Quotes from Margaret Atwood

What's the difference between vision and a vision? The former relates to something it's assumed you've seen, the latter to something it's assumed you haven't. Language is not always dependable either.

There is a silence. But sometimes it's as dangerous not to speak.

His time, what a bankrupt idea, as if he's been given a box of time belonging to him alone, stuffed to the brim with hours and minutes that he can spend like money. Trouble is, the box has holes in it and the time is running out, no matter what he does with it.

They say: Speak for us (to whom?) Some say: Avenge us (on whom?) Some say: Take our place. Some say: Witness Others say (and these are women) Be happy for us.

I avoid looking down at my body, not so much because it's shameful or immodest but because I don't want to see it. I don't want to look at something that determines me so completely.   I

The house, and all the objects in it, crackled with static electricity; undertows washed through it, the air was heavy with things that were known but not spoken. Like a hollow log, a drum, a church, it was amplified, so that conversations whispered in it sixty years ago can be half-heard today.

I love you. You're the only one. She isn't the first woman he's ever said that to. He shouldn't have used it up so much earlier in his life, he shouldn't have treated it like a tool, a wedge, a key to open women. By the time he got around to meaning it, the words had sounded fraudulent to him and he'd been ashamed to pronounce them.

Or he'd watch the news: more plagues, more famines, more floods, more insect or microbe or small-mammal outbreaks, more droughts, more chickenshit boy-soldier wars in distant countries. Why was everything so much like itself?

You should never let your picture be in a magazine or newspaper if you can help it, as you never know what ends your face may be made to serve, by others, once it has got out of your control.

It was also shameful: when a shameful thing is done to you, the shamefulness rubs off on you. You feel dirtied.

What confronts us, now the excitement's over, is our own failure.

xxx all souls are equal in heaven. Only in heaven, I thought. And this is not heaven. This is a place for snakes and ladders, and though I was once high up on a ladder propped up against the Tree of Life, now I've slid down a snake. How gratifying for the others to witness my fall!