Quotes from Margaret Atwood

Break the link in time between one generation and the next, and it's game over forever.

But when you cross over the border, it is like passing through air, you wouldn't know you'd done it; as the trees on both sides of it are the same.

The Fall was ongoing, but its trajectory led ever downward.

What well-to-do and once-young, once-beautiful woman or man, cranked up on hormonal supplements and shot full of vitamins but hampered by the unforgiving mirror, wouldn't sell their house, their gated retirement villa, their kids, and their soul to get a second kick at the sexual can?

Live performance had suffered in the sabotage panics of the early twenty-first century — no one during those decades had wanted to form part of a large group at a public event in a dark, easily destructible walled space, or no one with any cool or status.

she was beginning to emerge from the initial sex-induced coma created by him through

I thought she'd get angry then, but all she said was, "You are not unique in the universe. No one has an easy time in life. But maybe God has effed up—as you put it—your life for a reason." "And I can hardly fucking wait to find out what that is," I said.

God made them that way but He did not make you that way. He made you different. It's up to you to set the boundaries.

I've cut myself off. I can feel the place where I used o be attached. It's raw, as when you grate your finger. It's a shredded mess of images. It hurts. But where exactly on me is this torn-off stem? Now here, now there. Meanwhile the other girl, the one with the memory, is coming nearer and nearer. She's catching up to me, trailing behind her, like red smoke, the rope we share.

You can fall in love with anybody — a fool, a criminal, a nothing. There are no good rules.

Hungry, and also sad. Maybe sadness was a kind of hunger, she thought. Maybe the two went together.

And when I go that way, grow fur, start howling, scratch at your airwaves: no matter who I claim I am or how I love you, turn the key. Bar the window.