Margaret Atwood Quotes - Page 4

But thoughtless ingratitude is the armour of the young; without it, how would they ever get through life? The old wish the young well, but they wish them ill also: they would like to eat them up, and absorb their vitality, and remain immortal themselves. Without the protection of surliness and levity, all children would be crushed by the past - the past of others, loaded on their shoulders. Selfishness is their saving grace.

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

from under the ground, from under the waters,they clutch at us, they clutch at us,we won’t let go.

I remember my mean mouth, I remember how wise I thought I was. But I was not wise then. Now I am wise.

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

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

When you're young, you think everything you do is disposable. You move from now to now, crumpling time up in your hands, tossing it away. You're your own speeding car. You think you can get rid of things, and people too—leave them behind. You don't yet know about the habit they have, of coming back.Time in dreams is frozen. You can never get away from where you've been.

With the young writers now it’s F and C all day long, which he, personally, finds boring.

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

As all historians know, the past is a great darkness, and filled with echoes. Voices may reach us from it; but what they say to us is imbued with the obscurity of the matrix out of which they come; and try as we may, we cannot always decipher them precisely in the clearer light of our day.

If someone wants to suck your toes, those toes should be worth sucking.

It can't last forever. Others have thought such things, in bad times before this, and they were always right, they did get out one way or another, and it didn't last forever. Although for them it may have lasted all the forever they had.

But it seems she’d wanted children after all, because when she was told she’d been accidentally sterilized she could feel all the light leaking out of her.

Could it be he was feeling a certain nostalgia for the war, despite its stench and meaningless carnage? For that questionless life of instinct?

Bless you. Be careful. Anyone intending to meddle with words needs such blessing, such warning.

What you don’t know won’t hurt you. A dubious maxim: sometimes what you don’t know can hurt you very much.

What is believed in society is not always the equivalent of what is true; but as regards to a woman's reputation, it amounts to the same thing.

Stupidity is the same as evil if you judge by the results.

According to Adam One, the Fall of Man was multidimensional. The ancestral primates fell out of the trees; then they fell from vegetarianism into meat-eating. Then they fell from instinct into reason, and thus into technology; from simple signals into complex grammar, and thus into humanity; from firelessness into fire, and thence into weaponry; and from seasonal mating into an incessant sexual twitching. Then they fell from a joyous life in the moment into the anxious contemplation of the vanished past and the distant future.

Experiences were what you got when you couldn’t get what you wanted.

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

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

Every habit he's 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.

Longed for him. Got him. Shit.

In my dreams of this city I am always lost.

Sympathy from strangers can be ruinous.

Good writing takes place at intersections, at what you might call knots, at places where the society is snarled or knotted up.

You can wipe your feet on me, twist my motives around all you like, you can dump millstones on my head and drown me in the river, but you can’t get me out of the story. I’m the plot, babe, and don’t ever forget it.

Publishing a book is like stuffing a note into a bottle and hurling it into the sea. Some bottles drown, some come safe to land, where the notes are read and then possibly cherished, or else misinterpreted, or else understood all too well by those who hate the message. You never know who your readers might be.

Money isn't the only thing that must flow and circulate in order to have good value: good turns and gifts must flow and circulate . . . for any social system to remain in balance.

I feel despised there, for having so little money; also for once having had so much. I never actually had it, of course. Father had it, and then Richard. But money was imputed to me, the same way crimes are imputed to those who've simply been present at them.

But remember that forgiveness too is a power. To beg for it is a power, and to withhold or bestow it is a power, perhaps the greatest.Maybe none of this is about control. Maybe it isn't really about who can own whom, who can do what to whom and get away with it, even as far as death. Maybe it isn't about who can sit and who has to kneel or stand or lie down, legs spread open. Maybe it's about who can do what to whom and be forgiven for it. Never tell me it amounts to the same thing.

Galleries are frightening places, places of evaluation, of judgement.

Vanity is becoming a nuisance, I can see why women give it up, eventually. But I'm not ready for that yet.

If writing novels - and reading them - have any redeeming social value, it's probably that they force you to imagine what it's like to be somebody else. Which increasingly is something we all need to know.

