Margaret Atwood

“...how much needless despair has been caused by a series of biological mismatches, a misalignment of the hormones and pheromones? Resulting in the fact that the one you love so passionately won't or can't love you. As a species we're pathetic that way: imperfectly monogamous.”

“Men can imagine their own deaths, they can see them coming, and the mere though of impending death acts like an aphrodisiac. A dog or rabbit doesn't behave like that. Take birds -- in a lean season they cut down on the eggs, or they won't mate at all. They put their energy into staying alive themselves until times get better. But human beings hope they can stick their souls into someone else, some new version of themselves, and live on forever. As a species were doomed by hope, then?You could call it hope. That, or desperation.But we're doomed without hope, as well, said Jimmy.Only as individuals, said Crake cheerfully.”

“Women, and what went on under their collars. Hotness and coldness, coming and going in the strange musky flowery variable-weather country inside their clothes -- mysterious, important, uncontrollable. That was his father's take on things. But men's body temperatures were never dealt with; they were never even mentioned....”

“Sex is like a drink, it's bad to start brooding about it too early in the day.”

“Time rises and rises, and when it reaches the level of your eyes you drown.”

“The ochre-yellow linoleum floor hasn't been scrubbed for some time; splotches of dirt bloom on it like grey pressed flowers.”

“Those who live alone slide into the habit of vertical eating: why bother with the niceties when there's no one to share or censure? But laxity in one area may lead to derangement in all.”

“i sometimes felt as if these marks on my body were a kind of code, which blossomed, then faded, like invisible ink held to a candle. But if they were a code, who held the key to it? I was sand, I was snow—written on, rewritten, smoothed over.”

“By telling you anything at all I'm at least believing in you, I believe you're there, I believe you into being.”

“But if you happen to be a man, sometime in the future, and you’ve made it this far, please remember: you will never be subject to the temptation or feeling you must forgive, a man, as a woman. It’s difficult to resist, believe me. But remember that forgiveness too is a power. To beg for it is a power, and to withhold or bestow it is a power, perhaps the greatest.”

“I guess you get all my money, I said. And I'm not even dead. I was trying for a joke, but it came out sounding macabre.Hush, he said. He was still kneeling on the floor. You know I'll always take care of you.I thought, already he's starting to patronize me. Then I thought, already you're starting to get paranoid.”

“Why can't I believe? she asked the darkness. Behind her eyelids she saw an animal. It was golden colour, with gentle green eyes and canine teeth, and curly wool instead of fur. It opened its mouth, but it did not speak. Instead, it yawned.It gazed at her. She gazed at it. "You are the effect of a carefully calibrated blend of plant toxins," she told it.Then she fell asleep.”

“i)We are hard on each otherand call it honesty,choosing our jagged truthswith care and aiming them acrossthe neutral table.The things we say are true; it is our crooked aims, our choicesturn them criminal.ii)Of course your liesare more amusing:you make them new each time.Your truths, painful and boringrepeat themselves over & over perhaps because you ownso few of themiii)A truth should exist,it should not be usedlike this. If I love youis that a fact or a weapon?iv)Does the body liemoving like this, are these touches, hairs, wet soft marble my tongue runs overlies you are telling me?Your body is not a word,it does not lie or speak truth either.It is onlyhere or not here.”

“In case you're wondering, vanity never ends.”

“She did understand, or at least she understood that she was supposed to understand. She understood, and said nothing about it, and prayed for the power to forgive, and did forgive. But he can't have found living with her forgiveness all that easy. Breakfast in a haze of forgiveness: coffee with forgiveness, porridge with forgiveness, forgiveness on the buttered toast. He would have been helpless against it, for how can you repudiate something that is never spoken? She resented, too, the nurse, or the many nurses, who had attended my father in the various hospitals. She wished him to owe his recovery to her alone—to her care, to her tireless devotion. That is the other side of selflessness: its tyranny.”

“Perhaps her mind is slipping, perhaps she's going off the tracks, perhaps she is coming unhinged. Unhinged, like a broken door, like a rammed gate, like a rusting strongbox. When you're unhinged, things make their way out of you that should be kept inside and other things get in that ought to be shut out." ~~Margaret Atwood”

“Possible, impossible. What could be done? We thought we had such problems. How were we to know we were happy?”

