Quotes from Margaret Atwood

We hugged her to us, she was with us in secret, a giggle; she was lava beneath the crust of daily life.

He lacked the energy to work the crowd, he was fresh out of innocuous drivel... Saggy boobs, ran the thought balloon in his head. Bunfaced tofubrain. Thumbsucking posterboy. Fridgewoman. Sell his granny. Wobble-bummed bovine. Bladderheaded jerk.

I stand in the dark, start to unbutton. Then I hear something inside my body. I've broken, something has cracked, that must be it. Noise is coming up, coming out, of the broken place, in my face. Without warning: I wasn't thinking about here or there or anywhere. If I let the noise get out into the air it will be laughter, too loud, too much of it, someone is bound to hear.

Context is all; or is it ripeness? One or the other.

God cannot be held to the narrowness of literal and materialistic interpretations, nor measured by Human measurements, for His days are eons, and a thousand ages of our time are like an evening to Him.

Anyway, my dearest one, we still have the moon.

Having long ago whispered I want to die, I now realize that this wish will indeed be fulfilled, and sooner rather than later. No matter that I've changed my mind about it. I

For a time I almost believed what I understood I was supposed to believe. I numbered myself among the faithful for the same reason that many in Gilead did: because it was less dangerous.

Between the living and the dead. They carried the Word made air.

I can see this idea gathering in Cordelia as well. Maybe she's gone too far, hit, finally, some core of resistance in me. If I refuse to do what she says this time, who knows where my defiance will end?

I am in love with his need

El control de las mujeres y sus descendientes ha sido la piedra de toque de todo régimen represivo de este planeta. Napoleón y su «carne de cañón», la esclavitud y la mercancía humana, una práctica eternamente renovada: ambas encajan aquí. A quienes promueven la maternidad forzosa habría que preguntarles: Cui bono? ¿A quién beneficia? A veces a un sector, a veces a otro. Nunca a nadie.

These words are yours, though you never said them, you never heard them, history breeds death but if you kill it you kill yourself.

Love was its own transparent bubble-dome: you could see the two inside it, but you couldn't get in there yourself. That

But nothing I ever gave was good for you; it was like white bread to goldfish. They cram and cram, and it kills them, and they drift in the pool, belly-up, making stunned faces and playing on our guilt as if their own toxic gluttony was not their fault.

how outrageous could he get, in the realm of fatuous neologism, and still achieve praise?

it's one of the shapes money takes when it freezes.

What you mean is, with God in the story there's a penalty, said Toby. Yes, said Adam One. There's a penalty without God in the story, too, needless to say. But people are less likely to credit that. If there's a penalty, they want a penalizer. They dislike senseless catastrophe.

The line of her cheek has a marble, a classic, a simplicity; to look at her is to believe that suffering does indeed purify.

That was the trouble with Blood and Roses: it was easier to remember the Blood stuff. The other trouble was that the Blood player usually won, but winning meant you inherited a wasteland.

If he had known unstructured space is a deluge and stocked his log house- boat with all the animals even the wolves, he might have floated. But obstinate he stated, The land is solid and stamped, watching his foot sink down through the stone up to his knee. From Progressive insanities of a pioneer

She must have been annoyed that it no longer worked. One morning he looked down and it was gone. I expect she'd pointed at it when he was asleep. She was keeping it in a cedar box with some other penises she'd stolen; she was feeding them on grains of wheat. That's the usual method of tending penises.

My self is a thing that I must now compose...as one composes a speech. What I must present is a 'made' thing. Not something born.

When did the body first set out on its own adventures, after having ditched its old travelling companions, the mind and the soul?