Quotes by 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.

Love blurs your vision; but after it recedes, you can see more clearly than ever. Its like the tide going out, revealing whatevers 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 youve made.

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—youd be doomed. Youd be as ruined as God. Youd be a stone. Youd never eat or drink or laugh or get out of bed in the morning. Youd never love anyone, ever again. Youd never dare to.

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?

This is how the girl who couldnt speak and the man who couldnt see fell in love.

What is it the Ill want from you? Not love: that would be too much to ask. Not forgiveness, which isnt yours to bestow. Only a listener, perhaps; only someone who will see me. Dont 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.

The Eskimo has fifty-names for snow because it is important to them there ought to be as many for love.

If I love you, is that a fact or a weapon?

A home filled with nothing but yourself. Its heavy, that lightness. Its crushing, that emptiness.

Potential has a shelf life.

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 its time for you to become someone elses past time, and then time folds again.

Dont let the bastards grind you down.

So much for endings. Beginnings are always more fun. True connoisseurs, however, are known to favor the stretch in between, since its the hardest to do anything with. Thats about all that can be said for plots, which anyway are just one thing after another, a what and a what and a what.

Im not senile, I snapped. If I burn the house down it will be on purpose.

A Paradox, the doughnut hole. Empty space, once, but now theyve 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?

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.

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.

The truth is seldom welcome, especially at dinner.

It must have been then that I began to lose faith in reasonable argument as the sole measure of truth.

There were a lot of gods. Gods always come in handy, they justify almost anything.