Margaret Atwood Quotes - Page 2

The whole world is now one vast uncontrollable experiment - the way it always was, Crake would have said - and the doctrine of unintended consequences is in full spate.

Hatred would have been easier. With hatred, I would have known what to do. Hatred is clear, metallic, one-handed, unwavering; unlike love.

The Eskimo has fifty-names for snow because it is important to them; there ought to be as many for love.

If I love you, is that a fact or a weapon?

This is how the girl who couldn't speak and the man who couldn't see fell in love.

Nobody dies from the lack of sex. It's lack of love we die from.

A home filled with nothing but yourself. It's heavy, that lightness. It's crushing, that emptiness.

Potential has a shelf life.

Time folds you in its arms and gives you one last kiss, and then it flattens you out and folds you up and tucks you away until it's time for you to become someone else's past time, and then time folds again.

Don't let the bastards grind you down.

So much for endings. Beginnings are always more fun. True connoisseurs, however, are known to favor the stretch in between, since it's the hardest to do anything with. That's about all that can be said for plots, which anyway are just one thing after another, a what and a what and a what.

The truth is seldom welcome, especially at dinner.

It must have been then that I began to lose faith in reasonable argument as the sole measure of truth.

[H]aving a money value was no substitute for love.

A Paradox, the doughnut hole. Empty space, once, but now they've learned to market even that. A minus quantity; nothing, rendered edible. I wondered if they might be used-metaphorically, of course-to demonstrate the existence of God. Does naming a sphere of nothingness transmute it into being?

Setting fire to the roofs, getting away with the loot, suiting herself. She studied modern philosophy, read Sartre on the side, smoked Gitanes, and cultivated a look of bored contempt. But inwardly, she was seething with unfocused excitement, and looking for someone to worship.

We understand more than we know.

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

Truly amazing, what people can get used to, as long as there are a few compensations.

There I am, in the Grade Six class picture, smiling broadly. Happy as a clam, is what my mother says for happy. I am happy as a clam: hardshelled, firmly closed.