Quotes from Margaret Atwood

Stan got the message. He allowed the chicken assignations. What did that make him? A chicken pimp. Better than dead.

You don't teach boys to be charming. It makes people think they are devious.

You'll have to forgive me. I'm a refugee from the past, and like other refugees I go over the customs and habits of being I've left or been forced to leave behind me, and it all seems just as quaint, from here, and I am just as obsessive about it.

I have to be more careful about my memories, I have to be sure they're my own and not the memories of other people telling me what I felt, how I acted, what I said: if the events are wrong the feelings I remember about them will be wrong too, I'll start inventing them and there will be no way of correcting it, the ones who could help are gone.

But such messages can be dangerous. Think twice before you wish, and especially before you wish to make yourself into the hand of fate. (Think twice,said Reenie. Laura said,Why only twice? )

As a species we're pathetic in that way: imperfectly monogamous. If we could only pair-bond for life, like gibbons, or else opt for total guilt-free promiscuity, there'd be no more sexual torment.

This above all, to refuse to be a victim. Unless I can do that, I can do nothing. I have to recant, give up the old belief that I am powerless and and because of it nothing I can do will ever hurt anyone. A lie which was always more disastrous than the truth would have been.

Blood is thinner than money.

It is better to journey than to arrive, as long as we journey in firm faith and for selfless ends.

You can see it in her eyes: I am not there. But she exists, in her white dress. She grows and lives. Isn't that a good thing? A blessing? Still, I can't bear it, to have been erased like that.

A faithless preacher with a good manner and voice will always convert more than a limp-handed long-faced fool, no matter how Godly.

Free love," Aunt Beatrice said scornfully. "It's never free. There's always a price.