Margaret Atwood Quotes - Page 8

Maybe I don't really want to know what's going on. Maybe I'd rather not know. Maybe I couldn't bear to know. The Fall was a fall from innocence to knowledge.
Margaret Atwood
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.
Margaret Atwood
I learned about religion the way most children learned about sex, [in the schoolyard]. . . . They terrified me by telling me there was a dead man in the sky watching everything I did and I retaliated by explaining where babies came from. Some of their mothers phoned mine to complain, though I think I was more upset than they were: they didn't believe me but I believed them.
Margaret Atwood
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.
Margaret Atwood
Everyone thinks writers must know more about the inside of the human head, but that's wrong. They know less, that's why they write. Trying to find out what everyone else takes for granted.
Margaret Atwood
Good writing takes place at intersections, at what you might call knots, at places where the society is snarled or knotted up.
Margaret Atwood
Publishing a book is like stuffing a note into a bottle and hurling it into the sea. Some bottles drown, some come safe to land, where the notes are read and then possibly cherished, or else misinterpreted, or else understood all too well by those who hate the message. You never know who your readers might be.
Margaret Atwood
It's impossible to say a thing exactly the way it was, because of what you say can never be exact, you always have to leave something out, there are too many 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.
Margaret Atwood
All stories are about wolves. All worth repeating, that is. Anything else is sentimental drivel.All of them?Sure, he says. Think about it. There's escaping from the wolves, fighting the wolves, capturing the wolves, taming the wolves. Being thrown to the wolves, or throwing others to the wolves so the wolves will eat them instead of you. Running with the wolf pack. Turning into a wolf. Best of all, turning into the head wolf. No other decent stories exist.
Margaret Atwood
Perhaps I write for no one. Perhaps for the same person children are writing for when they scrawl their names in the snow.
Margaret Atwood
A word after a word after a word is power.
Margaret Atwood
By telling you anything at all I'm at least believing in you, I believe you're there, I believe you into being. Because I'm telling you this story I will your existence. I tell, therefore you are.
Margaret Atwood
Fatigue is here, in my body, in my legs and eyes. That is what gets you in the end. Faith is only a word, embroidered.
Margaret Atwood
SPRING POEMIt is spring, my decision, the earthferments like rising breador refuse, we are burninglast year's weeds, the smokeflares from the road, the clumped stalksglow like sluggish phoenixes / it wasn'tonly my fault / birdsongs burst fromthe feathered pods of their bodies, dandelionswhirl their blades upwards, from beneaththis decaying board a snakesidewinds, chained hidesmelling of reptile sex / the hensroll in the dust, squinting with bliss, frogbodiesbloat like bladders, contract, stringthe pond with living jellyeyes, can I be thisruthless? I plungemy hands and arms into the dirt,swim among stones and cutworms,come up rank as a fox,restless. Nights, while seedlingsdig near my headI dream of reconciliationswith those I have hurtunbearably, we move stilltouching over the greening fields, the futurewounds folded like seedsin our tender fingers, daysI go for vicious walks past the charredroadbed over the bashed stubbleadmiring the view, avoidingthose I have not hurtyet, apocalypse coiled in my tongue,it is spring, I am searchingfor the word:finishedfinishedso I can begin overagain, some yearI will take this word too far.
Margaret Atwood
Then there's the twoof us. This wordis far too short for us, it has onlyfour letters, too sparseto fill those deep barevacuums between the starsthat press on us with their deafness.It's not love we don't wishto fall into, but that fear.This word is not enough but it willhave to do. It's a singlevowel in this metallicsilence, a mouth that saysO again and again in wonderand pain, a breath, a fingergrip on a cliffside. You canhold on or let go.
Margaret Atwood
with shrunken fingerswe ate our oranges and bread,shivering in the parked car;though we know we had neverbeen there before,we knew we had been there before.
Margaret Atwood
Where do the words gowhen we have said them?
Margaret Atwood
Kill what you can't savewhat you can't eat throw outwhat you can't throw out buryWhat you can't bury give awaywhat you can't give away you must carry with you,it is always heavier than you thought.
Margaret Atwood
You fit into melike a hook into an eyea fish hookan open eye
Margaret Atwood
Via the conduit of a wild dog pack, she has now made the ultimate Gift to her fellow Creatures, and has become part of God's great dance of proteins.
Margaret Atwood
The reason they invented coffins, to lock the dead in, preserve them, they put makeup on them; they didn't want them spreading or changing into anything else. The stone with the name and date was on them to weight them down.
Margaret Atwood
The Chorus Line:A Rope-Jumping Rhymewe are the maidsthe ones you killedthe ones you failedwe danced in airour bare feet twitchedit was not fairwith every goddess, queen, and bitchfrom there to hereyou scratched your itchwe did much lessthan what you didyou judged us badyou had the spearyou had the wordat your commandwe scrubbed the bloodof our deadparamours from floors, from chairsfrom stairs, from doors,we knelt in waterwhile you staredat our bare feetit was not fairyou licked our fearit gave you pleasureyou raised your handyou watched us fallwe danced on airthe ones you failedthe ones you killed
Margaret Atwood
If you really want to stay the same age you are now forever and ever, she'd be thinking, try jumping off the roof: death's a sure-fire method for stopping time.