“Sanity is a valuable possession: I hoard it the way people once hoarded money.”

“It has thrown off its disguise as a meal and has revealed itself to me for what it is, a large dead bird. I'm eating a wing. It's the wing of a tame turkey, the stupidest bird in the world, so stupid it can't even fly any more. I am eating lost flight.”

“Women are hard to keep track of, most of them. They slip into other names, and sink without a trace.”

“Craziness was considered funny, like all other things that were in reality frightening and profoundly shameful.”

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

“While in a vintage restaurant..."the past isn't quaint while you're in it. Only at a safe distance, later, when you see it as decor, not as the shape your life's been squeezed into.”

“Fuck, thinks Stan. She knows about the chickens.”

“How dare she be anything he was annoyed with her for not being?”

“I always thought eating was a ridiculous activity anyway. I'd get out of it myself if I could, though you've got to do it to stay alive, they tell me.”

“It's like the Vatican's porn collection," Zeb told her. "Safe in our hands.”

“The way love feels is always only approximate. I would like to be without shame. I would like to be shameless. I would like to be ignorant. Then I would not know how ignorant I was.”

“In my dreams of this city I am always lost.”

“...the argument for the perfectibility of humankind rests on a logical fallacy. Thus: man is by definition imperfect, say those who would perfect him. But those who would perfect him are themselves, by their own definition, imperfect.”

“They have a certain gaiety to them, a power of invention, they don't care what people think. They have escaped, though what it is they've escaped from isn't clear to us. We think that their bizarre costumes, their verbal tics, are chosen, and that when the time comes we also will be free to choose. "That's what I'm going to be like,”

“How easy it is to invent a humanity, for anyone at all.”

“if the teenage kids want to carouse, that's where they do it. They make bonfires, and drink too much and smoke dope, and grope around in one another's clothing as if they've just invented it, and smash their parents cars up on the way back to town.”

“He feels the need to hear a human voice—a fully human voice like his own. Sometimes he laughs like a hyena or roars like a lion—his idea of a hyena his idea of a lion.”

“Real painters grunt like Marlon Brando”

“The sitting room is subdued, symmetrical; it’s one of the shapes money takes when it freezes.”

“By now you know: I come from another planet. But I will never say to you, "Take me to your leaders." Even I--unused to your ways though I am--would never make that mistake. We ourselves have such beings among us, made of cogs, pieces of paper, small disks of shiny metal, scraps of coloured cloth. I do not need to encounter more of them.Instead I will say, "Take me to your trees. Take me to your breakfasts, your sunsets, your bad dreams, your shoes, your nouns. Take me to your fingers; take me to your deaths."These are worth it. These are what I have come for.”

“Apart from all this, I do of course have a real life. I sometimes have trouble believing in it, because it doesn't seem like the kind of life I could ever get away with, or deserve. This goes along with another belief of mine: that everyone else my age is an adult, whereas I am merely in disguise.”

“You don't look back along time but down through it, like water. Sometimes this comes to the surface, sometimes that, sometimes nothing. Nothing goes away.”

“This afternoon held that special quality of mournful emptiness I've connected with late Sunday afternoons ever since childhood: the feeling of having nothing to do.”

“We get along by a symbiotic adjustment of habits and with a minimum of that pale-mauve hostility you often find among women.”

“These days I script whole fights, in my head, and the reconciliations afterwards, too.”

“We understand more than we know.”

“...we must be a beacon of hope, because if you tell people there's nothing they can do, they will do worse than nothing.”

“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.”

“To want is to have a weakness.”

“Knowing was a temptation. What you don't know won't tempt you.”

“You might even provide a Heaven for them. We need You for that. Hell we can make for ourselves.”

“I´ll take care of it, Luke said. And because he said it instead of her, I knew it meant kill. That is what you have to do before you kill, I thought. You have to create an it, where none was before. You do that first, in your head, and then you make it real. So that´s how they do it, I thought. I seemed never to have known that before.”

“It's old light, and there's not much of it. But it is enough to see by.”