Quotes from Margaret Atwood

You need a certain amount of nerve to be a writer.

Love is not a profession genteel or otherwise sex is not dentistry the slick filling of aches and cavities you are not my doctor you are not my cure, nobody has that power, you are merely a fellow/traveler.

A house divided against itself could not stand.

He's coming to hate the gratitude of women. It is like being fawned on by rabbits, or like being covered with syrup: you can't get it off.

He's got his cigarette going. He offers her one; this time she takes it. Brief match-flare insider their cupped hands. Red finger-ends. She thinks, Any more flame and we'd see the bones. It's like X-rays. We're just a kind of haze, just coloured water. Water does what it likes. It always goes downhill.

The body may be the home of the soul and the pathway of the spirit, but it is also the perversity, the stubborn resistance, the malign contagion of the material world. Having a body, being in the body, is like being roped to a sick cat.

Nolite te bastardes carborundorum [...] But what did it mean? I said. What?, he said. Oh, it meant 'Don't let the bastards grind you down'. I guess we thought we were pretty smart back then.

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.

I thought of myself as an itinerant brain--the equivalent of a strolling player of Elizabethan times, or else a troubadour, clutching my university degree like a cheap lute.

She stood for a long time, breathing in and breathing in, the scent of the trees and dogs and night flowers and water, because this was the best thing, it was what she wanted, to be outside in the night by herself. She wasn't sick any longer.

Translation was never possible. Instead there was always only conquest, the influx of the language of hard nouns, the language of metal, the language of either/or, the one language that has eaten all the others.

Four angels standing round my bed, Two to feet and two to head; One to watch and one to pray, And two to carry my soul away.