Margaret Atwood Quotes - Page 4

At some indeterminate point in their life cycles, they cause themselves to be placed in artificial stone or wooden cocoons, or chrysalises. They have an idea that they will someday emerge from these in an altered state, which they symbolize with carvings of themselves with wings. However, we did not observe that any had actually done so.
Margaret Atwood
Where were we? I've forgotten. He was deciding whether to cut her throat or love her forever.Right. Yes. The usual choices.
Margaret Atwood
I am a believer in sensible choices, so different from many of my own. Also in sensible names for children.
Margaret Atwood
They seemed to be able to choose. We seemed to be able to choose, then. We were a society dying of too much choice.
Margaret Atwood
That was when they suspended the Constitution. They said it would be temporary. There wasn't even any rioting in the streets. People stayed home at night, watching television, looking for some direction. There wasn't even an enemy you could put your finger on.
Margaret Atwood
But if Crake wanted her to stay longer on any given night, do it again maybe, she'd make some excuse—jet lag, a headache, something plausible. Her inventions were seamless, she was the best poker-faced liar in the world, so there would be a kiss goodbye for stupid Crake, a smile, a wave, a closed door, and the next minute there she would be, with Jimmy.
Margaret Atwood
But then it came to me that who I really am is a person who doesn't need to know who he really is, in the usual sense. What does it mean, anyway - family background and so forth? People use it mostly as an excuse for their own snobbery, or else their failings. I'm free of the temptation, that's all. I'm free of the strings. Nothing ties me down.
Margaret Atwood
People change, though, especially after they are dead.
Margaret Atwood
It is shocking how many crimes the Bible contains. The Governor's wife should cut them all out and paste them into her scrapbook.
Margaret Atwood
A voice is a human gift; it should be cherished and used, to utter fully human speech as possible. Powerlessness and silence go together.
Margaret Atwood
There is something subversive about this garden of Serena's, a sense of buried things bursting upwards, wordlessly, into the light, as if to point, to say: Whatever is silenced will clamor to be heard, though silently.
Margaret Atwood
Then we had the irises, rising beautiful and cool on their tall stalks, like blown glass, like pastel water momentarily frozen in a splash, light blue, light mauve, and the darker ones, velvet and purple, black cat's ears in the sun, indigo shadow, and the bleeding hearts, so female in shape it was a surprise they'd not long since been rooted out. There is something subversive about this garden of Serena's, a sense of buried things bursting upwards, wordlessly, into the light, as if to point, to say: Whatever is silenced will clamor to be heard, though silently.
Margaret Atwood
That’s what you get for being food.
Margaret Atwood
You know I love you. You're the only one.""She isn't the first woman he's ever said that to. He shouldn't have used it up so much earlier in his life, he shouldn't have treated it like a tool, a wedge, a key to open women. By the time he got around to meaning it, the words sounded fraudulent to him and he'd been ashamed to pronounce them.
Margaret Atwood
I love you. You're the only one." She isn't the first woman he's ever said that to. He shouldn't have used it up so much earlier in his life, he shouldn't have treated it like a tool, a wedge, a key to open women. By the time he got around to meaning it, the words had sounded fraudulent to him and he'd been ashamed to pronounce them.
Margaret Atwood
Because I am a mother, I am capable of being shocked; as I never was when I was not one.
Margaret Atwood
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.
Margaret Atwood
Life is warped. I'm just in sync.
Margaret Atwood
If someone wants to suck your toes, those toes should be worth sucking.
Margaret Atwood
A place with no handholds,no landmarks,no past at all:That would have been too much like dying
Margaret Atwood
An odd thing souvenir-hunting: now becomes then even while it is still now.
Margaret Atwood
It disturbs me that he can remember some of these things about himself, but not others; that the things he's lost or misplaced exist now only for me. If he's forgotten so much, what have I forgotten?
Margaret Atwood
I need to remember what they look like. I try to hold them still behind my eyes, their faces, like pictures in an album. But they won't stay still for me, they move, there's a smile and it's gone, their features curl and bend as if the paper's burning, blackness eats them. A glimpse, a pale shimmer on the air; a glow, aurora, dance of electrons, then a face again, faces. But they fade, though I stretch out my arms towards them, they slip away from me, ghosts at daybreak. Back to wherever they are. Stay with me, I want to say. But they won't.
Margaret Atwood
Girls did that then – knocked themselves out to support some man’s notion of his own genius. What was Gavin doing to help pay the rent? Not much, though she suspected him of dealing pot on the side. Once in a while they even smoked some of that, though not often, because it made Constance cough. It was all very romantic.
Margaret Atwood
Also she went in for culture, which gave her a certain moral authority. It wouldn't now; but people believed, then, that culture could make you better - a better person. They believed it could uplift you, or the women believed it. They hadn't yet seen Hitler at the opera house.
Margaret Atwood
Our problem right now is that we're so specialized that if the lights go out, there are a huge number of people who are not going to know what to do. But within every dystopia there's a little utopia.
Margaret Atwood
Why do we want other people to like us, even if we don't really care about them all that much?
Margaret Atwood
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.
Margaret Atwood
I'm sad now, the way we're talking is infinitely sad: faded music, faded paper flowers, worn satin, an echo of an echo. All gone away, no longer possible.
