Margaret Atwood Quotes

Exploited, they'd say. Yes, any way
you cut it, but I've a choice
of how, and I'll take the money.

All right, I say. I don't smile. Why tempt her to friendship?

When did the body first set out on its own adventures? Snowman thinks; after having ditched its old travelling companions, the mind and the soul, for whom it had once been considered a mere corrupt vessel or else a puppet acting out their dramas for them, or else bad company, leading the other two astray. it must have got tired of the soul's constant nagging and whining and the anxiety-driven intellectual web-spinning of the mind, distracting it whenever it was getting its teeth into something juicy or its fingers into something good. It had dumped the other two back there somewhere, leaving them stranded in some damp sanctuary or stuffy lecture hall while it made a beeline for the topless bars, and it had dumped culture along with them: music and painting and poetry and plays. Sublimation, all of it; nothing but sublimation, according to the body. Why not cut to the chase?
But the body had its own cultural forms. It had its own art. Executions were its tragedies, pornography was its romance.

Books are frozen voices, in the same way that musical scores are frozen music. The score is a way of transmitting the music to someone who can play it, releasing it into the air where it can once more be heard. And the black alphabet marks on the page represent words that were once spoken, if only in the writer's head. They lie there inert until a reader comes along and transforms the letters into living sounds. The reader is the musician of the book: each reader may read the same text, just as each violinist plays the same piece, but each interpretation is different.

There's only so long you can feel sorry for a person before you come to feel that their affliction is an act of malice committed by them against you.

I'm not afraid of seeing Cordelia. I'm afraid of being Cordelia. Because in some way we changed places, and I've forgotten when.

There were still newspapers, then. We used to read them in bed. It's French, he said. From m'aidez. Help Me.

Sometimes I wish she would just shut up and let me walk in peace. But I'm ravenous for news, any kind of news; even if it's false news, it must mean something.

While he writes, I feel as if he is drawing me; or not drawing me, drawing on me - drawing on my skin - not with the pencil he is using, but with an old-fashioned goose pen, and not with the quill end but with the feather end. As if hundreds of butterflies have settled all over my face, and are softly opening and closing their wings.

The light flickers on all of us and makes us look softer and more beautiful than we really are. But sometimes it makes us darker and scarier too, when the faces go into shadow and you can't see the eyes, only the eye sockets. Deep pools of blackness welling out of our heads. My

electrical wires dragged down by the weight of the ice and flickering balefully, a row of sleet-covered planes stranded in an airport, a huge truck that's jackknifed and tipped over and is lying on its side with smoke coming out. An ambulance is on the scene, a fire truck, a huddle of raingear-clad operatives: someone's been injured, always a sight to make the heart beat faster. A policeman appears, crystals of ice whitening his moustache; he pleads sternly with people to stay inside. It's no joke, he tells the viewers. Don't think you can brave the elements! His frowning, frosted eyebrows are noble, like those on the wartime bond-drive posters from the 1940s. Constance remembers those, or believes she does. But she may just be remembering history books or museum displays or documentary films: so hard, sometimes, to tag those memories accurately. Finally, a minor touch of pathos: a stray dog is displayed, semi-frozen, wrapped in a child's pink nap blanket. A gelid baby

I am alive, I live, I breathe, I put my hand out, unfolded, into the sunlight.

Romance takes place in the middle distance. Romance is looking in at yourself through a window clouded with dew. Romance means leaving things out: where life grunts and shuffles, romance only sighs.

You couldn't leave words lying around where our enemies might find them.

I want everything back, the way it was. But there is no point to it, this wanting.

Once, though, I heard Rita say to Cora that she wouldn't debase herself like that. Nobody asking you, Cora said. Anyways, what could you do, supposing? Go to the Colonies, Rita said. They have the choice. With the Unwomen, and starve to death and Lord knows what all? said Cora. Catch you. They

Dishtowels are the same as they always were. Sometimes these flashes of normality

As human beings, we are always torn between individual freedom and the ability of choose our actions, and the need for at least enough social structure so that anarchy, chaos, and warlordery - or the war of all against all - can be avoided.

