Quotes by Margaret Atwood

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

“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.”

“This world is not enough, but it will have to do. You can either hold on or let go.”

“The reason they invented coffins, to lock the dead in, preserve them, they put makeup on them; they didnt want them spreading or changing into anything else. The stone with the name and date was on them to weight them down.”

“I would like to be the air that inhabits you for a moment only. I would like to be that unnoticed and that necessary.”

“I planned my death carefully, unlike my life, which meandered along from one thing to another, despite my feeble attempts to control it.”

“Neither of us says the word love, not once. It would be tempting fate; it would be romance, bad luck.”

“If you really want to stay the same age you are now forever and ever, shed be thinking, try jumping off the roof: deaths a sure-fire method for stopping time.”

“Truly amazing, what people can get used to, as long as there are a few compensations.”

“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.”

“We understand more than we know.”

“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.”

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

“How could I be sleeping with this particular man.... Surely only true love could justify my lack of taste.”

“There I am, in the Grade Six class picture, smiling broadly. Happy as a clam, is what my mother says for happy. I am happy as a clam: hardshelled, firmly closed.”

“Hatred would have been easier. With hatred, I would have known what to do. Hatred is clear, metallic, one-handed, unwavering; unlike love.”

“I was taking something away from her, although she didnt know it. I was filching. Never mind that it was something she apparently didnt want or had no use for, had rejected even; still, it was hers, and if I took it away, this mysterious it I couldnt quite define.”

“Glenn used to say the reason you cant really imagine yourself being dead was that as soon as you say, Ill be dead, youve said the word I, and so youre still alive inside the sentence. And thats how people got the idea of the immortality of the soul - it was a consequence of grammar.”

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