Margaret Atwood
He put his arms around me. We were both feeling miserable. How were we to know we were happy, even then? Because we at least had that: arms, around.
Margaret Atwood
You all right?" he said again.I didn't love him, I was far away from him, it was as though I was seeing him through a smeared window or glossy paper; he didn't belong here. But he existed, he deserved to be alive. I was wishing I could tell him how to change so he could get there, the place where I was."Yes," I said. I touched him on the arm with my hand. My hand touched his arm. Hand touched arm. Language divides us into fragments, I wanted to be whole.
Margaret Atwood
Touch comes before sight, before speech. It is the first language and the last, and it always tells the truth.
Margaret Atwood
Experiences were what you got when you couldn’t get what you wanted.
Margaret Atwood
In the desert there is no sign that says, 'Thou shalt not eat stones.
Margaret Atwood
Maybe none of this is about control. Maybe it really isn't 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.
Margaret Atwood
Falling in love... how could he have made such light of it? Sneered even. As if it was trivial for us, a frill, a whim. It was, on the contrary, heavy going. It was the central thing, the way you understood yourself.
Margaret Atwood
I am not scoffing at goodness, which is far more difficult to explain than evil, and just as complicated. But sometimes it's hard to put up with.
Margaret Atwood
Stupidity is the same as evil if you judge by the results.
Margaret Atwood
Writers are much better behaved nowadays, for a couple of reasons. Once upon a time nobody was thinking of a career, unless you lived in New York, so there wasn’t as much pressure to present a respectable exterior. And secondly, there was no social media. So if you were found face down on the floor – people did do that quite a bit; usually men, but not always – or fell through plate glass windows or got into scrapes, it became a rumour, and rumours are hard to pin down.
Margaret Atwood
With the young writers now it’s F and C all day long, which he, personally, finds boring.
Margaret Atwood
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.
Margaret Atwood
She’s a lean vixen: I can seethe ribs, the slytrickster’s eyes, filled with longing and desperation, the skinnyfeet, adept at lies.Why encourage the notionof virtuous poverty?It’s only an excusefor zero charity.Hunger corrupts, and absolute hungercorrupts absolutely,
Margaret Atwood
Perhaps he was merely being friendly. Perhaps he saw the look on my face and mistook it for something else. Really what I wanted was the cigarette.
Margaret Atwood
I’m not mad because I’m a woman,” I say. “I’m mad because you’re an asshole.
Margaret Atwood
You always do good ones. We trust you, Mr. Duke," Says Dylan. Foolish lads, thinks Felix: never trust a professional ham.
Margaret Atwood
Pink is supposed to weaken your enemies, make them go soft on you, which must be why it's used for baby girls. It's a wonder the military hasn't got on to this.
Margaret Atwood
I wonderif I should let my hair go greyso my advice will be better.
Margaret Atwood
You can think clearly only with your clothes on.
Margaret Atwood
Ger says that Kat has a tendency to push things to extremes, to go over the edge, merely from a juvenile desire to shock, which is hardly a substitute for wit. One of these days, he says, she will go way too far. Too far for him, is what he means.
Margaret Atwood
Here the children have a custom. After the celebration of evil they take those vacant heads that shone once with such anguish and glee and throw them over the bridge, watching the smash, orange, as they hit below, We were standing underneath when you told it. People do that with themselves when they are finished, light scooped out. He landed here, you said, marking it with your foot.You wouldn't do it that way, empty, you wouldn't wait, you would jump with the light still in you.
Margaret Atwood
You cynical shit," he told himself. Then he started to weep."Don't be so fucking sentimental," Crake used to tell him. But why not? Why shouldn't he be sentimental? It wasn't as if there was anyone around to question his
Margaret Atwood
I and the girl in the picture have ceased to be the same person. I am her outcome, the result of the life she once lived headlong; whereas she, if she can be said to exist at all, is composed only of what I remember. I have the better view - I can see her clearly, most of the time. But even if she knew enough to look, she can't see me at all.
Margaret Atwood
I didn't much like it, this grudge-holding against the past.
Margaret Atwood
you can't change the past,Aunt Lou used to say.Oh, but I wanted to;that was the one thing I really wanted to do
Margaret Atwood
The past isn't quaint while you're in it. Only at a safe distance, later, when you can see it as décor, not as the shape your life's been squeezed into.
Margaret Atwood
I want everything back, the way it was. But there is no point to it, this wanting.
Margaret Atwood
But people will do anything rather than admit that their lives have no meaning.
Margaret Atwood
What should I take? Something that will not be missed. In the wood at midnight, a magic flower.
Margaret Atwood
The Loneliness of the Military HistorianConfess: it's my professionthat alarms you.This is why few people ask me to dinner,though Lord knows I don't go out of my way to be scary.I wear dresses of sensible cutand unalarming shades of beige,I smell of lavender and go to the hairdresser's:no prophetess mane of mine,complete with snakes, will frighten the youngsters.If I roll my eyes and mutter,if I clutch at my heart and scream in horrorlike a third-rate actress chewing up a mad scene,I do it in private and nobody seesbut the bathroom mirror.In general I might agree with you:women should not contemplate war,should not weigh tactics impart
Margaret Atwood
Confronted by too much emptiness, said Adam One, the brain invents. Loneliness creates company as thirst creates water. How many sailors have been wrecked in pursuit of islands that were merely a shimmering?
Margaret Atwood