Did we make them
because we needed to love someone
and could not love each other?

Well of course people cross genres all the time. You could have something called science-fiction-fantasy. Some galaxy far, far away and in another time with spaceships, but also dragons. And there's no rule that says you can't do that.

I'm interested in the Gothic novel because it's very much a woman's form. Why is there such a wide readership for books that essentially say, 'Your husband is trying to kill you'?

I wanted things to be highly coloured, simple in outline, without ambiguity, which is what most children want when it comes to the stories of their parents. They want a postcard.

We immortals aren't misers - we don't hoard! Such things are pointless.

But we lived as usual. Everyone does, most of the time. Whatever is

Looking down, she became aware of the water, which was covered with a film of calcinous hard-water particles of dirt and soap, and of the body that was sitting in it, somehow no longer quite her own. All at once she was afraid that she was dissolving, coming apart layer by layer like a piece of cardboard in a gutter puddle.

I don't think of poetry as a 'rational' activity but as an aural one. My poems usually begin with words or phrases which appeal more because of their sound than their meaning, and the movement and phrasing of a poem are very important to me.

She'd have been gnawing her way through his bedroom walls to sink her avid fingers into his youthful flesh.

But I envy the Commander's Wife her knitting. It's good to have small goals that can be easily attained.

It was hard to believe. The entire government, gone like that. How did they get in, how did it happen? That was when they suspended the Constitution.

If you want to be a writer, you should go into the largest library you can find and stand there contemplating the books that have been written. Then you should ask yourself, 'Do I really have anything to add?' If you have the arrogance or the humility to say yes, you will know you have the vocation.

I don't feel pleased with myself while recording this cruelty, even though it was only a cruelty to a doll. It's a vengeful side of my nature that I am sorry to say I have failed to subdue entirely. But in an account such as this, it is better to be scrupulous about your faults, as about all your other actions. Otherwise no one will understand why you made the decisions that you made.

And so I step up, int the darkness within; or else the light.

I'm thinking about Carol and Grace, my two best friends. At the same time I can't remember exactly what they look like. Did I really sit on the floor of Grace's bedroom, on her braided bedside rug, cutting out pictures of frying pans and washing machines from the Eaton's Catalogue and pasting them into a scrapbook? Already it seems implausible, and yet I know I did it.

- a young woman in desperate financial straits, with no visible relations and no nest egg or trust fund or fallback. People would shake their heads - a shame but what could you do, and at least she had something of marketable value, namely her young ass, and therefore she wouldn't starve to death, and nobody had to feel guilty.

But reality has too much darkness in it. Too many crows

What we prayed for was emptiness, so we would be worthy to be filled: with grace, with love, with self-denial, semen and babies.

Her metaphors for her children included barnacles encrusting a ship and limpets clinging to a rock.

No mother is ever, completely, a child's idea of what a mother should be, and I suppose it works the other way around as well. But despite everything, we didn't do too badly by one another, we did as well as most.

What's dangerous in the hands of the multitudes, he said, with what may or may not have been irony, is safe enough for those whose motives are ...
Beyond reproach, I said.
He nodded gravely. Impossible to tell whether or not he meant it.

In ten years, you'll be on a stamp /
where anyone at all can lick you.

Every night when I go to bed I think, In the morning I will wake up in my own house and things will be back the way they were.
It hasn't happened this morning, either.

Human reason is a pin dancing on the head of an angel, so small is it in comparison to the Divine vastness that encircles us.

You want your decisions taken away from you so you won't be responsible for your own actions?

I feel like cotton candy: sugar and air. Squeeze me and I'd turn into a small sickly damp wad of weeping pinky-red.

But Jimmy, you should know. All sex is real.

