoy the risk, the sensation of vertigo when I realize that I've shot right over the border of the socially acceptable, that I'm walking on thin ice, on empty air.

grey as a used angel

I agree with you that Gilead ought to fade away-there is too much wrong in it, too much that is false, and too much that is surely contrary to what God intended-but you must permit me some space to mourn the good that will be lost.

After a certain point, the ravages of experience reverse themselves; we put on innocence with advancing age, at least in the minds of others.

Wind comes in, your candle tips over and flares up, and a loose tent-flap catches fire, and through the widening black-edged gap you can see the eyes of the howlers, red and shining in the light from your burning paper shelter, but you keep on writing anyway because what else can you do?

Why should I need to explain you

Sex has been domesticated, stripped of the promised mystery, added to the category of the merely expected. It's just what is done, mundane as hockey. It's celibacy these days that would raise eyebrows.

Mushrooms were the roses in the garden of that unseen world, because