Margaret Atwood Quotes (276 Quotes)

Here and there are worms, evidence of the fertility of the soil, caught by the sun, half dead; flexible and pink, like lips.

Perhaps he's reached that state of intoxication which power is said to inspire, the state in which you believe you are indispensable and can therefore do anything, absolutely anything you feel like, anything at all.

I would like to believe this is a story I'm telling. I need to believe it. I must believe it. Those who can believe that such stories are only stories have a better chance. If it's a story I'm telling, then I have control over the ending. Then there will be an ending, to the story, and real life will come after it. I can pick up where I left off.

These days I script whole fights, in my head, and the reconciliations afterwards, too.

Moira was like an elevator with open sides. She made us dizzy.

We've learned to see the world in gasps.

His mouth is on me, his hands, I can't wait and he's moving, already, love, it's been so long, I'm alive in my skin, again, arms around him, falling and water softly everywhere, never-ending.

That is what you have to do before you kill, I thought. You have to create an it, where none was before.

I´ll take care of it, Luke said. And because he said it instead of her, I knew it meant kill. That is what you have to do before you kill, I thought. You have to create an it, where none was before. You do that first, in your head, and then you make it real. So that´s how they do it, I thought. I seemed never to have known that before.

These things you did were like prayers; you did them and you hoped they would save you. And for the most part they did. Or something did; you could tell by the fact that you were still alive.

My red skirt is hitched up to my waist, though no higher. Below it the Commander is fucking. What he is fucking is the lower part of my body.

When we think of the past it's the beautiful things we pick out. We want to believe it was all like that.

How easy it is to invent a humanity, for anyone at all.

That was when they suspended the Constitution. They said it would be temporary. There wasn't even any rioting in the streets. People stayed home at night, watching television, looking for some direction. There wasn't even an enemy you could put your finger on.

If I thought this would never happen again I would die. But this is wrong, nobody dies from lack of sex. It's lack of love we die from.

They seemed to be able to choose. We seemed to be able to choose, then. We were a society dying of too much choice.

Neither of us says the word love, not once. It would be tempting fate; it would be romance, bad luck.

You can only be jealous of someone who has something you think you ought to have yourself.

I am in a room where things once happened and now nothing does, except for the pollen of the weeds that grow up outside the window, blowing in as dust across the floor.

The bell that measures time is ringing

If you worked out enough, maybe the man would too. 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, taking his addictive body with him and leaving you with bad withdrawal, which you could counteract by exercise. If you didn't work it out it was because one of you had the wrong attitude.

To want is to have a weakness.

Night falls. Or has fallen. Why is it that night falls, instead of rising, like the dawn? Yet if you look east, at sunset, you can see night rising, not falling; darkness lifting into the sky, up from the horizon, like a black sun behind cloud cover. Like smoke from an unseen fire, a line of fire just below the horizon, brushfire or a burning city. Maybe night falls because it's heavy, a thick curtain pulled up over the eyes. Wool blanket.

You can think clearly only with your clothes on.

I am not your justification for existence.

The body is so easily damaged, so easily disposed of, water and chemicals is all it is, hardly more to it than a jellyfish drying on sand.

Ignoring isn't the same as ignorance, you have to work at it.

Truly amazing, what people can get used to, as long as there are a few compensations.

Nolite te bastardes carborundorum.

You can wet the rim of a glass and run your finger around the rim and it will make a sound. This is what I feel like: this sound of glass. I feel like the word shatter. I want to be with someone.