Quotes by Margaret Atwood

“The Chorus Line:A Rope-Jumping Rhymewe are the maidsthe ones you killedthe ones you failedwe danced in airour bare feet twitchedit was not fairwith every goddess, queen, and bitchfrom there to here...”

“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 o...”

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

“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 theres something dead about it, someth...”

“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.”

“Heroes need monsters to establish their heroic credentials. You need something scary to overcome.”

“Could it be he was feeling a certain nostalgia for the war, despite its stench and meaningless carnage? For that questionless life of instinct?”

“How did the war creep up? How did it gather itself together? What was it made from? What secrets, lies, betrayals? What loves and hatreds? What sums of money, what metals?”

“We understand more than we know.”

“When you're young, you think everything you do is disposable. You move from now to now, crumpling time up in your hands, tossing it away. You're your own speeding car. You think you can get rid of ...”

“But my dreaming self refuses to be consoled. It continues to wander, aimless, homeless, alone. It cannot be convinced of its safety by any evidence drawn from my waking life.”

“We ate the birds. We ate them. We wanted their songs to flow up through our throats and burst out of our mouths, and so we ate them. We wanted their feathers to bud from our flesh. We wanted their ...”

“In my dreams of this city I am always lost.”

“Expand your world. (Stories about wizards and spells) are very frequently about power relationships...”

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

“In the daylight we knowwhats gone is gone,but at night its different.Nothing gets finished,not dying, not mourning;”

“from under the ground, from under the waters,they clutch at us, they clutch at us,we wont let go.”

“There is more than one kind of freedom," said Aunt Lydia. "Freedom to and freedom from. In the days of anarchy, it was freedom to. Now you are being given freedom from. Don't underrate it.”

“You fit into melike a hook into an eyea fish hookan open eye”

“The sun is free, it is still there to be enjoyed.”