Margaret Atwood Quotes - Page 3

Romance takes place in the middle distance. Romance is looking in at yourself through a window clouded with dew. Romance means leaving things out: where life grunts and shuffles, romance only sighs.

Neither of us says the word love, not once. It would be tempting fate; it would be romance, bad luck.

I was taking something away from her, although she didn't know it. I was filching. Never mind that it was something she apparently didn't want or had no use for, had rejected even; still, it was hers, and if I took it away, this mysterious "it" I couldn't quite define.

I planned my death carefully, unlike my life, which meandered along from one thing to another, despite my feeble attempts to control it.

One of the gravestones in the cemetery near the earliest church has an anchor on it and an hourglass, and the words In Hope.

In Hope. Why did they put that above a dead person? Was it the corpse hoping, or those still alive?

Glenn used to say the reason you can't really imagine yourself being dead was that as soon as you say, 'I'll be dead,' you've said the word I, and so you're still alive inside the sentence. And that's how people got the idea of the immortality of the soul - it was a consequence of grammar.

If you really want to stay the same age you are now forever and ever, she'd be thinking, try jumping off the roof: death's a sure-fire method for stopping time.

The reason they invented coffins, to lock the dead in, preserve them, they put makeup on them; they didn't want them spreading or changing into anything else. The stone with the name and date was on them to weight them down.

Via the conduit of a wild dog pack, she has now made the ultimate Gift to her fellow Creatures, and has become part of God's great dance of proteins.

There were a lot of gods. Gods always come in handy, they justify almost anything.

Our heaven is their hell, said God. I like a balanced universe.

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

We yearned for the future. How did we learn it, that talent for insatiability?

...we must be a beacon of hope, because if you tell people there's nothing they can do, they will do worse than nothing.

As a species we're doomed by hope, then?

You could call it hope. That, or desperation.

But we're doomed without hope, as well, said Jimmy.

Only as individuals, said Crake cheerfully.

You fit into me
like a hook into an eye

a fish hook
an open eye

with shrunken fingers
we ate our oranges and bread,
shivering in the parked car;

though we know we had never
been there before,
we knew we had been there before.

If you knew what was going to happen, if you knew everything that was going to happen next - if you knew in advance the consequences of your own actions - you'd be doomed. You'd be ruined as God. You'd be a stone. You'd never eat or drink or laugh or get out of bed in the morning. You'd never love anyone, ever again. You'd never dare to.

Maybe I don't really want to know what's going on. Maybe I'd rather not know. Maybe I couldn't bear to know. The Fall was a fall from innocence to knowledge.

Knowing was a temptation. What you don't know won't tempt you.