Margaret Atwood

“I'll make you mine, lovers said in old books. They never said, I'll make you me.”

“Madness is only an amplification of what you already are.”

“It is always a mistake to curse back openly at those who are stronger than you unless there is a fence between.”

“He was deciding whether to cut her throat or love her forever.”

“Take me to your trees. Take me to your breakfasts, your sunsets, your bad dreams, your shoes, your nouns. Take me to your fingers.”

“Every child should have love, every person should have it. She herself would rather have had her mother's love - the love she still continued to believe in, the love that had followed her through the jungle in the form of a bird so she would not be too frightened or lonely.”

“I’m not sure which is worse: intense feeling, or the absence of it.”

“That kind of love comes and goes and is hard to remember afterwards, like pain. You would look at the man one day and you would think, I loved you, and the tense would be past, and you would be filled with a sense of wonder, because it was such an amazing and precarious and dumb thing to have done; and you would know too why your friends had been evasive about it, at the time. There is a good deal of comfort, now, in remembering this.”

“It was Crake preserving his dignity, because the alternative would have been losing it.”

“Whatever is silenced will clamor to be heard, though silently.”

“In reality it was like this: Earth was colonized by the Zycronites, who developed the ability to travel from one space dimension to another at a period several millennia after the epoch of which we speak. They arrived here eight thousand years ago. They brought a lot of plant seeds with them, which is why we have apples and oranges, not to mention bananas—one look at a banana and you can tell it came from outer space. They also brought animals—horses and dogs and goats and so on. They were the builders of Atlantis. Then they blew themselves up through being too clever. We’re descended from the stragglers.”

“Ama saygısız nankörlük genç insanların zırhıdır.O olmasa nasıl kalırlar hayatta,nasıl ilerlerler ? Yaşlı insanlar gençlerin iyiliğini ister ama kötülüğünü de ister : Onları tüketmek,canlılıklarını içlerine çekmek isterler,böylece kendileri ölümsüzlüğe erişsin diye.O haşinliğin kabalığın ve hafif meşrepliğin koruyucu zırhı olmasa,çocuklar geçmişin yükü altında ezilirler,başkalarının geçmişinin yükü altında,kendi sırtlarına yüklenen.Bencillik onları kurtaran bir lütuftur.”

“Bir yumruk onu meydana getiren parmakların toplamından fazla bir şeydir.”

“You can't help what you feel, but you can help how you behave”

“February, month of despair,with a skewered heart in the centre.”

“One look at a banana and you can tell it came from outer space.”

“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.”

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

“There is never only one, of anyone”

“Once in a while, though, he went on binges. He would sneak into bookstores or libraries, lurk around the racks where the little magazines were kept; sometimes he'd buy one. Dead poets were his business, living ones his vice. Much of the stuff he read was crap and he knew it; still, it gave him an odd lift. Then there would be the occasional real poem, and he would catch his breath. Nothing else could drop him through space like that, then catch him; nothing else could peel him open.”

“You need a certain amount of nerve to be a writer.”

“Canada is built on dead beavers.”

“She looks like a very young old person, or a very old young person; but then, she's looked that way ever since she was two.”

“We should think only beautiful things, as much as we can. There is so much beautiful in the world if you look around. You are only looking at the dirt under your feet, Jimmy. It's not good for you.”

“They did not set out to disappoint their father, not on purpose, but neither did they wish to shoulder the lumpy, enervating burden of the mundane.”

“The tension between her lack of control and her attempt to suppress it is horrible. It's like a fart in church.”

“The Adams and the Eves used to say, We are what we eat, but I prefer to say, we are what we wish. Because if you can't wish, why bother?”

“Oryx,” he says. “I know you’re there.” He repeats the name. It’s not even her real name, which he’d never known anyway; it’s only a word. It’s a mantra. Sometimes he can conjure her up. At first she’s pale and shadowy, but if he can say her name over and over, then maybe she’ll glide into his body and be present with him in his flesh, and his hand on himself will become her hand. But she’s always been evasive, you can never pin her down. Tonight she fails to materialize and he is left alone, whimpering ridiculously, jerking off all by himself in the dark.”

“I said maybe I was too sad for the job: didn’t they want a more upbeat personality in their girls? But Mordis smiled with his shiny black-ant eyes and said, as if he was patting me: “Ren. Ren. Everyone’s too sad for everything.”

