Quotes from Margaret Atwood

Still, I wanted to believe; indeed I longed to; and, in the end, how much of belief comes from longing?

We shouldn't have been so scornful; we should have had compassion. But compassion takes work, and we were young.

I would never blame a human creature for feeling lonely.

Amazing how the heart clutches at anything familiar, whimpering Mine!Mine!

What you don't know won't hurt you. A dubious maxim: sometimes what you don't know can hurt you very much.

Ill take care of it, Luke said. And because he said it instead of her, I knew it meant kill. That is what you have to do before you kill, I thought. You have to create an it, where none was before. You do that first, in your head, and then you make it real. So thats how they do it, I thought. I seemed never to have known that before.

Some days I do appreciate things more, eggs, flowers, but then I decide I'm only having an attack of sentimentality, my brain going pastel Technicolor, like a beautiful-sunset greeting cards they used to make so many of in California. High-gloss hearts. The danger is grayout.

All Creatures know that some must die That all the rest may take and eat; Sooner or later, all transform Their blood to wine, their flesh to meat. But Man alone seeks Vengefulness, And writes his abstract Laws on stone; For this false Justice he has made, He tortures limb and crushes bone. Is this the image of a god? My tooth for yours, your eye for mine? Oh, if Revenge did move the stars Instead of Love, they would not shine.

She said love was useless, because it led you into dumb exchanges in which you gave too much away, and then you got bitter and mean.

Messy love is better than none, I guess. I am no authority on sane living.

I marvel again at the nakedness of men's lives: the showers right out in the open, the body exposed for inspection and comparison, the public display of privates. What is it for? What purposes of reassurance does it serve? The flashing of a badge, look, everyone, all is in order, I belong here. Why don't women have to prove to one another that they are women? Some form of unbuttoning, some split-crotch routine, just as casual. A doglike sniffing.

Eating Fire Eating fire is your ambition: to swallow the flame down take it into your mouth and shoot it forth, a shout or an incandescent tongue, a word exploding from you in gold, crimson, unrolling in a brilliant scroll To be lit up from within vein by vein To be the sun