Quotes from Margaret Atwood

Though it's hard to concentrate on the idea of a future. She's too immersed in the present:

God works in mysterious ways his wonders to perform, as Reenie used to say. Could it be that Myra is my designated guardian angel? Or is she instead a foretaste of Purgatory? And how do you tell the difference?

If you ask a human being what makes his flesh creep more, a bat or a bomb, he will say the bat. It is difficult to experience loathing for something merely metal, however ominous. We save these sensations for those with skin and flesh: a skin, a flesh, unlike our own.

Nothing. Just that sound, like the sound of starlight scratching its way through outer space: kkkkkkk.

The thing to remember is that there is nothing new about the society depicted in The Handmaid's Tale except the time and place. All of the things I have written about have been done before, more than once.

Gavin has tried quoting Yeats to the effect that women must labour to be beautiful, but Reynolds--who used to be a passionate Yeats fan--is now of the opinion that Yeats is entitled to his point of view, but that was then and social attitudes were different then, and in actual fact Yeats is dead.

Our big mistake was teaching them to read. We won't do that again.

He showed me a little thing, the quantity of a hazel nut, lying in the palm of my hand … as round as any ball. I looked at it and thought, What may this be, and I was answered generally thus: It is all that is made. I marvelled how it might last. For I thought it might fall suddenly to nothing, for little cause; and I was answered in my understanding: It lasts and ever shall, for God loves it. And so has everything its being, through the love of God.

I don't want to be left by myself in this room. The walls are too empty, there are no pictures on them nor curtains on the little high-up window, nothing to look at and so you look at the wall, and after you do that for a time, there are pictures on it after all, and red flowers growing.

A scar is like writing on your body. It tells about something that once happened to you, such as a cut on your skin where blood came out. What

What I miss is what she'd say. What she would have said.

She looks at you as if she really sees you." So many people had looked past me. "I think I'd like that," I said. "No," said Becka. "That's why she's so scary.