“Toast was a pointless invention from the Dark Ages. Toast was an implement of torture that caused all those subjected to it to regurgitate in verbal form the sins and crimes of their past lives. Toast was a ritual item devoured by fetishists in the belief that it would enhance their kinetic and sexual powers. Toast cannot be explained by any rational means.Toast is me.I am toast.”

“I wish this story were different. I wish it were more civilized. I wish it showed me in a better light, if not happier, than at least more active, less hesitant, less distracted by trivia. I wish it had more shape. I wish t were about love, or about sudden realizations important to one’s life, or even about sunsets, birds, rainstorms, or snow. I’m sorry there is so much pain in this story. I’m sorry it’s in fragments, like a body caught in crossfire or pulled apart by force. But there is nothing I can do to change it.”

“What is your favorite word?”“And. It is so hopeful.”

“For me the experience of writing is really an experience of losing control.… I think it’s very much like dreaming or like surfing. You go out there and wait for a wave, and when it comes it takes you somewhere and you don’t know where it’ll go.”

“I stand holding the apple in both hands. It feels precious, like a heavy treasure. I lift it up and smell it. It has such an odour of outdoors on it I want to cry.”

“When I was younger I used to think that if I could hug myself tight enough I could make myself smaller, because there was never enough room for me, at home or anywhere, but if I was smaller then I would fit in.”

“First maid:If I was a princess, with silver and gold,And loved by a hero, I'd never grow old:Oh, if a young hero came a-marrying me,I'd always be beautiful, happy, and free!Chorus: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.”

“I wish I was ignorant, so I didn't know how ignorant I am”

“Where there's a doctor it's always a bad sign. Even when they are not doing the killing themselves it means a death is close, and in that way they are like ravens or crows.”

“It is shocking how many crimes the Bible contains. The Governor's wife should cut them all out and paste them into her scrapbook.”

“I don't know why they are all so eager to be remembered. What good will it do them? There are some things that should be forgotten by everyone, and never spoken of again.”

“It's a wonder they can sit down at all, and when they walk, nothing touches their legs under the billowing skirts, except their shifts and stockings. They are like swans, drifting along on unseen feet; or else like the jellyfish in the waters of the rocky harbour near our house, when I was little, before I ever made the long sad journey across the ocean. They were bell-shaped and ruffled, gracefully waving and lovely under the sea; but if they washed up on the beach and dried out in the sun there was nothing left of them. And that is what the ladies are like: mostly water.”

“Like the trains, she's never on time and always departing.Sympathy from strangers can be ruinous.”

“bye-bye love, as in songs. All alone now. It was so sad. Why did such things have to disintegrate like that? Why did longing and desire, and friendliness and goodwill too, have to shatter into pieces? Why did they have to be so thoroughfully over?I could make myself cry even more by repeating the key word: love,alone, sad, over. I did it on purpose.”

“I would have to go into the tunnel whether I wanted to or not - the tunnel was the road of going on, and there was more of the road on the other side of it - but the entrance was where [my teacher] had to stop. Inside the tunnel was what I was meant to learn”

“That image - of a little child being suffocated, or almost suffocated, by others who thought the whole thing was a game - melded with the furtive nocturnal slugs, and my solitary pacing and singing, and the separate, claustrophobic stairway, and the charmless abstract painting, and the gold-framed mirror, and the slithery green satin bedspread, and became inseperable from them. It wasn't a cheerful composite. As a memory, it is more like a fog bank than a sunlit meadow. Yet I think of that period as having been a happy time in my life.Happy is the wrong word. Important.”

“I think of bad news as a huge bird, with the wings of a crow and the face of my Grade Four school teacher, sparse bun, rancid teeth, wrinkly frown, pursed mouth and all, sailing around the world under cover of darkness pleased to be the bearer of ill tidings, carrying a basket of rotten eggs, and knowing- as the sun comes up- exactly where to drop them. On me, for one.”

“Envoiwe had no voicewe had no namewe had no choicewe had one faceone face the samewe took the blameit was no fairbut now w're herewe're all here toothe same as youand now we followyou, we find younow, we callto you to youtoo wit too wootoo wit too wootoo woo(The Maids sprout feathers, and fly away as owls.)”

“Death is much too high a price to pay for the satisfaction of curiosity, needless to say.”

“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.”

“After everything that's happened, how can the world still be so beautiful? Because it is.”