Quotes by Margaret Atwood

Things that are falling apart encourage me: whatever else, I’m in better shape than they are.

And then she began to cry, and when I asked her why she was doing that, she said it was because I was to have a happy ending, and it was just like a book; and I wondered what books shed been reading.

...otherwise, one of you, most likely the man, would go wandering off on a trajectory of his own, taking his addictive body with him and leaving you with bad withdrawal, which you could counteract by exercise. If you didnt work it out it was because one of you had the wrong attitude. Everything that went on in your life was thought to be due to some positive or negative power emanating from inside your head.

nothing is more opaque than absolute transparency. Look--my feet dont hit the marble! Like breath or a balloon, Im rising, I hover six inches in the air in my blazing swan-egg of light. You think Im not a goddess? Try me. This is a torch song. Touch me and youll burn.

It must have been an endless breathing in: between the wish to know and the wish to praise there was no seam.

Home, I think. But its nowhere I can go back to.

(...) everything Id been longing to get away from, true, but not through destruction. Id wanted to leave home, but have it stay in place, waiting for me, unchanged, so I could step back into it at will.

The house, and all the objects in it, crackled with static electricity; undertows washed through it, the air was heavy with things that were known but not spoken. Like a hollow log, a drum, a church, it was amplified, so that conversations whispered in it sixty years ago can be half-heard today.

I wont fatten them in cages, though. I wont ply them with poisoned fruit items. I wont change them into clockwork images or talking shadows. I wont drain out their lifes blood. They can do all those things for themselves.

I remember my mean mouth, I remember how wise I thought I was. But I was not wise then. Now I am wise.

Reading and writing, like everything else, improve with practice. And, of course, if there are no young readers and writers, there will shortly be no older ones. Literacy will be dead, and democracy - which many believe goes hand in hand with it - will be dead as well.

I was tired of her getting away with being so young.

The Three of them were beautiful, in the way all girls of that age are beautiful. It cant be helped, that sort of beauty, nor can it be conserved; its a freshness, a plumpness of the cells, thats unearned and temporary, and that nothing can replicate. None of them was satisfied with it, however; already they were making attempts to alter themselves into some impossible, imaginary mould, plucking and pencilling away at their faces. I didnt blame them, having done the same once myself.

Lilies used to be a movie theatre, before. Students went there a lot; every spring they had a Humphrey Bogart festival, with Lauren Bacall or Katherine Hepburn, women on their own, making up their minds. They wore blouses with buttons down the front that suggested the possibilities of the word undone. These women could not be undone; or not. They seemed to be able to choose.

Happiness is a garden walled with glass: theres no way in or out. In Paradise there are no stories, because there are no journeys. Its loss and regret and misery and yearning that drive the story forward, along its twisted road.

But I have already told the beginning, so right now its the middle. And Zeb is in the middle of the story about Zeb. He is in the middle of his own story.I am not in this part of the story; it hasnt come to the part with me. But Im waiting, far off in the future. Im waiting for the story of Zeb to join up with mine. The story of Toby. The story I am in right now, with you.

A writers age at the time of a works composition is never irrelevant.

I keep on going with this sad and hungry and sordid, this limping and mutilated story, because after all I want you to hear it….By telling you anything at all I’m at least believing in you….Because I’m telling you this story I will your existence. I tell, therefore you are.

And the vampires. You used to know where you stood with them – smelly, evil, undead – but now there are virtuous vampires and disreputable vampires, and sexy vampires and glittery vampires, and none of the old rules about them are true any more. Once you could depend on garlic, and on the rising sun, and on crucifixes. You could get rid of the vampires once and for all. But not any more.

Madness is only an amplification of what you already are.