Quotes by Margaret Atwood

Our heaven is their hell, said God. I like a balanced universe.

You might even provide a Heaven for them. We need You for that. Hell we can make for ourselves.

We understand more than we know.

We shouldnt have been so scornful; we should have had compassion. But compassion takes work, and we were young.

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

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.

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

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.

We yearned for the future. How did we learn it, that talent for insatiability?

One of the gravestones in the cemetery near the earliest church has an anchor on it and an hourglass, and the words In Hope.In Hope. Why did they put that above a dead person? Was it the corpse hoping, or those still alive?

...we must be a beacon of hope, because if you tell people theres nothing they can do, they will do worse than nothing.

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

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.

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.

The Chorus Line:A Rope-Jumping Rhymewe are the maidsthe ones you killedthe ones you failedwe danced in airour bare feet twitchedit was not fairwith every goddess, queen, and bitchfrom there to hereyou scratched your itchwe did much lessthan what you didyou judged us badyou had the spearyou had the wordat your commandwe scrubbed the bloodof our deadparamours from floors, from chairsfrom stairs, from doors,we knelt in waterwhile you staredat our bare feetit was not fairyou licked our fearit gave you pleasureyou raised your handyou watched us fallwe danced on airthe ones you failedthe ones you killed

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.

Via the conduit of a wild dog pack, she has now made the ultimate Gift to her fellow Creatures, and has become part of Gods great dance of proteins.

You fit into melike a hook into an eyea fish hookan open eye

Kill what you cant savewhat you cant eat throw outwhat you cant throw out buryWhat you cant bury give awaywhat you cant give away you must carry with you,it is always heavier than you thought.

Where do the words gowhen we have said them?