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The Blind Assassin quotes

Margaret Atwood

English (42) Français (35)

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“Gods always come in handy, they justify almost anything, and the gods of Sakiel-Norn were no exception.” 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
“some people can't tell where it hurts. They can't calm down. They can't ever stop howling.” Margaret Atwood, The Blind Assassin
“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
“She imagines him imagining her. This is her salvation.” 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
“The best way of keeping a secret is to pretend there isn’t one.” Margaret Atwood, The Blind Assassin
“Time: old cold time, old sorrow, settling down in layers like silt in a pond.” Margaret Atwood, The Blind Assassin
“The ancestral voices were prophesying war because ancestral voices never shut up, and they hate to be wrong, and war is a sure thing, sooner or later.” 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
“Many believed what they were told: that the welfare of the entire kingdom depended on their selflessness.” Margaret Atwood, The Blind Assassin
“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
“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
“On impulse he might die for her, but living for her would be quite different.” Margaret Atwood, The Blind Assassin
“Having experienced both, I am not sure which is worse: intense feeling, or the absence of it.” Margaret Atwood, The Blind Assassin
“It wasn’t so easy, though, ending the war. A war is a huge fire; the ashes from it drift far, and settle slowly.” Margaret Atwood, The Blind Assassin
“Farewells can be shattering, but returns are surely worse.” 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
“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
“When you’re young, you think everything you do is disposable.” 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
“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
“The only way you can write the truth is to assume that what you set down will never be read.” Margaret Atwood, The Blind Assassin
“Home is where the heart is” Margaret Atwood, The Blind Assassin
“All stories are about wolves. All worth repeating, that is. Anything else is sentimental drivel.” 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
“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
“I expect he did it awkwardly, but awkwardness in men was a sign of sincerity then.” Margaret Atwood, The Blind Assassin
“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
“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
“There is nothing more onerous than enforced gratitude.” Margaret Atwood, The Blind Assassin
“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
“Lose your temper and you lose the fight, Reenie used to say.” Margaret Atwood, The Blind Assassin
“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
“The young habitually mistake lust for love, they’re infested with idealism of all kinds.” Margaret Atwood, The Blind Assassin
“They were both in their own ways earnest; they both wanted to achieve some worthy end or other, change the world for the better. Such alluring, such perilous ideals!” Margaret Atwood, The Blind Assassin
“Nevertheless, blood is thicker than water, as anyone knows who has tasted both.” Margaret Atwood, The Blind Assassin
“She wished him to owe his recovery to her alone—to her care, to her tireless devotion. That is the other side of selflessness: its tyranny.” Margaret Atwood, The Blind Assassin
“More and more I feel like a letter—deposited here, collected there. But a letter addressed to no one.” Margaret Atwood, The Blind Assassin
“The living bird is not its labelled bones.” Margaret Atwood, The Blind Assassin
“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 snuffles, romance only sighs.” Margaret Atwood, The Blind Assassin
“But unshed tears can turn you rancid. So can memory. So can biting your tongue. My bad nights were beginning.” Margaret Atwood, The Blind Assassin

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women consequences love truth writing death pain war devotion name absence return foresight imagination howling loneliness blood heart time romance

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