Margaret Atwood
Glenn used to say the reason you can't really imagine yourself being dead was that as soon as you say, 'I'll be dead,' you've said the word I, and so you're still alive inside the sentence. And that's how people got the idea of the immortality of the soul - it was a consequence of grammar.
Margaret Atwood
I planned my death carefully, unlike my life, which meandered along from one thing to another, despite my feeble attempts to control it.
Margaret Atwood
...we must be a beacon of hope, because if you tell people there's nothing they can do, they will do worse than nothing.
Margaret Atwood
One of the gravestones in the cemetery near the earliest church has an anchor on it and an hourglass, and the words In Hope.In Hope. Why did they put that above a dead person? Was it the corpse hoping, or those still alive?
Margaret Atwood
We yearned for the future. How did we learn it, that talent for insatiability?
Margaret Atwood
I was taking something away from her, although she didn't know it. I was filching. Never mind that it was something she apparently didn't want or had no use for, had rejected even; still, it was hers, and if I took it away, this mysterious "it" I couldn't quite define.
Margaret Atwood
Neither of us says the word love, not once. It would be tempting fate; it would be romance, bad luck.
Margaret Atwood
Romance takes place in the middle distance. Romance is looking in at yourself through a window clouded with dew. Romance means leaving things out: where life grunts and shuffles, romance only sighs.
Margaret Atwood
Truly amazing, what people can get used to, as long as there are a few compensations.
Margaret Atwood
We shouldn't have been so scornful; we should have had compassion. But compassion takes work, and we were young.
Margaret Atwood
We understand more than we know.
Margaret Atwood
You might even provide a Heaven for them. We need You for that. Hell we can make for ourselves.
Margaret Atwood
Our heaven is their hell, said God. I like a balanced universe.
Margaret Atwood
There were a lot of gods. Gods always come in handy, they justify almost anything.
Margaret Atwood
It must have been then that I began to lose faith in reasonable argument as the sole measure of truth.
Margaret Atwood
The truth is seldom welcome, especially at dinner.
Margaret Atwood
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.
Margaret Atwood
By now you must have guessed: 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.
Margaret Atwood
A Paradox, the doughnut hole. Empty space, once, but now they've learned to market even that. A minus quantity; nothing, rendered edible. I wondered if they might be used-metaphorically, of course-to demonstrate the existence of God. Does naming a sphere of nothingness transmute it into being?
Margaret Atwood
I'm not senile," I snapped. "If I burn the house down it will be on purpose.
Margaret Atwood
So much for endings. Beginnings are always more fun. True connoisseurs, however, are known to favor the stretch in between, since it's the hardest to do anything with. That's about all that can be said for plots, which anyway are just one thing after another, a what and a what and a what.
Margaret Atwood
Don't let the bastards grind you down.
Margaret Atwood
Time folds you in its arms and gives you one last kiss, and then it flattens you out and folds you up and tucks you away until it's time for you to become someone else's past time, and then time folds again.
Margaret Atwood
Potential has a shelf life.
Margaret Atwood
A home filled with nothing but yourself. It's heavy, that lightness. It's crushing, that emptiness.
Margaret Atwood
If I love you, is that a fact or a weapon?
Margaret Atwood
The Eskimo has fifty-names for snow because it is important to them there ought to be as many for love.
Margaret Atwood
What is it the I'll want from you? Not love: that would be too much to ask. Not forgiveness, which isn't yours to bestow. Only a listener, perhaps; only someone who will see me. Don't prettify me though, whatever else you do: I have no wish to be a decorated skull. But I leave myself in your hands. What choice do I have? By the time you read this last page, that- if anywhere- is the only place I will be.
Margaret Atwood
This is how the girl who couldn't speak and the man who couldn't see fell in love.
Margaret Atwood
She imagines him imagining her. This is her salvation.In spirit she walks the city, traces its labyrinths, its dingy mazes: each assignation, each rendezvous, each door and stair and bed. What he said, what she said, what they did, what they did then. Even the times they argued, fought, parted, agonized, rejoined. How they’d loved to cut themselves on each other, taste their own blood. We were ruinous together, she thinks. But how else can we live, these days, except in the midst of ruin?
Margaret Atwood
How could I have been so ignorant? she thinks. So stupid, so unseeing, so given over to carelessness. But without such ignorance, such carelessness, how could we live? 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 as 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.
Margaret Atwood
Falling in love, we said; I fell for him. We were falling women. We believed in it, this downward motion: so lovely, like flying, and yet at the same time so dire, so extreme, so unlikely. God is love, they once said, but we reversed that, and love, like heaven, was always just around the corner. The more difficult it was to love the particular man beside us, the more we believed in Love, abstract and total. We were waiting, always, for the incarnation. That word, made flesh.And sometimes it happened, for a time. 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.
Margaret Atwood
I would like to be the air that inhabits you for a moment only. I would like to be that unnoticed and that necessary.
Margaret Atwood
A truth should exist,it should not be usedlike this. If I love youis that a fact or a weapon?
Margaret Atwood
How could I be sleeping with this particular man.... Surely only true love could justify my lack of taste.
Margaret Atwood
Hatred would have been easier. With hatred, I would have known what to do. Hatred is clear, metallic, one-handed, unwavering; unlike love.
Margaret Atwood
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.
Margaret Atwood