Margaret Atwood Quotes (276 Quotes)

But in the end, back she comes. There's no use resisting. She goes to him for amnesia, for oblivion. She renders herself up, is blotted out; enters the darkness of her own body, forgets her name. Immolation is what she wants, however briefly. To exist without boundaries.

Perhaps they were looking for passion; perhaps they delved into this book as into a mysterious parcel - a gift box at the bottom of which, hidden in layers of rustling tissue paper, lay something they'd always longed for but couldn't ever grasp.

Things might have been different if she hadn't been able to drift; if she'd had to concentrate on her next meal, instead of dwelling on all the injuries she felt we'd done her. An unearned income encourages self-pity in those already prone to it.

Women have curious ways of hurting someone else. They hurt themselves instead; or else they do it so the guy doesn't even know he's been hurt until much later. Then he finds out. Then his dick falls off.

But in the closeness of the sewing room, Simon can smell her as well as look at her. He tries to pay no attention but her scent is a distracting undercurrent. She smells like smoke; smoke, and laundry soap, and the salt from her skin; and she smells of the skin itself, with its undertone of dampness, fullness, ripeness - what? Ferns and mushrooms; fruits crushed and fermenting.

Craziness was considered funny, like all other things that were in reality frightening and profoundly shameful.

It's evening, one of those gray water-color washes, like liquid dust.

While in a vintage restaurant..."the past isn't quaint while you're in it. Only at a safe distance, later, when you see it as decor, not as the shape your life's been squeezed into.

HeÆd developed a strangely tender feeling towards such words, as if they were children abandoned in the woods and it was his duty to rescue them.

There were a few other moves of his father's he could do without as well - the sucker punches, the ruffling of the hair, the way of pronouncing the word son, in a slightly deeper voice. This hearty way of talking was getting worse, as if his father were auditioning for the role of Dad, but without much hope.

But thoughtless ingratitude is the armour of the young; without it, how would they ever get through life? The old wish the young well, but they wish them ill also: they would like to eat them up, and absorb their vitality, and remain immortal themselves. Without the protection of surliness and levity, all children would be crushed by the past - the past of others, loaded on their shoulders. Selfishness is their saving grace.

She had her reasons. Not that they were the same as anybody else's reasons.

Things written down can cause a great deal of harm. All too often, people don't consider that.

Yes, it does feel deceptively safer with two; but Thou is a slippery character. Every Thou I've known has had a way of going missing. They skip town or turn perfidious, or else the drop like flies and then where are you?

For if the world treats you well, Sir, you come to believe you are deserving of it.

Despite their cool poses they wear their cravings on the outside, like the suckers on a squid. They want it all.

It's old light, and there's not much of it. But it is enough to see by.

Women are hard to keep track of, most of them. They slip into other names, and sink without a trace.

If he wants to be an asshole, it's a free country. Millions before him have made the same life choice.

There's something to be said for hunger: at least it lets you know you're still alive.

Don't blame me, blame history, he says, smiling. Such things happen. Falling in love has been recorded, or at least those words have.

She who pays the undertaker calls the tune.

This is how the girl who couldn't speak and the man who couldn't see fell in love.

You want the truth, of course. You want me to put two and two together. But two and two doesn't necessarily get you the truth. Two and two equals a voice outside the window. Two and two equals the wind. The living bird is not its labeled bones.

He is talking to people in Toronto, trying to find out if I am guilty; but he won't find it out that way. He doesn't understand yet that guilt comes to you not from the things you've done, but from the things that other have done for you.

For these dances the boys send corsages, which I keep afterward and keep in my bureau drawer; squashed carnations and brown-edged rosebuds, wads of dead vegetation, like a collection of floral shrunken heads.

Knowing too much about other people puts you in their power, they have a claim on you, you are forced to understand their reasons for doing things and then you are weakened.

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.

It made him feel invisibleùnot that he wanted to feel anything else.

These things sneak up on him for no reason, these flashes of irrational happiness. It's probably a vitamin deficiency.

Don't misunderstand me. I am not scoffing at goodness, which is far more difficult to explain than evil, and far more complicated. But sometimes it's hard to put up with.

Should is a futile word. It's about what didn't happen. It belongs in a parallel universe. It belongs in another dimension of space.

Those who live alone slide into the habit of vertical eating: why bother with the niceties when there's no one to share or censure? But laxity in one area may lead to derangement in all.

A bachelor, a studio, those were the names for that kind of apartment. Separate entrance it would say in the ads, and that meant you could have sex, unobserved.

I am afraid of falling into hopeless despair, over my wasted life, and I am still not sure how it happened.

Forgiving men is so much easier than forgiving women.

Love blurs your vision; but after it recedes, you can see more clearly than ever. It's like the tide going out, revealing whatever's been thrown away and sunk: broken bottles, old gloves, rusting pop cans, nibbled fishbodies, bones. This is the kind of thing you see if you sit in the darkness with open eyes, not knowing the future. The ruin you've made.

A puff of airùwhuff!ùhits his ears, blows out the candle. He can't be bothered relighting it, because the bourbon is taking over. He'd rather stay in the dark. He can sense Oryx drifting towards him on her soft feathery wings. Any moment now she'll be with him. He sits crouched in the chair with his head down on the desk and his eyes closed, in a state of misery and peace.

It was a question now, rather than a statement; a question with no answer.

They spent the first three years of school getting you to pretend stuff and then the rest of it marking you down if you did the same thing.

Farewells can be shattering, but returns are surely worse. Solid flesh can never live up to the bright shadow cast by its absence. Time and distance blur the edges; then suddenly the beloved has arrived, and it's noon with its merciless light, and every spot and pore and wrinkle and bristle stands clear.

So much better to travel than to arrive.

Time rises and rises, and when it reaches the level of your eyes you drown.

A man is just a woman's strategy for making other women. Not that your father wasn't a nice guy and all, but... there's something missing in them, even the nice ones. It's like they're permanently absent-minded, like they can't quite remember who they are. They look at the sky too much. They lose touch with their feet. They aren't a patch on a woman except they're better at fixing cars and playing football, just what we need for the improvement of the human race, right?

I am certain that a Sewing Machine would relieve as much human suffering as a hundred Lunatic Asylums, and possibly a good deal more.

Happy as a clam, is what my mother says for happy. I am happy as a clam: hard-shelled, firmly closed.

My hands are out of practice, my eyes disused. Most of what I do is drawing, because the preparation of the surface, the laborious underpainting and detailed concentration... are too much for me. I have lost confidence: perhaps all I will ever be is what I am now.

All it takes,ö said Crake, ôis the elimination of one generation. One generation of anything. Beetles, trees, microbes, scientists, speakers of French, whatever. Break the link in time between one generation and the next, and itÆs game over forever.

It was the thumbprints of human imperfection that used to move him, the flaws in the design: the lopsided smile, the wart next to the navel, the mole, the bruise. Was it consolation heÆd had in mind, kissing the wound to make it better?

Those walls and bars are there for a reason,ö said Crake. ôNot to keep us out, but to keep them in. Mankind needs barriers in both cases.ö ôThem?ö ôNature and God.ö ôI thought you didnÆt believe in God,ö said Jimmy. ôI donÆt believe in Nature either,ö said Crake. ôOr not with a capital N.