Quotes from Margaret Atwood

All observations of life are harsh, because life is. I lament that fact, but I cannot change it.

When power is scarce, a little of it is tempting.

It's Paradise, but we can't get out of it. And anything you can't get out of is Hell.

What else can I do? Once you've gone this far you aren't fit for anything else. Something happens to your mind. You're overqualified, overspecialized, and everybody knows it. Nobody in any other game would be crazy enough to hire me. I wouldn't even make a good ditch-digger, I'd start tearing apart the sewer-system, trying to pick-axe and unearth all those chthonic symbols - pipes, valves, cloacal conduits... No, no. I'll have to be a slave in the paper-mines for all time.

Where do the words go when we have said them?

He stops, looks up at this window, and I can see the white oblong of his face. We look at each other. I have no rose to toss, he has no lute. But it's the same kind of hunger.

How were we to know we were happy?

You might even provide a Heaven for them. We need You for that. Hell we can make for ourselves.

Mary: Some call this Eve's curse, but I think that is stupid because the real curse of Eve was having to put up with the nonsense of Adam.

I would like to be without shame. I would like to be shameless. I would like to be ignorant. Then I would not know how ignorant I was.

You refuse to own yourself, you permit others to do it for you

The body is so easily damaged, so easily disposed of, water and chemicals is all it is, hardly more to it than a jellyfish, drying on sand.