Quotes from Margaret Atwood

Why does the mind do such things? Turn on us, rend us, dig the claws in. If you get hungry enough, they say, you start eating your own heart. Maybe it's much the same.

I began writing at the age of 5, but there was a dark period between the ages of 8 and 16 when I didn't write. I started again at 16 and have no idea why, but it was suddenly the only thing I wanted to do.

A home filled with nothing but yourself. It's heavy, that lightness. It's crushing, that emptiness.

My brother and I were both good at science, and we were both good at English literature. Either one of us could have gone either way.

Our problem right now is that we're so specialized that if the lights go out, there are a huge number of people who are not going to know what to do. But within every dystopia there's a little utopia.

All stories are about wolves. All worth repeating, that is. Anything else is sentimental drivel. All of them? Sure, he says. Think about it. There's escaping from the wolves, fighting the wolves, capturing the wolves, taming the wolves. Being thrown to the wolves, or throwing others to the wolves so the wolves will eat them instead of you. Running with the wolf pack. Turning into a wolf. Best of all, turning into the head wolf. No other decent stories exist.

Potential has a shelf life.

I knew what love was supposed to be: obsession with undertones of nausea.

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.

This is how the girl who couldn't speak and the man who couldn't see fell in love.

Beginnings are sudden, but also insidious. They creep up on you sideways, they keep to the shadows, they lurk unrecognized. Then, later, they spring.

Happy as a clam, is what my mother says for happy. I am happy as a clam: hard-shelled, firmly closed.