Margaret Atwood

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

“Canadians are fond of a good disaster, especially if it has ice, water, or snow in it. You thought the national flag was about a leaf, didn't you? Look harder. It's where someone got axed in the snow.”

“She knows herself to be at the mercy of events, and she knows by now that events have no mercy.”

“The only way you can write the truth is to assume that what you set down will never be read. Not by any other person, and not even by yourself at some later date. Otherwise you begin excusing yourself. You must see the writing as emerging like a long scroll of ink from the index finger of your right hand; you must see your left hand erasing it.”

“There's an epigram tacked to my office bulletin board, pinched from a magazine -- "Wanting to meet an author because you like his work is like wanting to meet a duck because you like pâté.”

“Wild geese fly south, creaking like anguished hinges; along the riverbank the candles of the sumacs burn dull red. It's the first week of October. Season of woolen garments taken out of mothballs; of nocturnal mists and dew and slippery front steps, and late-blooming slugs; of snapdragons having one last fling; of those frilly ornamental pink-and-purple cabbages that never used to exist, but are all over everywhere now.”

“And then everything went on very quietly for a fortnight, says Dr. Jordan. He is reading aloud from my confession.Yes Sir, it did, I say. More or less quietly.What is everything? How did it go on?I beg your pardon, Sir?What did you do everyday?Oh, the usual, Sir, I say. I performed my duties.You will forgive me, says Dr. Jordan. Of what did those duties consist?I look at him. He is wearing a yellow cravat with small white squares, he is not making a joke. He really does not know. Men such as him do not have to clean up the messes they make, but we have to clean up our own messes, and theirs into the bargain. In that way they are like children, they do not have to think ahead, or worry about the consequences of what they do. But it's not their fault, it is only how they are brought up.”

“Nolite te bastardes carborundorum.”

“There is more than one kind of freedom," said Aunt Lydia. "Freedom to and freedom from. In the days of anarchy, it was freedom to. Now you are being given freedom from. Don't underrate it.”

“Snowman wakes before dawn.”

“I would like to be the air that inhabits you for a moment only. I would like to be that unnoticed and that necessary.”

“In the spring, at the end of the day, you should smell like dirt.”

“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.”

“Beginnings are sudden, but also insidious. They creep up on you sideways, they keep to the shadows, they lurk unrecognized. Then, later, they spring.”

“War is what happens when language fails.”

“They had been pathetically eager to have the wedding in the family church. Their reaction though, as far as she could estimate the reactions of people who were now so remote from her, was less elated glee than a quiet, rather smug satisfaction, as though their fears about the effects of her university education, never stated but aways apparent, had been calmed at last. They had probably been worried she would turn into a high-school teacher or a maiden aunt or a dope addict or a female executive, or that she would undergo some shocking physical transformation, like developing muscles and a deep voice or growing moss.”

“A word after a word after a word is power.”

“Ten days after the war ended, my sister Laura drove a car off a bridge.”

“And she finds it difficult to believe—that a person would love her even when she isn't trying. Trying to figure out what other people need, trying to be worthy.”

“We slept in what had once been the gymnasium.”

“The true story is vicious and multiple and untrue after all. Why do you need it? Don’t ever ask for the true story.”

“Siren SongThis is the one song everyonewould like to learn: the songthat is irresistible:the song that forces mento leap overboard in squadronseven though they see beached skullsthe song nobody knowsbecause anyone who had heard itis dead, and the others can’t remember.Shall I tell you the secretand if I do, will you get meout of this bird suit?I don’t enjoy it heresquatting on this islandlooking picturesque and mythicalwith these two feathery maniacs,I don’t enjoy singingthis trio, fatal and valuable.I will tell the secret to you,to you, only to you.Come closer. This songis a cry for help: Help me!Only you, only you can,you are uniqueat last. Alasit is a boring songbut it works every time.”

“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.”

“When I am lonely for boys it’s their bodies I miss. I study their hands lifting the cigarettes in the darkness of the movie theaters, the slope of a shoulder, the angle of a hip. Looking at them sideways, I examine them in different lights. My love for them is visual: that is the part of them I would like to possess. Don’t move, I think. Stay like that, let me have that.”

“I sink down into my body as into a swamp, fenland, where only I know the footing….I’m a cloud, congealed around a central object, the shape of a pear, which is hard and more real than I am and glows red within its translucent wrapping. Inside it is a space, huge as the sky at night and dark and curved like that, though black-red rather than black.”

“Perhaps I write for no one. Perhaps for the same person children are writing for when they scrawl their names in the snow.”

“Don't let the bastards grind you down.”

“It wasn't so easy though, ending the war. A war is a huge fire; the ashes from it drift far, and settle slowly.”

“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.”

“Below me, in the foundations of the house, I could hear the clothes I'd buried there growing themselves a body.”

“I grew sodden with light; my skin on the inside glowed a dull red.”

“A man in a cloud, with icicle teeth and eyes of fire.”

“Her glass wings are gone.”

“to fix and make plausible, the nebulous emotions of my costumed heroins, like diamonds on a sea of dough.”

“I would pore for hours over the stalls of worn necklaces, sets of gilt spoons, sugar tongs in the shape of hen's feet or midget hands, clocks that didn't work, flowered china, spotty mirrors and ponderous furniture, the flotsam left by those receding centuries in which, more and more, I was living.”

“I always remembered what she looked like, the dried apple face, the silvery gray hair, the snapping blue eyes.”

“I sang out the words unflinchingly though, as I stomped around the toadstool in clouds of church-basement dust, with a damp Gnome hand clutched in each of mine.”

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

“her body feels different, no longer taut and sinewy but sponge-like fluid. Saturated. It has a different energy, a deep orangy-like pink, like the inside of a hibiscus.”

“She walks towards Karen and Karen feels a cool wind against her skin, and the grandmother holds out both of her knobby old hands, and Karen puts out her own hands and touches her, and her hands feel as if sand is falling over them. There's a smell of milkweed flowers and garden soil. The grandmother keeps on walking; her eyes are light blue, and her cheek comes against Karen's, cool grains of dry rice. Then she's like the dots on the comic page, close up, and then she's only a swirl in the air, and then she's gone.”

“he doesn't know it, but this touching she does is not only compassionate, but possessive.”

“a few brown leaves are stuck to the outside of the glass like leather tongues.”

“Karen wasn't hard, she was soft, too soft. A soft touch. Her hair was soft, her smile was soft, her voice was soft. She was so soft there was no resistance. Hard things sank into her, they went right through her, and if she made a real effort, out the other side. Then she didn't have to see them or hear them, or even touch them.”

“It's clear, it's fresh, like a mint candy.”

“The story of Zenia ought to begin when Zenia began. It must have been someplace long ago and distant in space, thinks Tony; someplace bruised, and very tangled. A European print, hand-tinted, ochre-coloured, with dusty sunlight and a lot of bushes in it- bushes with thick leaves and ancient twisted roots, behind which, out of sight in the undergrowth and hinted at only by a boot protruding, or a slack hand, something ordinary but horrifying is taking place.”

“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 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.”

“What you get is no longer what you see.”

“left lipstick imprints the shape of grateful, rubbery sighs...”

“He considers me also a little fragile because artistic. I need to be cared for, like a potted plant.”

“oil paints...the look of licked lips.”