Margaret Atwood Quotes - Page 4

So we couldn't mingle with them, but we could eavesdrop. We got our knowledge that way-we caught it like germs.

Ignoring isn’t the same as ignorance, you have to work at it.

Better not to invent her in her absence. Better to wait until she's actually here. Then he can make her up as she goes along.

God is a cluster of neurons.

Fatigue is here, in my body, in my legs and eyes. That is what gets you in the end. Faith is only a word, embroidered.

By telling you anything at all I'm at least believing in you, I believe you're there, I believe you into being. Because I'm telling you this story I will your existence. I tell, therefore you are.

Perhaps they were looking for passion; perhaps they delved into this book as into a mysterious parcel - a gift box at the bottom of which, hidden in layers of rustling tissue paper, lay something they'd always longed for but couldn't ever grasp.

These things sneak up on him for no reason, these flashes of irrational happiness. It's probably a vitamin deficiency.

I always thought eating was a ridiculous activity anyway. I'd get out of it myself if I could, though you've got to do it to stay alive, they tell me.

Her metaphors for her children included barnacles encrusting a ship and limpets clinging to a rock.

Here's a health to our Captain, so gallant and free
Whether stuck on a rock or asleep 'neath a tree
Or rolled in the arms of some nymph of the sea
Which is where we would all like to be, man!

I used to jog but it’s bad for the knees. Too much beta carotene
turns you orange, too much calcium gives you kidney stones. Health kills.

I already told you,” said Adam. “There is no need to swear.”
“Sorry, it just fucking slipped out,” said Zeb.

He has to find more and better ways of occupying his time. His time, what a bankrupt idea, as if he's been given a box of time belonging to him alone, stuffed to the brim with hours and minutes that he can spend like money. Trouble is, the box has holes in it and the time is running out, no matter what he does with it.

Time is not a line but a dimension, like the dimensions of space. If you can bend space you can bend time also, and if you knew enough and could move faster than light you could travel backward in tie and exist in two places at once.

Time: old cold time, old sorrow, settling down in layers like silt in a pond.

Change can be accommodated by any system depending on its rate, Crake used to say. Touch your head to a wall, nothing happens, but if the same head hits the wall at ninety miles an hour, it's red paint. We're in a speed tunnel, Jimmy. When the water's moving faster than the boat, you can't control a thing.

Time in dreams is frozen. You can never get away from where you've been.

I and the girl in the picture have ceased to be the same person. I am her outcome, the result of the life she once lived headlong; whereas she, if she can be said to exist at all, is composed only of what I remember. I have the better view - I can see her clearly, most of the time. But even if she knew enough to look, she can't see me at all.

There are tenses that define us now: past tense, back then; future tense, not yet. We live in the small window between them, the space we've only recently come to think as still, and really its no smaller than anyone else's window.