What's with her?" says the painter.
"She's mad because she's a woman," Jon says. This is something I haven't heard for years, not since high school. Once it was a shaming thing to say, and crushing to have it said about you, by a man. It implied oddness, deformity, sexual malfunction.
I go to the living room doorway. "I'm not mad because I'm a woman," I say. "I'm mad because you're an asshole.

He has tried imagining her as a prostitute - he often plays this private mental game with various women he encounters - but he can't picture any man actually paying for her services. It would be like paying to be run over by a wagon, and would be, like that experience, a distinct threat to the health.

Be a good girl," she said. "I hope you'll be a good sister to Laura. I know you try to be." I nodded. I didn't know what to say. I felt I was the victim of an injustice: why was it always me who was supposed to be a good sister to Laura, instead of the other way around? Surely my mother loved Laura more than she loved me.

Jimmy had been full of himself back then, thinks Snowman with indulgence and a little envy. He'd been unhappy too, of course. It went without saying, his unhappiness. He'd put a lot of energy into it.

I'm fine," said Pilar, "for the moment. And the moment is the only time we can be fine in.

My good intentions are completely lethal.

she refused to feel what he wanted her to feel. Was

Your friend is intellectually honourable," Jimmy's mother would say. "He doesn't lie to himself.

At least he hadn't completely blown it: she wasn't angry with him. That was the main thing. What

The sky darkens from ultramarine to indigo. God bless the namers of oil paints and high-class women's underwear, Snowman thinks. Rose-Petal Pink, Crimson Lake, Sheer Mist, Burnt Umber, Ripe Plum, Indigo, Ultramarine – they're fantasies in themselves, such words and phrases. It's comforting to remember that Homo sapiens sapiens was once so ingenious with language, and not only with language. Ingenious in every direction at once.

Gone mad is what they say, and sometimes Run mad, as if mad is a different direction, like west; as if mad is a different house you could step into, or a separate country entirely. But when you go mad you don't go any other place, you stay where you are. And somebody else comes in.

Your hand is a warm stone I hold between two words.

Happy endings are best achieved by keeping the right doors locked

Never pray for justice, because you might get some.

The lock splits. The iron gate swings open. She emerges, raises her arms towards the suddenly chilled moon. The world changes.

Laughter may instruct but it may also conceal, defending the joker against anger and retaliation: a game is only a game.

The weapons that were once outside sharpening themselves on war are now indoors there, in the fortress, fragile in glass cases; Why is it (I'm thinking of the careful moulding round the stonework archways) that in this time, such elaborate defences keep things that are no longer (much) worth defending?

The times when she was away were hard for Jimmy. He worried about her, he longed for her, he resented her for not being there.

Thus the time passed. Toby stopped counting it. In any case, time is not a thing that passes, said Pilar: it's a sea on which you float.

The darkness is really out there. It's not something that's in my head, just. It's in my work because it's in the world.

It was as if they could read each other's minds. No, not minds: each other's mindlessness.

They thought he was only what they could see. A nice boy but a bit of a goof, a bit of a show-off. Not the brightest star in the universe; not a numbers person, but you couldn't have everything you wanted and at least he wasn't a total washout.

A prison does not only lock its inmates inside, it keeps all others out. Her strongest prison is of her own construction.

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

at this distance
you're a mirage, a glossy image
fixed in the posture
of the last time I saw you.
Turn you over, there's a place
for the address. Wish you were
here.

Rome versus the Visigoths, Ancient Egypt versus the Hyksos, Aztecs versus the Spaniards.

I lie flat, the damp air above me like a lid. Like earth. I wish it would rain. Better still, a thunderstorm, black clouds, lightning, ear-splitting sound.

I wasn't discriminating in my reading, and I'm still not. I read then primarily to be entertained, as I do now. And I'm not saying that apologetically: I feel that if you remove the initial gut response from reading - the delight or excitement or simply the enjoyment of being told a story - and try to concentrate on the meaning or the shape of the "message" first, you might as well give up, it's too much like all work and no play.

