Quotes by Margaret Atwood

Lose your temper and you lose the fight.

Perfection exacts a price, but its the imperfect who pay it

He loved her; in some ways he was devoted to her. But he couldnt reach her, and it was the same on her side. It was as if theyd drunk some fatal potion that would keep them forever apart, even though they lived in the same house, ate at the same table, slept in the same bed.

He is talking to people in Toronto, trying to find out if I am guilty; but he wont find it out that way. He doesnt understand yet that guilt comes to you not from the things youve done, but from the things that other have done for you.

Every habit hes ever had is still there in his body, lying dormant like flowers in the desert. Given the right conditions, all his old addictions would burst into full and luxuriant bloom.

Her face is silting up, like a pond; layers are accumulating. Every once in a while, when she can afford the time, she spends a few days at a spa north of the city, drinking vegetable juice and having ultrasound treatments, in search of her original face, the one she knows is under there somewhere; she comes back feeling toned up and virtuous, and hungry.

You believed you could transcend the body as you aged, she tells herself. You believed you could rise above it, to a serene, nonphysical realm. But it’s only through ecstasy you can do that, and ecstasy is achieved through the body itself. Without the bone and sinew of wings, no flight. Without that ecstasy you can only be dragged further down by the body, into its machinery. Its rusting, creaking, vengeful, brute machinery.

I’m not used to girls, or familiar with their customs. I feel awkward around them, I don’t know what to say. I know the unspoken rules of boys, but with girls I sense that I am always on the verge of some unforeseen, calamitous blunder.

Something is unfolding, being revealed to me. I see that theres a whole world of of girls and their doings that has been unknown to me, and that I can be part of without making any effort at all. I dont have to keep up with anyone, run as fast, aim as well, make loud explosive noises, decode messages, die on cue. I dont have to think about whether I do these things well, as well as a boy. All I have to do is sit on the floor and cut frying pans our of the Eatons Catalogue with embroidery scissors, and say Ive done it badly.

He said, I wont have one of those things in the house. It gives a young girl a false notion of beauty, not to mention anatomy. If a real woman was built like that shed fall on her face.She said, If we dont let her have one like all the other girls shell feel singled out. Itll become an issue. Shell long for one and shell long to turn into one. Repression breeds sublimation. You know that. He said, Its not just the pointy plastic tits, its the wardrobes. The wardrobes and that stupid male doll, whats his name, the one with the underwear glued on.She said, Better to get it over with when shes young. He said, All right but dont let me see it.She came whizzing down the stairs, thrown like a dart. She was stark naked. Her hair had been chopped off, her head was turned back to front, she was missing some toes and shed been tattooed all over her body with purple ink, in a scrollwork design. She hit the potted azalea, trembled there for a moment like a botched angel, and fell.He said, I guess were safe.

But in life, a tragedy is not one long scream. It includes everything that led up to it. Hour after trivial hour, day after day, year after year, and then the sudden moment: the knife stab, the shell burst, the plummet of the car from a bridge.

Nothing is more difficult than to understand the dead, Ive found; but nothing is more dangerous than to ignore them.

She knows herself to be at the mercy of events, and she knows by now that events have no mercy.

Yet each flower, each twig, each pebble, shines as though illuminated from within, as once before, on her first day in the Garden. It’s the stress, it’s the adrenalin, it’s a chemical effect: she knows this well enough. But why is it built in? she thinks. Why are we designed to see the world as supremely beautiful just as we’re about to be snuffed? Do rabbits feel the same as the fox teeth bite down on their necks? Is it mercy?

Why is it we want so badly to memorialize ourselves? Even while were still alive. We wish to assert our existence, like dogs peeing on fire hydrants.

The best way of being kind to bears is not to be very close to them.

Genius is an infinite capacity for causing pain.

Gender roles suck, says Swift Fox.Then you should stop playing them, thinks Toby.

You can only be jealous of someone who has something you think you ought to have yourself.

I tried to visualize my jealousy as a yellowy-brown cloud boiling around inside me, then going out through my nose like smoke and turning into a stone and falling down into the ground. That did work a little. But in my visualization a plant covered with poison berries would grow out of the stone, whether I wanted it to or not.