Margaret Atwood

“How furious she must be, now that she's been taken at her word.”

“But it seems she’d wanted children after all, because when she was told she’d been accidentally sterilized she could feel all the light leaking out of her.”

“They are as happy as they can be, given who they are. Though if they'd been different people they might have been happier.”

“But maybe, underneath, she loves him too much. Maybe it's her excessive love that pushes him away.”

“Where to start is the problem, because nothing begins when it begins and nothing's over when it's over, and everything needs a preface: a preface, a postscript, a chart of simultaneous events.”

“he might die for her, but living for her would be quite different.”

“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. The locks lose their powers. The guards go to sleep. The passwords fail.”

“Don't misunderstand me. I am not scoffing at goodness, which is far more difficult to explain than evil, and far more complicated. But sometimes it's hard to put up with.”

“So much better to travel than to arrive.”

“gazing down at the black water remembering all the stories of women who had thrown themselves into it. They'd done it for love, because that was the effect love had on you. It snuck up on you, it grabbed hold of you before you knew it, and then there was nothing you could do. Once you were in it- in love- you would be swept away, regardless. Or so the books had it.”

“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. They skip town or turn perfidious, or else the drop like flies and then where are you?”

“She had her reasons. Not that they were the same as anybody else's reasons.”

“He needed to exist only in the present, without guilt, without expectation.”

“Immortality,' said Crake, ' is a concept. If you take 'mortality' as being, not death, but the foreknowledge of it and the fear of it, then 'immortality' is the absence of such fear. Babies are immortal. Edit out the fear, and you'll be...”

“expectation isn't the same as desire”

“Those walls and bars are there for a reason,' said Crake. ' Not to keep us out, but to keep them in. Mankind needs barriers in both cases”

“Nature is to zoos as God is to churches.”

“She had no images of this love. She could offer no anecdotes. It was a belief rather than a memory.”

“Why hyphenate, why parenthesize, unless absolutely necessary?”

“But people will do anything rather than admit that their lives have no meaning. No use, that is. No plot.”

“One and one and one and one doesn't equal four. Each one remains unique, there is no way of joining them together. They cannot be exchanged, one for the other. They cannot replace each other.”

“These albums were thick with babies, but my replicas thinned out as I grew older, as if the population of my duplicates had been hit with some plague.”

“What's dangerous in the hands of the multitudes, he said, with what may or may not have been irony, is safe enough for those whose motives are...Beyond reproach, I said.He nodded gravely. Impossible to tell whether or not he meant it.”

“When I get out of here, if I'm ever able to set this down, in any form, even in the form of one voice to another, it will be a reconstruction then too, yet another remove. It's impossible to say a thing exactly the way it was, because what you say can never be exact, you always have to leave something out, there are too may parts, sides, crosscurrents, nuances; too many gestures, which could mean this or that, too many shapes which can never be fully described, too many flavors, in the air or on the tongue, half-colors, too many. 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 it or bestow it is a power, perhaps the greatest.Maybe none of this is about control. Maybe it isn't really about who can own whom, who can do what to whom and get away with it, even as far as death. Maybe it isn't about who can sit and who has to kneel or stand or lie down, legs spread open. Maybe it's about who can do what to whom and be forgiven for it. Never tell me it amounts to the same thing.”

“Not a hope. I know where I am, and who, and what day it is. These are the tests, and I am sane. Sanity is a valuable possession; I hoard it the way people once hoarded money. I save it, so I will have enough, when the time comes.”

“We lived, as usual by ignoring. Ignoring isn't the same as ignorance, you have to work at it.”

“Tunnen olevani kuin hattaranekku: sokeria ja ilmaa. Jos minua puristaa niin minusta tulee pieni, etovaa kosteutta tihkuva punertava mytty.”

“An old walrus-faced waiter attended to me; he had the knack of pouring the coffee and the hot milk from two jugs, held high in the air, and I found this entrancing, as if he were a child's magician. One day he said to me - he had some English - "Why are you sad?""I'm not sad," I said, and began to cry. Sympathy from strangers can be ruinous."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.”

“Only a girl like thiscan know what's happened to you.If she were here she wouldreach out her arms towardsyou now, and touch youwith her absent handsand you would feel nothing, but you would betouched all the same.”

“Is anything wrong, dear? the old joke went.No, why?You moved.Just don't move.”

“There's always something to occupy the inquiring mind.”

“These things you did were like prayers; you did them and you hoped they would save you. And for the most part they did. Or something did; you could tell by the fact that you were still alive.”

“Murderess, murderess, he whispers to himself. It has an allure, a scent almost. Hothouse gardenias. Lurid, but also furtive. He imagines himself breathing it as he draws Grace towards him, pressing his mouth against her. Murderess. He applies it to her throat like a brand.”

“A great fear came over me, and my body went entirely cold, and I stood as if paralyzed with fear; for I knew that the horse was no earthly horse, but the pale horse that will be sent at the Day of Reckoning, and the rider of it is Death; and it was Death himself who stood behind me, with his arms wrapped around me as tight as iron bands, and his lipless mouth kissing my neck as if in love. But as well as the horror, I also felt a strange longing.”

“Forgive us our trespasses, as we forgive those who trespass against us.I refuse to say this. If it means I will have to forgive Mrs. Smeath or else go to Hell when I die, I'm ready to go. Jesus must have known how hard it is to forgive, that was why he put this in. He was always putting in things that were impossible to do really, such as giving away all your money.”

“He doesn't understand yet that guilt comes to you not from the things you've done, but from the things that others have done to you.”

“The newspaper journalists like to believe the worst; they can sell more papers that way, as one of them told me himself; for even upstanding and respectable people dearly love to read ill of others.”

“I am certain that a Sewing Machine would relieve as much human suffering as a hundred Lunatic Asylums, and possibly a good deal more.”

“Sleeping in your clothes makes you tired. The clothes are crumpled, and also your body underneath them. I feel as if I've been rolled into a bundle and thrown on the floor.”

“Stretch your hand towards those gentle eyes that regard you with such trust”

“How easy it is, treachery. You just slide into it.”

“So we couldn't mingle with them, but we could eavesdrop. We got our knowledge that way--we caught it like germs.”

“Now I can see how that can happen. You can fall in love with anybody--a fool, a criminal, a nothing. There are no good rules.”

“We shouldn't have been so scornful; we should have had compassion. But compassion takes work, and we were young.”

“All myths are stories, but not all stories are myths: among stories, myths hold a special place.”

“[Northrop] Frye was concerned mostly with literary criticism, and myths interested him as structural elements in works of literature. He used the word myth to mean story, without attaching any connotation of truth or falsehood to it; but a myth is a story of a certain kind. The myths of a culture are those stories it takes seriously—the ones that are thought to be a key to its identity.”

“[A]nother thing about myths: they gather in and circumscribe their target audience. They make a collection into a collective.”

“In those timeless years between infancy and, say, seven what is has always been: in that way children inhabit the realm of myth.”

“Some people write letters, in the library.”

“Books and characters in books, pictures and elements in pictures—they all have families and ancestors, just like people.”