Margaret Atwood

“Good writing takes place at intersections, at what you might call knots, at places where the society is snarled or knotted up.”

“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.”

“Better not to invent her in her absence. Better to wait until she's actually here. Then he can make her up as she goes along.”

“They were new money, without a doubt: so new it shrieked. Their clothes looked as it they'd covered themselves in glue, then rolled around in hundred-dollar bills.”

“I've learned to do without a lot of things. If you have a lot of things, said Aunt Lydia, you get too attached to this material world and you forget about spiritual values.”

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

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

“What a lost person needs is a map of the territory, with his own position marked on it so he can see where he is in relation to everything else. Literature is not only a mirror; it is also a map, a geography of the mind. Our literature is one such map, if we can learn to read it as our literature, as the product of who and where we have been. We need such a map desperately, we need to know about here, because here is where we live. For the members of a country or a culture, shared knowledge of their place, their here, is not a luxury but a necessity. Without that knowledge we will not survive.”

“Longed for him. Got him. Shit.”

“You should not be sad," he said, gazing at me with his melancholy, leathery walrus eyes. "It must be the love. But you are young and pretty, you will have time to be sad later." The French are connoisseurs of sadness, they know all the kinds. This is why they have bidets. "It is criminal, the love, " he said, patting my shoulder. "But none is worse."—”

“What people want is perfection," said the man. "In themselves." "But they need the steps to it to be pointed out," said the woman. "In a simple order," said the man. "With encouragement," said the woman. "And a positive attitude.”

“Falling in love, although it resulted in altered body chemistry and was therefore real, was a hormonally induced delusional state, according to him. In addition it was humiliating, because it put you at a disadvantage, it gave the love object too much power. As for sex per se, it lacked both challenge and novelty, and was on the whole a deeply imperfect solution to the problem of intergenerational genetic transfer.”

“A wave of blood goes up to my head, my stomach shrinks together, as if something dangerous has just missed hitting me. It's as if I've been caught stealing, or telling a lie; or as if I've heard other people talking about me, saying bad things about me, behind my back. There's the same flush of shame, of guilt and terror, and of cold disgust with myself. But I don't know where these feelings have come from, what I've done.”

“When they're gone out of his head, these words, they'll be gone, everywhere, forever. As if they had never been.”

“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.”

“On the way home from school we go to the record store... [Cordelia] expects me to roll my eyes in ecstasy, the way she does; she expects me to groan. She knows the rituals, she knows how we're supposed to be behaving, now that we're in high school. But I think these things are impenetrable and fraudulent, and I can't do them without feeling I'm acting.”

“The male frog in mating season," said Crake, "makes as much noise as it can. The females are attracted to the male frog with the biggest, deepest voice because it suggests a more powerful frog, one with superior genes. Small male frogs—it's been documented—discover if they position themselves in empty drainpipes, the pipe acts as a voice amplifier and the small frog appears much larger than it really is."So?"So that's what art is for the artist, an empty drainpipe. An amplifier. A stab at getting laid.”

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

“When demons are required someone will always be found to supply the part, and whether you step forward or are pushed is all the same in the end.”

“Then sail, my fine lady, on the billowing wave -The water below is as dark as the grave,And maybe you'll sink in your little blue boat -It's hope, and hope only, that keeps us afloat”

“How could I have been so ignorant? she thinks. So stupid, so unseeing, so given over to carelessness. But without such ignorance, such carelessness, how could we live? If you knew what was going to happen, if you knew everything that was going to happen next—if you knew in advance the consequences of your own actions—you'd be doomed. You'd be as ruined as God. You'd be a stone. You'd never eat or drink or laugh or get out of bed in the morning. You'd never love anyone, ever again. You'd never dare to.”

“A road is a process, not a location.”

“How old do you have to get before wisdom descends like a plastic bag over your head and you learn to keep your big mouth shut? Maybe never. Maybe you get more frivolous with age.”

“Every ending is arbitrary, because the end is where you write The end. A period, a dot of punctuation, a point of stasis. A pinprick in the paper: you could put your eye to it and see through, to the other side, to the beginning of something else. Or, as Tony says to her students, Time is not a solid, like wood, but a fluid, like water or the wind. It doesn't come neatly cut into even-sized length, into decades and centuries. Nevertheless, for our purposes we have to pretend it does. The end of any history is a lie in which we all agree to conspire.”

