Quotes from Margaret Atwood

Who is this Fuck?" says Abraham Lincoln. "Why is he talking to this Fuck? That is not the name of anyone here.

He was entitled to his own versions, his own conjurings. as I am. I may have served his ends, but he served mine as well.

Human society, they claimed, was a sort of monster, its main by-products being corpses and rubble. It never learned, it made the same cretinous mistakes over and over, trading short-term gain for long-term pain.

Are you an evening bird Watching the moon Singing Alone, Alone, Singing Dead Too Soon?

I was bedazzled, as if struck by lightning.

All I can hear now is the sound of my own heart, opening and closing, opening and closing.

Oblivion was increasingly attractive, since why retain your brain when no amount of thinking could even begin to solve the problem?

The night before I left on the sealed bullet train, I reread my old diary, and then I knew what the Gardeners meant when they said, Be careful what you write. There were my own words from the time when I was so happy, except that now it was torture to read them. I took the diary down the street and around the corner and shoved it into a garboil dumpster. It would turn into oil and then all those red hearts I'd drawn would go up in smoke, but at least they would be useful along the way.

but he had to dull the pain. The pain of what? The pain of the raw torn places, the damaged membranes where he'd whanged up against the Great Indifference of the Universe.

We would like to hear the story of Fuck," says Abraham Lincoln politely.

But what if she discovers the truth? What he suspects is the truth. That he's patchwork, a tin man, his heart stuffed with sawdust. He thinks of her waiting for him, somewhere else, an island, subtropical, not muggy, her long hair waving in the sea breeze, a red hibiscus tucked behind one ear. If he's lucky she'll wait till that happens, till he can get there to be with her.

Ours is a fall into greed: why do we think that everything on Earth belongs to us, while in reality we belong to Everything? We have betrayed the trust of the Animals, and defiled our sacred task of stewardship.

Nothing is ever settled," says Jocelyn. "Every day is different. Isn't it better to do something because you've decided to? Rather than because you have to?" "No, it isn't," says Charmaine. "Love isn't like that. With love, you can't stop yourself." She wants the helplessness, she wants…

But now here they are, right in front of me. It's like seeing unicorns. I want to hear them purr.

Returning from the dead used to be something I did well I began asking why I began forgetting how

You yourself would never have done such things! But you yourself will never have had to.

There is a silence. But sometimes it's as dangerous not to speak. Yes, we are very happy, I murmur. I have to say something. What else can I say?

Although I'm afraid of this idea and ashamed of it, and although in the daytime I find it melodramatic and ludicrous and refuse to believe in it, I also cherish it. It's like the secret bottle stashed away by alcoholics: I may have no desire to use it, right now, but I feel more secure knowing it's there. It's a fallback, it's a vice, it's an exit. It's a weapon.

His generation believed that if there was trouble all you'd have to do was shoot someone and then it would be okay.

the Republic of Texas is nervous. They fought Gilead to a standstill, but they don't want to be invaded. They're avoiding provocations.

hatred and viciousness are addictive. You can get high on them.

At the subatomic level, you can't even say that matter exists. You can only say that it has a tendency to exist.' 'You're confusing Cordelia," I say. Cordelia has lit a cigarette and is looking out the window, where several squirrels are chasing one another around the lawn. She is paying no attention to any of this. Stephen considers Cordelia. "Cordelia has a tendency to exist," is what he says.

She prefers the more dramatic shows where everyone's getting kidnapped or raped or shut up in a dark hole, and you aren't supposed to laugh at it. You're supposed to be upset, the way you'd be if it was happening to you. Being upset is a warmer, close-up feeling, not a chilly distant feeling like laughing at people.

Art was a kind of demonic possession. Art would dance you to death. It would move in and take you over, and then destroy you.