Quotes from Margaret Atwood

stringing up rival kings on trees, rejoicing in piles of heads – there was an element of childish glee in all of that.

Yes, good, kind Crake. I will stop telling this story if you sing. Because it makes me forget what I am telling.

Rennie can see what she is now: she's an object of negotiation. The truth about knights comes suddenly clear: the maidens were only an excuse. The dragon was the real business. So much for vacation romances, she thinks. A kiss is just a kiss, Jocasta would say, and you're lucky if you don't get trenchmouth.

still at the table, engaged no doubt in some kind of arcane flirtation, she for practise, he in pathetic earnest. Toby

Maybe you would be able to work it out together, as if the two of you were a puzzle that could be solved; otherwise, one of you, most likely the man, would go wandering off on a trajectory of his own, taking his addictive body with him and leaving you with bad withdrawal, which you could counteract by exercise.

you should know. All sex is real.

We begin to climb and my husband catches up with me again, making one of the brief appearances, framed memories he specializes in: crystal-clear image enclosed by a blank wall.

But not, surely, for the first time in human history. How many others have stood in this place? Left behind, with all gone, all swept away. The dead bodies evaporating like slow smoke; their loved and carefully tended homes crumbling away like deserted anthills. Their bones reverting to calcium; night predators

You don't look back along time but down through it, like water. Sometimes this comes to the surface, sometimes that, sometimes nothing. Nothing goes away.

And it's not the real Elvis you need to resemble, it's the imitation Elvises. Not hard to look like one of them.

The more difficult it was to love the particular man beside us, the more we believed in Love, abstract and total. We were waiting, always, for the incarnation. That word, made flesh. And sometimes it happened, for a time. That kind of love comes and goes and is hard to remember afterwards, like pain. You would look at the man one day and you would think, I loved you, and the tense would be past

Is there no end to his diguises of benevolence?

He just tarted up his misdemeanours and made them look respectable

Perfection exacts a price, but it's the imperfect who pay it.

The combination of presence and anonymity - confession without penance, truth without consequences - it has its attractions. Getting the blood off your hands, one way or another.

After the wolvogs have gone he lies on his back on the platform, gazing up at the stars through the gently moving leaves. They seem close, the stars, but they're far away. Their light is millions, billions of years out of date. Messages with no sender.

I need to feel physical pain, to attach myself to daily life.

When the leaders were older than me I could believe in their wisdom, I could believe they had transcended rage and malice and the need to be loved. Now I know better. I look at the faces in newspapers, in magazines, and wonder: what greeds, what furies drive them on?

There must be a certain freedom in not having a good name to lose.

Is this really your fate, to enter poetry and become transparent?

I whispered into her ear, or meant to whisper – Bless you. Be careful. Anyone intending to meddle with words needs such blessing, such warning.

I've become swollen with power, true, but also nebulous with it—formless, shape-shifting. I am everywhere and nowhere: even in the minds of the Commanders I cast an unsettling shadow. How can I regain myself? How to shrink back to my normal size, the size of an ordinary woman?

Everything is post these days, as if we're all just a footnote to something earlier that was real enough to have a name of its own.

In Tin's already jaded view, experiences were what you got when you couldn't get what you wanted, but Jorrie had always been more optimistic than him.