Quotes from Margaret Atwood

I have them, these attacks of the past, like faintness, a wave sweeping over my head.

Being socially retarded is like being mentally retarded, it arouses in others disgust and pity and the desire to torment and reform.

None of them was willing to be a girl, he said. You can see why not. I know, right? I don't blame them, she said with a hard edge to her voice. Being a girl is the pits, trust me.

Blondes are like white mice, you only find them in cages. They wouldn't last long in nature. They're too conspicuous.

Pink is supposed to weaken your enemies, make them go soft on you, which must be why it's used for baby girls. It's a wonder the military hasn't got on to this.

The bell that measures time is ringing.

For years I wanted to be older, and now I am.

If there were no emptiness, there would be no life.

I admired my mother in some ways, although things between us were never easy. She expected too much from me, I felt. She expected me to vindicate her life for her, and the choices she'd made. I didn't want to live my life on her terms. I didn't want to be the model offspring, the incarnation of her ideas. We used to fight about that. I am not your justification for existence, I said to her once.

And sometimes it happened, for a time. That kind of love comes and goes and is hard to remember afterwards, like pain. You would look at the man one day and you would think, I loved you, and the tense would be past, and you would be filled with a sense of wonder, because it was such an amazing and precarious and dumb thing to have done; and you would know too why your friends had been evasive about it, at the time. There is a good deal of comfort, now, in remembering this.

That way nobody feels exploited." "Wait a minute," says Stan. "Nobody's exploited?" "I said nobody feels exploited," says Budge. "Different thing.

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.