Margaret Atwood Quotes: 43

• War is what happens when language fails.

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

• A word after a word after a word is power.

• Another belief of mine: that everyone else my age is an adult, whereas I am merely in disguise.

  Cat's Eye

• Love blurs your vision; but after it recedes, you can see more clearly than ever. It's like the tide going out, revealing whatever's 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.

  Cat's Eye

• Don't let the bastards grind you down.

  The Handmaid's Tale

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

  The Blind Assassin

• Ignoring isn’t the same as ignorance, you have to work at it.

  The Handmaid's Tale

• 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 Blind Assassin

• Perhaps I write for no one. Perhaps for the same person children are writing for when they scrawl their names in the snow.

• 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.

• Love blurs your vision; but after it recedes, you can see more clearly than ever. It's like the tide going out, revealing whatever's 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 you've made.

  Cat's Eye

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

• A truth should exist,it should not be usedlike this. If I love youis that a fact or a weapon?

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

  Lady Oracle

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

  Cat's Eye

• Potential has a shelf life.

  Cat's Eye

• A home filled with nothing but yourself. It's heavy, that lightness. It's crushing, that emptiness.

  The Tent

• What am I living for and what am I dying for are the same question.

  The Year of the Flood

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

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

  The Blind Assassin

• It's impossible to say a thing exactly the way it was, because of what you say can never be exact, you always have to leave something out, there are too many parts, sides, crosscurrents, nuances; too many gestures, which could mean this or that, too many shapes which can never be fully described, too many flavors, in the air or on the tongue, half-colors, too many.

  The Handmaid's Tale

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

  The Handmaid's Tale

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

  Power Politics

• Knowing was a temptation. What you don't know won't tempt you.

  The Handmaid's Tale

• 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 it's time for you to become someone else's past time, and then time folds again.

  The Tent

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

  The Handmaid's Tale

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

  The Tent

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

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

  Lady Oracle

• Glenn used to say the reason you can't really imagine yourself being dead was that as soon as you say, 'I'll be dead,' you've said the word I, and so you're still alive inside the sentence. And that's how people got the idea of the immortality of the soul - it was a consequence of grammar.

  The Year of the Flood

• We understand more than we know.

  Oryx and Crake

• A Paradox, the doughnut hole. Empty space, once, but now they've 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?

  Der blinde Mörder

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

  The Handmaid's Tale

• But my dreaming self refuses to be consoled. It continues to wander, aimless, homeless, alone. It cannot be convinced of its safety by any evidence drawn from my waking life.

• The truth is seldom welcome, especially at dinner.

  Morning in the Burned House

• Fatigue is here, in my body, in my legs and eyes. That is what gets you in the end. Faith is only a word, embroidered.

  The Handmaid's Tale

• Better not to invent her in her absence. Better to wait until she's actually here. Then he can make her up as she goes along.

  The Blind Assassin

• Where do the words gowhen we have said them?

  Procedures For Underground

• 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?

  The Handmaid's Tale

• Maybe I don't really want to know what's going on. Maybe I'd rather not know. Maybe I couldn't bear to know. The Fall was a fall from innocence to knowledge.

• Kill what you can't savewhat you can't eat throw outwhat you can't throw out buryWhat you can't bury give awaywhat you can't give away you must carry with you,it is always heavier than you thought.

  You are Happy

• So we couldn't mingle with them, but we could eavesdrop. We got our knowledge that way--we caught it like germs.

  The Year of the Flood