Margaret Atwood Quotes - Page 5

Every month there is a moon, gigantic, round, heavy, an omen. IT transits, pauses, continues on and passes out of sight, and I see despair coming towards me like famine. To feel that empty, again, again. I listen to my heart, wave upon wave, salty and red, continuing on and on, marking time.

I lie on the floor, washed by nothing and hanging on. I cry at night. I am afraid of hearing voices, or a voice. I have come to the edge, of the land. I could get pushed over.

Modesty is invisibility...Never forget it. To be seen - to be seen - is to be...penetrated. What you must be girls, is impenetrable.

We have learned to see the world in gasps.

Every budding dictatorship begins by muzzling the artists, because they're a mouthy lot and they don't line up and salute very easily.

I read for pleasure and that is the moment I learn the most.

The answers you get from literature depend on the questions you pose.

Gavin has tried quoting Yeats to the effect that women must labour to be beautiful, but Reynolds-who used to be a passionate Yeats fan-is now of the opinion that Yeats is entitled to his point of view, but that was then and social attitudes were different then, and in actual fact Yeats is dead.

The beauty is an illusion, and also a warning: there's a dark side to beauty, as with poisonous butterflies.

Can I be blamed for wanting a real body, to put my arms around? Without it I too am disembodied. I can listen to my own heartbeat against the bedsprings...but there’s something dead about it, something deserted.

Sex is like a drink, it's bad to start brooding about it too early in the day.

Even sex was no longer what it had once been, though he was still as addicted to it as ever. He felt jerked around by his own dick, as if the rest of him was merely an inconsequential knob that happened to be attached to one end of it. Maybe the thing would be happier if left to roam around on its own.

A bachelor, a studio, those were the names for that kind of apartment. Separate entrance it would say in the ads, and that meant you could have sex, unobserved.

Nobody wanted to be sexless, but nobody wanted to be nothing but sex.

Not that it isn't great to see you. But it's not so great for you. What'd you do wrong? Laugh at his dick?

Condoms seemed to her inherently wicked. But they were also inherently funny. They were like rubber gloves with only one finger, and every time she saw one she had to be severe with herself or she’d get the giggles, a terrifying thought because the man might think you were laughing at him, at his dick, at its size, and that would be fatal.

In the spring, at the end of the day, you should smell like dirt.

Nature is to zoos as God is to churches.

Nature is an expert in cost-benefit analysis,' she says. 'Although she does her accounting a little differently. As for debts, she always collects in the long run...

As Charles Darwin said,'The economy shown by Nature in her resources is striking,'' says the Spirit. 'All wealth comes from Nature. Without it, there wouldn't be any economics. The primary wealth is food, not money. Therefore anything that concerns the handling of the land also concerns me.