Quotes from Margaret Atwood

The Aunts had their methods, and their informants: no walls were solid for them, no doors locked.

They may not like me, but they respect me. Respect is better than like.

They say that a nightmare can frighten you to death, that your heart can literally stop. Will this bad dream kill me, one of these nights? Surely it will take more than that.

It is not only the body that travels, Adam One used to say, it is also the Soul. And the end of one journey is the beginning of another.

Falling in love, although it resulted in altered body chemistry and was therefore real, was a hormonally induced delusional state.

I've learned to do without a lot of things. If you have a lot of things, said Aunt Lydia, you get too attached to this material world and you forget about spiritual values. You must cultivate poverty of spirit. Blessed are the meek.

I beliebe in the resistance as I believe there can be no light without shadow; or rather, no shadow unless there is also light.

God is love, they once said, but we reversed that, and love, like heaven, was always just around the corner. The more difficult it was to love the particular man beside us, the more we believed in Love, abstract and total. We were waiting, always, for the incarnation. That word, made flesh.

How young they are, how frisky! I thought. How touchingly innocent! Was I ever like that? I could not remember.

He keeps his voice kindly but remote. A cross between a pedagogue, soothsayer, and a benevolent uncle — that should be his tone.

Stupid, stupid, stupid: I'd believed all that claptrap about life, liberty, democracy, and the rights of the individual I'd soaked up at law school. These were eternal verities and we would always defend them. I'd depended on that, as if on a magic charm.

We lived, as usual, by ignoring. Ignoring isn't the same as ignorance, you have to work at it.