“Extreme good, extreme evil: the abilities required are similar.”

“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.”

“The trickle-down theory of economics has it that it's good for rich people to get even richer because some of their wealth will trickle own, through their no doubt lavish spending, upon those who stand below them on the economic ladder. Notice that the metaphor is not that of a gushing waterfall but of a leaking tap: even the most optimistic endorsers of this concept do not picture very much real flow, as their language reveals" pg. 102.”

“Faith is only a word, embroidered.”

“You refuse to own yourself, you permit others to do it for you”

“My own view of myself was that I was small and innocuous, a marshmallow compared to the others. I was a poor shot with a 22, for instance, and not very good with an ax. It took me a long time to figure out that the youngest in a family of dragons is still a dragon from the point of view of those who find dragons alarming.”

“You're sad because you're sad.It's psychic. It's the age. It's chemical.Go see a shrink or take a pill,or hug your sadness like an eyeless dollyou need to sleep.Well, all children are sadbut some get over it.Count your blessings. Better than that,buy a hat. Buy a coat or a pet.Take up dancing to forget.”

“You aren't sick & unhappy only alive & stuck with it.”

“History (that listof ballooning wishes, flukes,bent times, plunges and mistakesclutched like parachutes)is rolling itself up in your headat one end unrolling at the other.”

“There is something powerful in the whispering of obscenities, about those in power. There's something delightful about it, something naughty, secretive, forbidden, thrilling. It's like a spell, of sorts. It deflates them, reduces them to the common denominator where they can be dealt with.”

“She knows the rituals, she knows how we're supposed to be behaving...But I think these things are impenetrable and fraudulent, and I can't do them without feeling I'm acting.”

“I see that there will be no end to imperfection, or to doing things the wrong way. Even if you grow up, no matter how hard you scrub, whatever you do, there will always be some other stain or spot on your face or stupid act, somebody frowning.”

“The temptation is to stay inside; to subside into the kind of recluse whom neighborhood children regard with derision and little awe; to let the hedges and weeds grow up, to allow the doors to rust shut, to lie on my bed in some gown-shaped garment and let my hair lengthens and spread out over the pillow and my fingernails to sprout into claws, while candle wax drips onto the carpet. But long ago I made a choice between classicism and romanticism. I prefer to be upright and contained—an urn in daylight.”

“The cemetery has ... an inscription: 'Though I walk through the Valley of the Shadow of Death I will Fear No Evil, For Thou Art With Me.' 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.”

“The best way of keeping a secret is to pretend there isn't one.”

“Of course (said Oryx), having a money value was no substitute for love. Every child should have love, every person should have it. . . . but love was undependable, it came and then it went, so it was good to have a money value, because then at least those who wanted to make a profit from you would make sure you were fed enough and not damaged too much. Also there were many who had neither love nor a money value, and having one of these things was better than having nothing.”

“Me gustaría que algo fuera verdadero. No todo, eso es imposible, pero sí al menos una o dos cosas. Vaya, que el doctor Johnson refutó la teoría de la irrealidad de la materia arreándole una patada a una piedra, pero yo no puedo ir por ahí pateando a mis compañeros de piso, o a los profesores. Además, ¿y si mi pie tampoco es real?. Me parecía que a lo mejor tu lo serías. Bueno, si nos acostábamos. Pero ahora mismo eres totalmente irreal, sólo puedo pensar en todas esas capas de ropa que llevas, abrigos y suéters y esas cosas. A veces me pregunto si habrá más capas debajo, a lo mejor eres toda de lana. Y sería bonito, bueno, digo que sería bonito que no lo fueras.”

“If we were all on trial for our thoughts, we would all be hanged.”

“She was an infallible prophetess, and these powers came from her ability to look into the patterns of the universe.”

“Another friend of mine used to maintain that airplanes stayed up in the air only because people believed—against reason—that they could fly: without that collective delusion sustaining them, they would instantly plummet to earth.”

“Within each of these categories, the principle was the same: rarity and beauty increased value.”

“It was like being in an elevator cut loose at the top. Falling, falling, and not knowing when you will hit.”

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

“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.”

“. . . they lurk passively, like vampire sheep”

“Take a pencil to write with on aeroplanes. Pens leak. But if the pencil breaks, you can't sharpen it on the plane, because you can't take knives with you. Therefore: take two pencils.”