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Margaret Atwood quotes
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(77)
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“Forgiving men is so much easier than forgiving women.”
Margaret Atwood
,
Cat's Eye
“Having experienced both, I am not sure which is worse: intense feeling, or the absence of it.”
Margaret Atwood
,
The Blind Assassin
“In Paradise there are no stories, because there are no journeys. It’s loss and regret and misery and yearning that drive the story forward, along its twisted road.”
Margaret Atwood
,
The Blind Assassin
“Never pray for justice, because you might get some.”
Margaret Atwood
,
Cat's Eye
“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.”
Margaret Atwood
,
The Blind Assassin
“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.”
Margaret Atwood
,
Oryx and Crake
“if you knew in advance the consequences of your own actions—you’d be doomed. You’d be as ruined as God.”
Margaret Atwood
,
The Blind Assassin
“I don’t want to see anyone. I lie in the bedroom with the curtains drawn and nothingness washing over me like a sluggish wave. Whatever is happening to me is my own fault. I have done something wrong, something so huge I can’t even see it,...”
Margaret Atwood
,
Cat's Eye
“Hatred is clear, metallic, one-handed, unwavering; unlike love.”
Margaret Atwood
,
Cat's Eye
“The best way of keeping a secret is to pretend there isn’t one.”
Margaret Atwood
,
The Blind Assassin
“On impulse he might die for her, but living for her would be quite different.”
Margaret Atwood
,
The Blind Assassin
“She knows herself to be at the mercy of events, and she knows by now that events have no mercy.”
Margaret Atwood
,
The Blind Assassin
“Touch comes before sight, before speech. It is the first language and the last, and it always tells the truth.”
Margaret Atwood
,
The Blind Assassin
“Don't let the bastards grind you down.”
Margaret Atwood
,
The Handmaid's Tale
“Potential has a shelf life.”
Margaret Atwood
,
Cat's Eye
“All stories are about wolves. All worth repeating, that is. Anything else is sentimental drivel.”
Margaret Atwood
,
The Blind Assassin
“Love blurs your vision; but after it recedes, you can see more clearly than ever. It’s like the tide going out, revealing what ever’s been thrown away and sunk: broken bottles, old gloves, rusting pop cans, nibbled fishbodies, bones. This is...”
Margaret Atwood
,
Cat's Eye
“Home is where the heart is”
Margaret Atwood
,
The Blind Assassin
“People cry at weddings for the same reason they cry at happy endings: because they so desperately want to believe in something they know is not credible.”
Margaret Atwood
,
The Blind Assassin
“We were ruinous together . . . But how else can we live, these days, except in the midst of ruin?”
Margaret Atwood
,
The Blind Assassin
“Beginnings are sudden, but also insidious. They creep up on you sideways, they keep to the shadows, they lurk unrecognized. Then, later, they spring.”
Margaret Atwood
,
The Blind Assassin
“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 the bridge.”
Margaret Atwood
,
The Blind Assassin
“When we think of the past it's the beautiful things we pick out. We want to believe it was all like that.”
Margaret Atwood
,
The Handmaid's Tale
“Women have curious ways of hurting someone else. They hurt themselves instead; or else they do it so the guy doesn’t even know he’s been hurt until much later.”
Margaret Atwood
,
The Blind Assassin
“everyone else my age is an adult, whereas I am merely in disguise.”
Margaret Atwood
,
Cat's Eye
“What is it that I’ll want from you? Not love: that would be too much to ask. Not forgiveness, which isn’t yours to bestow. Only a listener, perhaps; only someone who will see me.”
Margaret Atwood
,
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.”
Margaret Atwood
,
The Blind Assassin
“What fabrications they are, mothers. Scarecrows, wax dolls for us to stick pins into, crude diagrams. We deny them an existence of their own, we make them up to suit ourselves—our own hungers, our own wishes, our own deficiencies. Now that...”
Margaret Atwood
,
The Blind Assassin
“And yet it disturbs me to learn I have hurt someone unintentionally. I want all my hurts to be intentional.”
Margaret Atwood
,
Cat's Eye
“There is nothing more onerous than enforced gratitude.”
Margaret Atwood
,
The Blind Assassin
“When any civilization is dust and ashes . . . art is all that’s left over.”
Margaret Atwood
,
Oryx and Crake
“More and more I feel like a letter—deposited here, collected there. But a letter addressed to no one.”
Margaret Atwood
,
The Blind Assassin
“I see that there will be no end to imperfection, or to doing things the wrong way. Even if you grow up, no matter how hard you scrub, whatever you do, there will always be some other stain or spot on your face or stupid act, somebody frowning.”
Margaret Atwood
,
Cat's Eye
“We were the people who were not in the papers. We lived in the blank white spaces at the edges of print. It gave us more freedom.”
Margaret Atwood
,
The Handmaid's Tale
“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.”
Margaret Atwood
,
The Blind Assassin
“I expect he did it awkwardly, but awkwardness in men was a sign of sincerity then.”
Margaret Atwood
,
The Blind Assassin
“When you’re young, you think everything you do is disposable.”
Margaret Atwood
,
The Blind Assassin
“Farewells can be shattering, but returns are surely worse.”
Margaret Atwood
,
The Blind Assassin
“She imagines him imagining her. This is her salvation.”
Margaret Atwood
,
The Blind Assassin
“We understand more than we know.”
Margaret Atwood
,
Oryx and Crake
“how much needless despair has been caused by a series of biological mismatches, a misalignment of the hormones and pheromones? Resulting in the fact that the one you love so passionately won’t or can’t love you. As a species we’re pathetic...”
Margaret Atwood
,
Oryx and Crake
“There’s something to be said for hunger: at least it lets you know you’re still alive.”
Margaret Atwood
,
Oryx and Crake
“Walking into the crowd was like sinking into a stew—you became an ingredient, you took on a certain flavour.”
Margaret Atwood
,
The Blind Assassin
“people will do anything rather than admit that their lives have no meaning. No use, that is. No plot.”
Margaret Atwood
,
The Handmaid's Tale
“To pronounce the name of the dead is to make them live again, said the ancient Egyptians: not always what one might wish.”
Margaret Atwood
,
The Blind Assassin
“The living bird is not its labelled bones.”
Margaret Atwood
,
The Blind Assassin
“After everything that’s happened, how can the world still be so beautiful? Because it is.”
Margaret Atwood
,
Oryx and Crake
“Time: old cold time, old sorrow, settling down in layers like silt in a pond.”
Margaret Atwood
,
The Blind Assassin
“The young habitually mistake lust for love, they’re infested with idealism of all kinds.”
Margaret Atwood
,
The Blind Assassin
“Nature is to zoos as God is to churches.”
Margaret Atwood
,
Oryx and Crake
view all 77 quotes
Related topics
love
women
time
death
pain
imagination
imperfection
truth
stupidity
forgiveness
writing
nature
justice
war
memory
ignorance
past
art
secret
existence
Related sources
The Blind Assassin
(42)
Cat's Eye
(17)
Oryx and Crake
(11)
The Handmaid's Tale
(7)
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