Quotes from Margaret Atwood

Each twinge, each murmur of slight pain, ripples of sloughed-off matter, swellings and diminishings of tissue, the droolings of the flesh, these are signs, these are the things I need to know about. Each month I watch for blood, fearfully, for when it comes it means failure. I have failed once again to fulfill the expectations of others, which have become my own.

not the shore but an aquarium filled with exhausted water and warm seaweed

As Saint Paul says, marry or burn.

Opening up their sack, the children chorus, "Oh Snowman, what have we found?" They lift out the objects, hold them up as if offering them for sale: a hubcap, a piano key, a chunk of pale-green pop bottle smoothed by the ocean. A plastic BlyssPluss container, empty; a ChickieNobs Bucket O'Nubbins, ditto. A computer mouse, or the busted remains of one, with a long wiry tail.

the best and most cost-effective way to control women for reproductive and other purposes was through women themselves.

A momentary psychotic break," I'd said. "The strain of being in a strange and debilitating environment, such as Canada, can have that effect.

The threat to the planet is us. It's actually not a threat to the planet - it's a threat to us.

The television series has respected one of the axioms of the novel: no event is allowed into it that does not have a precedent in human history.

It was a wicked game. "Homer," says Snowman, making his way through the dripping-wet vegetation. "The Divine Comedy. Greek statuary. Aqueducts. Paradise Lost. Mozart's music. Shakespeare, complete works. The Brontës. Tolstoy. The Pearl Mosque. Chartres Cathedral. Bach. Rembrandt. Verdi. Joyce. Penicillin. Keats. Turner. Heart transplants. Polio vaccine. Berlioz. Baudelaire. Bartok. Yeats. Woolf.

Aunt Lydia, you are too good," he will beam. Too good to be true, I will think. Too good for this earth. Good, be thou my evil.

Be a good girl, she said. I hope you'll be a good sister to Laura. I know you try to be. I nodded. I didn't know what to say. I felt I was the victim of an injustice: why was it always me who was supposed to be a good sister to Laura, instead of the other way around? Surely my mother loved Laura more than she loved me.

Laura was flint in a nest of thistledown. I say flint, not stone: a flint has a heart of fire.