Quotes from Margaret Atwood

The answer can only be that God has given Adam free will, and therefore Adam may do things that God Himself cannot anticipate in advance.

There's a moon now, almost full. Good luck for owls; bad luck for rabbits, who often choose to cavort riskily but sexily in the moonlight, their brains buzzing with pheromones.

Then she lent me her red flannel petticoat until I should get one of my own, and showed me how to fold and pin the cloths, and said hat some called it Eve's curse but she thought that was stupid, and the real curse of Eve was having to put up with the nonsense of Adam, who as soon as there was any trouble, blamed it all on her.

Too good to be true, I will think. Too good for this earth. Good, be thou my evil.

It disturbs me that he can remember some of these things about himself, but not others; that the things he's lost or misplaced exist now only for me. If he's forgotten so much, what have I forgotten?

Is that all we are? he thinks. Unmistakable clothing, a hairstyle, a few exaggerated features, a gesture? —

I felt confused, and also inadequate; whatever he was asking or demanding, it was beyond me. this was the first time a man would expect more from me than i was capable of giving, but it wouldn't be the last.

Every war is the war for whoever's lived through it.

Is this purgatory, and if it is, why is it so much like the first grade?

A thing is valued, she says, only if it is rare and hard to get.

the reason you can't really imagine yourself being dead was that as soon as you say, "I'll be dead," you've said the word I, and so you're still alive inside the sentence. And that's how people got the idea of the immortality of the soul — it was a consequence of grammar.

Storytelling is not a luxury to humanity; it's almost as necessary as bread. We cannot imagine ourselves without it, because the self is a story.