Quotes by Margaret Atwood

It was Colonel Parkman who upped stakes, crossed the border, and named our town, thus perversely commemorating a battle in which hed lost. (Though perhaps thats not so unusual: many people take a curatorial interest in their own scars.) Hes shown astride his horse, waving a sword and about to gallop into the nearby petunia bed: a craggy man with seasoned eyes and pointed beard, every sculptors idea of every cavalry leader. No one knows what Colonel Parkman really looked like, since he left no pictorial evidence of himself and the statue wasnt erected until 1885, but he looks like this now. Such is the tyranny of Art.On the left-hand side of the lawn, also with a petunia bed, is an equally mythic figure: the Weary Soldier, his three top shirt buttons undone, his neck bowed as if for the headmans axe, his uniform rumpled, his helmet askew, leaning on his malfunctioning Ross rifle. Forever young, forever exhausted, he tops the War Memorial, his skin burning green in the sun, pigeon droppings running down his face like tears.

Think of yourselves as pearls. We, sitting in our rows, eyes down, we make her salivate morally. We are hers to define, we must suffer her adjectives. I think about pearls. Pearls are congealed oyster spit.

Pearls are congealed oyster spit.

It isnt running away theyre afraid of. We wouldnt get far. Its those other escapes, the ones you can open in yourself, given a cutting edge.

Time in dreams is frozen. You can never get away from where youve been.

You think you can get rid of things, and people too--leave them behind. You dont know yet about the habit they have, of coming back.

​Now Im awake to the world. I was asleep before. Thats how we let it happen. When they slaughtered Congress, we didnt wake up. When they blamed terrorists and suspended the constitution, we didnt wake up then, either. Nothing changes instantaneously. In a gradually heating bathtub, youd be boiled to death before you knew it.

God works in mysterious ways his wonders to perform, as Reenie used to say. Could it be that Myra is my designated guardian angel? Or is she instead a foretaste of Purgatory? And how do you tell the difference?

I sink down into my body as into a swamp, fenland, where only I know the footing….I’m a cloud, congealed around a central object, the shape of a pear, which is hard and more real than I am and glows red within its translucent wrapping. Inside it is a space, huge as the sky at night and dark and curved like that, though black-red rather than black.

Does feminist mean large unpleasant person wholl shout at you or someone who believes women are human beings? To me its the latter, so I sign up

If he had known unstructured space is a delugeand stocked his log house-boat with all the animals even the wolves, he might have floated. But obstinate hestated, The land is solid and stamped, watching his foot sink down through the stone up to his knee. From Progressive insanities of a pioneer

More powerful than God, more evil than the Devil; the poor have it, the rich lack it, and if you eat it you die?

The door of Reverend Verringer’s impressive manse is opened by an elderly female with a face like a pine plank; the Reverend is unmarried, and has need of an irreproachable housekeeper. Simon is ushered into the library. It is so self-consciously the right sort of library that he has an urge to set fire to it.

The truly fearless think of themselves as normal.

If the national mental illness of the United States is megalomania that of Canada is paranoid schizophrenia.

There are some women who seem to be born without fear just as there are people who are born without the ability to feel pain. ... Providence appears to protect such women maybe out of astonishment.

Fear has a smell as Love does.

The Eskimos had fifty-two names for snow because it was important to them there ought to be as many for love.

Time is compressed like the fist I close on my knee ... I hold inside it the clues and solutions and the power for what I must do now.

A divorce is like an amputation: you survive it but theres less of you.