Quotes from Margaret Atwood

Why interesting and important? Because women are interesting and important in real life. They are not an afterthought of nature, they are not secondary players in human destiny, and every society has always known that. Without women capable of giving birth, human populations will die out. That is why the mass rape and murder of women, girls, and children has long been a feature of genocidal wars, and of other campaigns meant to subdue and exploit a population.

Yes, the thought-experiment penises can get out of control

Every move I make is sodden with unreality. When no one is around, I bite my fingers. I need to feel physical pain, to attach myself to daily life.

She's so beautiful she glows in the dark.

Ed, knows power corrupts, they'll have experienced that first-hand. They'll see how I'd be tempted to use my own power for personal reasons. They may not approve of that, but they'll buy

Malum quidem nullum esse sine aliquo bono, Tin noted in the journal he was sporadically keeping then. Every cloud has a silver lining.

The minimalist life. Pleasure is an egg. Blessings that can be counted, on the fingers of one hand. But possibly this is how I am expected to react. If I have an egg, what more can I want?

What would that be like - to long, to yearn for someone who is right there before your eyes, day in and day out?

What else can I do? Once you've gone this far you aren't fit for anything else. Something happens to your mind. You're overqualified, overspecialized, and everybody knows it. Nobody in any other game would be crazy enough to hire me. I wouldn't even make a good ditch-digger, I'd start tearing apart the sewer-system, trying to pick-axe and unearth all of those chthonic symbols - pipes, valves, cloacal conduits... No, no. I'll have to be a slave to the paper-mines for all time.

What were prizes but one more level of control imposed on Art by the establishment?

For the ones who come after you, it will be easier. They will accept their duties with willing hearts. She did not say: Because they will have no memories, of any other way. She said: Because they won't want things they can't have.

The older women, the married ones and the widows, wear black clothes and no makeup, as I used to do. When I was in the later months of pregnancy, they would smile at me, as if I was almost one of them. Now they smile at Sarah first.

Good. You are all intelligent women. Through your former…" He did not want to say professions. "Through your former experiences, you are familiar with the lives of women. You know how they are likely to think, or let me rephrase that—how they are likely to react to stimuli, both positive and less positive.

For so much time, our history was written in bones only.

Once they tried to save something, others or their own souls.

Powerful men don't take well to rejection. Rage could result. There

so hard, sometimes, to tag those memories accurately.

It's as if some bored theatrical costume designer got drunk behind the scenes and raided the storage boxes:

The only way you can write the truth is to assume that what you set down will never be read. Not by any other person, and not even by yourself at some later date. Otherwise you begin excusing yourself.

Women do not usually write novels of the type favoured by men but men are known to write novels of the type favoured by women. Some people find this odd.

Mitch looks in her direction. He can't meet her eyes. It's as if she's semi-invisible, a kind of hovering blur.

So much for the gods not wanting me to suffer. They all tease. I might as well have been a stray dog, pelted with stones or with its tail set alight for their amusement. Not the fat and bones of animals, but our suffering, is what they love to savour.

there are some things that do not fare well in high definition. She resents the pores, the wrinkles, the nose hairs, the impossibly whitened teeth shoved right up in front of your eyes so you can't ignore them the way you would in real life.

It's all about sex and territory, which are what will finish us off in the long run.