Quotes from Margaret Atwood

there goes this day, down to where all the other days have gone, each one carrying something away with it.

Maybe nothing happened, maybe these emotions I remember are not the right emotions.

I will bend, I will touch the ground, or as close to it as I can get without rupture. I will lay a wreath of invisible money on her grave.

You were such a sensitive child. So easily wounded. So I told you those things. I didn't want you to feel defenseless in the face of life. Life can be harsh. I wanted you to feel protected, and to know that there was a greater power watching over you. That the Universe was taking a personal interest.

How long do you expect me to wait while you cauterize your senses, one after another turning yourself to an impervious glass tower?

I stand there on the top step, frozen with hate. What I hate is not Grace or even Cordelia. I can't go as far as that. I hate Mrs. Smeath, because what I thought was a secret, something going on among girls, among children, is not one. It has been discussed before, and tolerated. Mrs. Smeath has known and approved. She has done nothing to stop it. She thinks it serves me right.

She says the clogs are comfortable, and that comfort trumps fashion as far as she's concerned. Gavin has tried quoting Yeats to the effect that women must labour to be beautiful, but Reynolds Ãƒ¢Ã¢'¬Ã¢â‚¬œ who used to be a passionate Yeats fan Ãƒ¢Ã¢'¬Ã¢â‚¬œ is now of the opinion that Yeats is entitled to his point of view, but that was then and social attitudes were different, and in actual fact Yeats is dead. Reynolds

She was something of his own that he had lost.

This is a pattern humankind has repeated many times over the course of its history. When there is a crisis, whether real or imagined, culprits—whether real or imagined—must be found and eliminated.

Some might call the overthrowing of an illegitimate government an act of treason; without a doubt, many have had this thought about me. Now that you have joined us, it is the same thought that others will have about you. But loyalty to a higher truth is not treason, for the ways of God are not the ways of man, and they are most emphatically not the ways of woman.

Being here with him is safety; it's a cave, where we huddle together while the storm goes on outside.

I wanted to ask why it had to be like this, but I already knew the answer: because it was God's plan. That was how the Aunts got out of everything