Debt . . . . that peculiar nexus where money, narrative or story, and religious belief intersect, often with explosive force.

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.

In the end, we'll all become stories

A Tennyson garden, heavy with scent, languid; the return of the word swoon.

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

Surviving Is the only warWe can afford

you can't change the past,Aunt Lou used to say.Oh, but I wanted to;that was the one thing I really wanted to do

Every war is the war for whoever's lived through it.

Madness is only an amplification of what you already are.

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

We want to get there faster. Get where? Wherever we are not. But a human soul can only go as fast as a man can walk, they used to say. In that case, where are all the souls? Left behind. They wander here and there, slowly, dim lights flickering in the marshes at night, looking for us. But they're not nearly fast enough, not for us, we're way ahead of them, they'll never catch up. That's why we can go so fast: our souls don't weigh us down.

Then we had the irises, rising beautiful and cool on their tall stalks, like blown glass, like pastel water momentarily frozen in a splash, light blue, light mauve, and the darker ones, velvet and purple, black cat's ears in the sun, indigo shadow, and the bleeding hearts, so female in shape it was a surprise they'd not long since been rooted out. There is something subversive about this garden of Serena's, a sense of buried things bursting upwards, wordlessly, into the light, as if to point, to say: Whatever is silenced will clamor to be heard, though silently.

You couldn’t leave words lying around where our enemies might find them.

They were wrong about the sun.It does not go down into the underworld at night.The sun leaves merelyand the underworld emerges.It can happen at any moment.It can happen in the morning,you in the kitchen going throughyour mild routines.Plate, cup, knife.All at once there’s no blue, no green,no warning.

Some people write letters, in the library.

Falling in love, although it resulted in altered body chemistry and was therefore real, was a hormonally induced delusional state, according to him. In addition it was humiliating, because it put you at a disadvantage, it gave the love object too much power. As for sex per se, it lacked both challenge and novelty, and was on the whole a deeply imperfect solution to the problem of intergenerational genetic transfer.

They were new money, without a doubt: so new it shrieked. Their clothes looked as it they'd covered themselves in glue, then rolled around in hundred-dollar bills.

UPYou wake up filled with dread.There seems no reason for it.Morning light sifts through the window,there is birdsong,you can't get out of bed.It's something about the crumpled sheetshanging over the edge like junglefoliage, the terry slippers gapingtheir dark pink mouths for your feet,the unseen breakfast--some of itin the refrigerator you do not dareto open--you will not dare to eat.What prevents you? The future. The future tense,immense as outer space.You could get lost there.No. Nothing so simple. The past, its densityand drowned events pressing you down,like sea water, like gelatinfilling your lungs instead of air.Forget all that and let's get up.Try moving your arm.Try moving your head.Pretend the house is on fireand you must run or burn.No, that one's useless.It's never worked before.Where is it coming form, this echo,this huge No that surrounds you,silent as the folds of the yellowcurtains, mute as the cheerfulMexican bowl with its cargoof mummified flowers?(You chose the colours of the sun,not the dried neutrals of shadow.God knows you've tried.)Now here's a good one:you're lying on your deathbed.You have one hour to live.Who is it, exactly, you have neededall these years to forgive?

Alcohol's a depressant, it will let me down later.

Of course (said Oryx), having a money value was no substitute for love. Every child should have love, every person should have it. . . . but love was undependable, it came and then it went, so it was good to have a money value, because then at least those who wanted to make a profit from you would make sure you were fed enough and not damaged too much. Also there were many who had neither love nor a money value, and having one of these things was better than having nothing.

Am I shallow? she asks the mirror. Yes, I am shallow. The sun shines on the ripples where it's shallow. Deep is too dark.

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.

Home, I think. But it's nowhere I can go back to.

But if Crake wanted her to stay longer on any given night, do it again maybe, she'd make some excuse—jet lag, a headache, something plausible. Her inventions were seamless, she was the best poker-faced liar in the world, so there would be a kiss goodbye for stupid Crake, a smile, a wave, a closed door, and the next minute there she would be, with Jimmy.

It is shocking how many crimes the Bible contains. The Governor's wife should cut them all out and paste them into her scrapbook.