Margaret Atwood

“I was unfair to him, of course, but where would I have been without unfairness? In thrall, in harness. Young women need unfairness, it's one of their few defenses. They need their callousness, they need their ignorance. They walk in the dark, along the edges of high cliffs, humming to themselves, thinking themselves invulnerable.”

“We have begun to slam doors, and to throw things. I throw my purse, an ashtray, a package of chocolate chips, which breaks on impact. We are picking up chocolate chips for days. Jon throws a glass of milk, the milk, not the glass: he knows his own strength, as I do not. He throws a box of Cheerios, unopened.The things I throw miss, although they are worse things. The things he throws hit, but are harmless.I begin to see how the line is crossed, between histrionics and murder.”

“it was about men, the kind who caused women to fall. I did not ascribe any intentions to these men. They were like the weather, they didn't have a mind. They merely drenched you or struck you like lightning and moved on, mindless as blizzards. Or they were like rocks, a line of sharp slippery rocks with jagged edges. You could walk with care along between the rocks, picking your steps, and if you slipped you'd fall and cut yourself, but it was no use blaming the rocks.That must be what was meant by fallen women. Fallen women were women who had fallen onto men and hurt themselves. There was some suggestion of downward motion, against one's will and not with the will of anyone else. Fallen women were not pulled-down women or pushed women, merely fallen. Of course there was Eve and the Fall; but there was nothing about falling in that story, which was only about eating, like most children's stories.”

“In pictures like these there are always empty shoes. It's the shoes that get to me. Sad, that innocent daily task - putting your shoes on your feet, in the firm belief that you'll be going somewhere.”

“Writing of the narrative kind, and perhaps all writing, is motivated deep down, by a fear or and fascination with mortality - by a desire to make the risky trip to the underworld and to bring something or someone back from the dead. ”

“We have been shark to one another, but also lifeboat.”

“Love was like a steamroller. There was no avoiding it, it went over you and you came out flat.”

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

“Because you are never herebut always there, I forgetnot you but what you look likeYou drift down the streetin the rain, your facedissolving, changing shape, the coloursrunning togetherMy walls absorbyou, breathe you forthagain, you resumeyourself, I do not recognize youYou rest on the bedwatching me watchingyou, we will never knoweach other any betterthan we do now”

“Rezábamos por la vacuidad, para hacernos dignas de ser llenadas: de gracia, de amor, de abnegación, de semen y de niños.Oh, Dios, Rey del universo, gracias por no haberme hecho hombre.Oh, Dios, destrúyeme. Házme fértil. Mortifica mi carne para que pueda multiplicarme. Permite que me realice…”

“Nevertheless, blood is thicker than water, as anyone knows who has tasted both.”

“It's Paradise, but we can't get out of it. And anything you can't get out of is Hell.”

“I suppose it's everyone's fate to be reduced to quaintness by those younger than themselves.”

“Human understanding is fallible, and we see through a glass, darkly. Any religion is a shadow of God. But the shadows of God are not God.”

“Without the light, no chance; without the dark, no dance.”

“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.”

“As we know from the study of history, no new system can impose itself upon a previous one without incorporating many of the elements to be found in the latter...”

“I used to think of my body as an instrument, of pleasure, or a means of transportation, or an implement for the accomplishment of my will.”

“How were we to know we were happy?”

“I'm not senile," I snapped. "If I burn the house down it will be on purpose.”

“I was taking something away from her, although she didn't know it. I was filching. Never mind that it was something she apparently didn't want or had no use for, had rejected even; still, it was hers, and if I took it away, this mysterious "it" I couldn't quite define.”

“All you have to do, I tell myself, is keep your mouth shut and look stupid. It shouldn't be that hard.”

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

“We were the people who were not in the papers. We lived in the blank white spaces at the edges of print. It gave us more freedom.We lived in the gaps between the stories.”

“For years I wanted to be older, and now I am.”

“Just what the doctor ordered, he says. A bottle of lemonade, a hard-boiled egg, and Thou.”

“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.”

“People cry at weddings for the same reason they cry at happy endings: because they so desperately want to believe in something they know is not credible.”

“What do you want me to do?” he whispers into the empty air.It’s hard to know.Oh Jimmy, you were so funny.Don’t let me down.From habit he lifts his watch; it shows him its blank face.Zero hour, Snowman thinks. Time to go.”

“a handful of crumpled stars”

“...there was little that was truly original or indigenous to Gilead. Its genius was synthesis.”

“A rat in a maze is free to go anywhere, as long as it stays inside the maze.”

“I have a fork and a spoon, but never a knife… as if I’m lacking manual skills or teeth. I have both, however. That’s why I’m not allowed a knife.”

“The night is mine, my own time, to do with it as I will, as long as I am quiet. As long as I don't move. As long as I lie still. The difference between lie and lay. Lay is always passive.”

“As it says in the Bible, For now we through a glass, darkly; but then face to face. If it is face to face, there must be two looking.”

“Myths can't be translated as they did in their ancient soil. We can only find our own meaning in our own time. ”

“A man is just a woman's strategy for making other women.”

“The bell that measures time is ringing”

“like a pathway through a forest, like a carpet for royalty, it shows me the way”

“her face might be kindly if she would smile”

“A Sister, dipped in blood”

“This is what I miss, Cordelia: not something that’s gone, but something that will never happen. Two old women giggling over their tea.”

“When they came to harvest my corpse(open your mouth, close your eyes)cut my body from the rope,surprise, surprise:I was still alive.Tough luck, folks,I know the law:you can't execute me twicefor the same thing. How nice.I fell to the clover, breathed it in,and bared my teeth at themin a filthy grin.You can imagine how that went over.Now I only need to lookout at them through my sky-blue eyes.They see their own ill willstaring then in the foreheadand turn tailBefore, I was not a witch.But now I am one.”

“I try to congure, to raise my own spirits, from wherever they are. I need to remember what they look like. I try to hold them still behind my eyes, their faces, like pictures in an album. But they won't stay still for me, they move, there's a smile and it's gone, their features curl and bend as if the paper's burning, blackness eats them. A glimpse, a pale shimmer on the air; a glow, aurora, dance of electrons, then a face again, faces. But they fade, though I stretch out my arms towards them, they slip away from me, ghosts at daybreak. Back to wherever they are. Stay with me, I want to say. But they won't.It's my fault. I am forgetting too much.”

“His father was self-made, but his mother was constructed by others, and such edifices are notoriously fragile.”

“When you are in the middle of a story it isn't a story at all, but only a confusion; a dark roaring, a blindness, a wreckage of shattered glass and splintered wood; like a house in a whirlwind, or else a boat crushed by the icebergs or swept over the rapids, and all aboard powerless to stop it. It's only afterwards that it becomes anything like a story at all. When you are telling it, to yourself or to someone else.”

“The answers you get from literature depend on the questions you pose.”

“Now I wanted to be acknowledged, but I feared it.”

“I wanted to forget the past, but it refused to forget me; it waited for sleep, then cornered me.”

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