Quotes from Margaret Atwood

Sanity is a valuable possession; I hoard it the way people once hoarded money.

Grace and Cordelia and Carol hang around the edges of my life, enticing, jeering, growing paler and paler every day, less and less substantial. I hardly hear them any more because I hardly listen.

William sits opposite her, drinking water from a Murray's glass with a trace of lipstick on the rim. His fingers hold the glass, his other hand lies on the table, his neck comes out of his shirt collar, which is light green, and on top of that is his head. His eyes are blue and he has two of them. This is the sum total of William in the present tense.

I say her because I don't recall having been present, not in any meaningful sense of the word. I and the girl in the picture have ceased to be the same person. I am her outcome, the result of the life she once lived headlong; whereas she, if she can be said to exist at all, is composed only of what I remember. I have the better view - I can see her clearly, most of the time. But even if she knew enough to look, she can't see me at all.

When it was raining we would sit at this table and draw in our scrapbooks with crayons or colored pencils, anything we liked. In school you had to do what the rest were doing.

I was communicating with my inner Pilar, which was externalized in visible form, connected with the help of a brain chemistry facilitator to the wavelengths of the Universe; a universe in which – rightly understood – there are no coincidences.

It's literature. It's all books. There are good books and bad books. Literary fiction can be bad, and so can sci-fi. Sci-fi can be wonderful and so can literary fiction. As long as it's a good book, who cares? Hold my attention; that's all I ask. Make me believe.

Pieces for Peace, rescue the Korean poet, ban the bomb. It's just that he's never agreed to do anything before. He wonders why, this time, he has. Not that this enterprise is any more likely to succeed than her other enterprises. But collecting signatures against RCMP Wrongdoing does not at the moment seem any more futile than most other things in his life.

If writing novels - and reading them - have any redeeming social value, it's probably that they force you to imagine what it's like to be somebody else. Which increasingly is something we all need to know.

Poems are made of words. They aren't boxes. They aren't houses. Nobody is in them, really.

Life, life, you sang with every cell, compelled into dancing as the spell held you enchained and you burned air.

They never knew, about that or why I left. Their own innocence, the reason I couldn't tell them; perilous innocence, closing them in glass, their articial garden, greenhouse. They didn't teach us about evil, they didn't understand about it, how could I describe it to them? They were from another age, prehistoric, when everyone got married and had a family, children growing in the yard like sunowers; remote as Eskimoes or mastodons.

Ignorieren ist nicht das gleiche wie Ignoranz, man muß etwas dazu tun.

Then, when he was exhausted, she stole his penis.

It was a problem in comic books: drawing an invisible man.

Everything in this town is retro, which accounts for the large supply of black vintage items in Accessories. The past is so much safer, because whatever's in it has already happened. It can't be changed; so, in a way, there's nothing to dread. She

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.

But the truth is that I don't know what the villagers thought or talked about, I was so shut off from them. The older ones occasionally crossed themselves when we passed, possibly because my mother was wearing slacks, but even that was never explained.

Is it disapproval or extreme lust? Toby wonders. With some men it's hard to tell the difference.

at that time men and women tried each other on, casually, like suits, rejecting whatever did not fit.

Nothing's broken, nevertheless I'm skinless, the gentlest touch would gut me.

He loved her so much when he made her unhappy, or else when she made him unhappy: at these moments he scarcely knew which was which.

I have an uneasy feeling, as if something's buried down there, a nameless, crucial thing, or as if there's someone still on the bridge, left by mistake, up in the air, unable to get to the land. But it's obvious there's no one.

Suppose I told you about the income from body parts? Organs, bones, DNA, whatever's in demand. That's one of the big earners for this place.