On the whole she fares better with the men, if they can work their way past the awkward preliminaries; if they can avoid calling her "little lady," or saying they weren't expecting her to be so feminine, by which they mean short. Though only the most doddering ones do that any more. If she weren't so tiny, though, she'd never get away with it. If she were six feet tall and built like a blockhouse; if she had hips. Then she'd be threatening, then she'd be an Amazon. It's the incongruity that grants her permission. A breath would blow you away, they beam down at her silently. You wish, thinks Tony, smiling up. Many have blown.

Fuck, thinks Stan. She knows about the chickens.

If I waited for perfection ... I would never write a word.

What a moron I was to think you were sweet and innocent, when it turns out you were actually college-educated the whole time!

Already my childhood seemed far away - a remote age, faded and bittersweet, like dried flowers. Did I regret its loss, did I want it back? I didn't think so.

I wonder
if I should let my hair go grey
so my advice will be better.

The witch is absolutely necessary.

The girls in the stories make such fools of themselves. They are so weak. They fall helplessly in love with the wrong men, they give in, they are jilted. Then they cry.

Roughing it builds a boy's character, but only certain kinds of roughing it.

Buttered, I lie on my single bed, flat, like a piece of toast. I

This world is not enough, but it will have to do. You can either hold on or let go.

The best way of being kind to bears is not to be very close to them.

And each of his voices left his body in a different colored soul and floated up towards the sun still singing.

I was horrified in high school by the fate of the hanged maids at the end of the Odyssey; it seemed unfair to me, even then.

For an instant she felt them, their identities, almost their substance, pass over her head like a wave. At some time she would be - or no, already she was like that too; she was one of them, her body the same, identical, merged with that other flesh that choked the air in the flowered room with its sweet organic scent; she felt suffocated by this thick sargasso-sea of femininity.

All writers must go from now to once upon a time; all must take care not to be captured and held immobile by the past.

I lie on the floor, washed by nothing and hanging on. I cry at night. I am afraid of hearing voices, or a voice. I have come to the edge, of the land. I could get pushed over.

Children don't read 'genres'; they read stories. Below a certain age, they don't distinguish between 'true' and 'not true,' because they see no reason that a white rabbit shouldn't possess a pocket watch, that whales shouldn't talk, or that sentient beings shouldn't live on other planets and travel in spaceships. Science-fiction tropes aren't read as 'science fiction'; they're read as fiction. And fiction is read as reality. And sometimes reality lives under the bed and has very large teeth, and it's no use pretending otherwise.

Cleverness is a quality a man likes to have in his wife as long as she is some distance away from him. Up close, he'll take kindness any day of the week, if there's nothing more alluring to be had.

It could be old clips, it could be faked. But

According to Adam One, the Fall of Man was multidimensional. The ancestral primates fell out of the trees; then they fell from vegetarianism into meat-eating. Then they fell from instinct into reason, and thus into technology; from simple signals into complex grammar, and thus into humanity; from firelessness into fire, and thence into weaponry; and from seasonal mating into an incessant sexual twitching. Then they fell from a joyous life in the moment into the anxious contemplation of the vanished past and the distant future.

I have a big following among the biogeeks of this world. Nobody ever puts them in books.

How I wasted them, those rooms, that freedom from being seen. Rented

I'd felt like crying, but cry once and it's all over: if you cry, the reliable men will despise you, and then they will not be reliable any more.

I consider telling my brother, asking him for help. But tell him what exactly? I have no black eyes, no bloody noses to report: Cordelia does nothing physical. If it was boys, chasing or teasing, he would know what to do, but I don't suffer from boys in this way. Against girls and their indirectness, their whisperings, he would be helpless.

[...] in this world you have to take your bits and ends of kindness where you can find them, as they do not grow on trees.

But also I'm hungry. This is monstrous, but nevertheless it's true. Death makes me hungry. Maybe it's because I've been emptied; or maybe it's the body's way of seeing to it that I remain alive, continue to repeat its bedrock prayer: I am, I am. I am, still. I want to go to bed, make love, right now. I think of the word relish. I could eat a horse.