Quotes by Margaret Atwood

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

“By now you must have guessed: I come from another planet. But I will never say to you, Take me to your leaders. Even I - unused to your ways though I am - would never make that mistake. We ourselve...”

“This is what I miss, Cordelia: not something thats gone, but something that will never happen. Two old women giggling over their tea.”

“The only way you can write the truth is to assume that what you set down will never be read. Not by any other person, and not even by yourself at some later date. Otherwise you begin excusing yours...”

“The truth is seldom welcome, especially at dinner.”

“I don't smile. Why tempt her to friendship?”

“She can outstare anyone, and I am almost as good. Were impervious, we scintillate, we are thirteen. We wear long wool coats with tie belts, the collars turned up to look like those of movie stars, ...”

“Of course (said Oryx), having a money value was no substitute for love. Every child should have love, every person should have it. . . . but love was undependable, it came and then it went, so it w...”

“They were new money, without a doubt: so new it shrieked. Their clothes looked as it they'd covered themselves in glue, then rolled around in hundred-dollar bills.”

“I feel despised there, for having so little money; also for once having had so much. I never actually had it, of course. Father had it, and then Richard. But money was imputed to me, the same way c...”

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

“Perhaps its not the world that is soundless but we who are deaf.”

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

“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 tha...”

“War is what happens when language fails.”

“The heart with letters on it shining like a light bulb through the trim hole painted in the chest, art history.”

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

“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.”

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

“It wasn't so easy though, ending the war. A war is a huge fire; the ashes from it drift far, and settle slowly.”