Quotes by Margaret Atwood

“Kill what you can't savewhat you can't eat throw outwhat you can't throw out buryWhat you can't bury give awaywhat you can't give away you must carry with you,it is always heavier than you thought.”

“I know why there is no glass, in front of the watercolor picture of blue irises, and why the window opens only partly and why the glass in it is shatter-proof. It isn't running away they're afraid ...”

“Where do the words gowhen we have said them?”

“According to Adam One, the Fall of Man was multidimensional. The ancestral primates fell out of the trees; then they fell from vegetarianism into meat-eating. Then they fell from instinct into reas...”

“Men are afraid that women will laugh at them. Women are afraid that men will kill them.”

“All you have to do, I tell myself, is keep your mouth shut and look stupid. It shouldn't be that hard.”

“with shrunken fingerswe ate our oranges and bread,shivering in the parked car;though we know we had neverbeen there before,we knew we had been there before.”

“She was not stunned, the way I was. In some strange way she was gleeful, as if this was what she had been expecting for some time and now she'd been proven right.”

“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.”

“Then there's the twoof us. This wordis far too short for us, it has onlyfour letters, too sparseto fill those deep barevacuums between the starsthat press on us with their deafness.It's not love we...”

“SPRING POEMIt is spring, my decision, the earthferments like rising breador refuse, we are burninglast year's weeds, the smokeflares from the road, the clumped stalksglow like sluggish phoenixes / ...”

“I guess that's how they were able to do it, in the way they did, all at once, without anyone knowing beforehand. If there had still been portable money, it would have been more difficult. "It was a...”

“There's just one thing I want you to remember. You know those chemicals women have in them, when they've got PMS? Well, men have the very same chemicals in them all the time.”

“In the old days, trouble was kept in the family, which is still the best place for it, not that there's ever a best place for trouble. Why stir everything up again after that many years, with all c...”

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

“He was a dork, a dink, a dong Why should the male member be used as a term of abuse? No man hated his own dorkdinkdong, quite the opposite. But maybe it was an affront that any other man had one. T...”

“I don't want a man around, what use are they except for ten seconds' worth of half babies”

“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.”

“Lambhood and tigerishness may be found in either gender, and in the same individual at different times.”