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Margaret Atwood Quotes

Margaret Atwood quote from classy quote

I would like to be the air that inhabits you for a moment only. I would like to be that unnoticed and that necessary.

~ Margaret Atwood

Margaret Atwood Love Obsession Sleep

Falling in love, we said; I fell for him. We were falling women. We believed in it, this downward motion: so lovely, like flying, and yet at the same time so dire, so extreme, so unlikely. God is love, they once said, but we reversed that, and love, like heaven, was always just around the corner. The more difficult it was to love the particular man beside us, the more we believed in Love, abstract and total. We were waiting, always, for the incarnation. That word, made flesh.And sometimes it happened, for a time. That kind of love comes and goes and is hard to remember afterwards, like pain. You would look at the man one day and you would think, I loved you, and the tense would be past, and you would be filled with a sense of wonder, because it was such an amazing and precarious and dumb thing to have done; and you would know too why your friends had been evasive about it, at the time.There is a good deal of comfort, now, in remembering this.

~ Margaret Atwood

Margaret Atwood Love

How could I be sleeping with this particular man.... Surely only true love could justify my lack of taste.

~ Margaret Atwood

Margaret Atwood Humor Love Relationships

A truth should exist,it should not be usedlike this. If I love youis that a fact or a weapon?

~ Margaret Atwood

Margaret Atwood Love Poetry Truth

Hatred would have been easier. With hatred, I would have known what to do. Hatred is clear, metallic, one-handed, unwavering; unlike love.

~ Margaret Atwood

Margaret Atwood Hatred Love

Love blurs your vision; but after it recedes, you can see more clearly than ever. It's like the tide going out, revealing whatever's been thrown away and sunk: broken bottles, old gloves, rusting pop cans, nibbled fishbodies, bones. This is the kind of thing you see if you sit in the darkness with open eyes, not knowing the future. The ruin you've made.

~ Margaret Atwood

Margaret Atwood Love

How could I have been so ignorant? she thinks. So stupid, so unseeing, so given over to carelessness. But without such ignorance, such carelessness, how could we live? If you knew what was going to happen, if you knew everything that was going to happen next—if you knew in advance the consequences of your own actions—you'd be doomed. You'd be as ruined as God. You'd be a stone. You'd never eat or drink or laugh or get out of bed in the morning. You'd never love anyone, ever again. You'd never dare to.

~ Margaret Atwood

Margaret Atwood Carelessness Despair Ignorance Insight Loneliness Love Sorrow Wisdom

She imagines him imagining her. This is her salvation.In spirit she walks the city, traces its labyrinths, its dingy mazes: each assignation, each rendezvous, each door and stair and bed. What he said, what she said, what they did, what they did then. Even the times they argued, fought, parted, agonized, rejoined. How they’d loved to cut themselves on each other, taste their own blood. We were ruinous together, she thinks. But how else can we live, these days, except in the midst of ruin?

~ Margaret Atwood

Margaret Atwood Chaos Loss Love Lovers

This is how the girl who couldn't speak and the man who couldn't see fell in love.

~ Margaret Atwood

Margaret Atwood Blind Love See Speak

What is it the I'll want from you? Not love: that would be too much to ask. Not forgiveness, which isn't yours to bestow. Only a listener, perhaps; only someone who will see me. Don't prettify me though, whatever else you do: I have no wish to be a decorated skull. But I leave myself in your hands. What choice do I have? By the time you read this last page, that- if anywhere- is the only place I will be.

~ Margaret Atwood

Margaret Atwood Forgiveness Last Page Love The Threshold

If I love you, is that a fact or a weapon?

~ Margaret Atwood

Margaret Atwood Love

A home filled with nothing but yourself. It's heavy, that lightness. It's crushing, that emptiness.

~ Margaret Atwood

Margaret Atwood Home Life

Potential has a shelf life.

~ Margaret Atwood

Margaret Atwood Life Potential

Time folds you in its arms and gives you one last kiss, and then it flattens you out and folds you up and tucks you away until it's time for you to become someone else's past time, and then time folds again.

~ Margaret Atwood

Margaret Atwood Life Time

Don't let the bastards grind you down.

~ Margaret Atwood

Margaret Atwood Inspirational

So much for endings. Beginnings are always more fun. True connoisseurs, however, are known to favor the stretch in between, since it's the hardest to do anything with. That's about all that can be said for plots, which anyway are just one thing after another, a what and a what and a what.

~ Margaret Atwood

Margaret Atwood Happy Endings Inspirational Literature

A Paradox, the doughnut hole. Empty space, once, but now they've learned to market even that. A minus quantity; nothing, rendered edible. I wondered if they might be used-metaphorically, of course-to demonstrate the existence of God. Does naming a sphere of nothingness transmute it into being?

~ Margaret Atwood

Margaret Atwood Food Marketing Philosophy Religion

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 ourselves have such beings among us, made of cogs, pieces of paper, small disks of shiny metal, scraps of coloured cloth. I do not need to encounter more of them.Instead I will say, Take me to your trees. Take me to your breakfasts, your sunsets, your bad dreams, your shoes, your nouns. Take me to your fingers; take me to your deaths.These are worth it. These are what I have come for.

~ Margaret Atwood

Margaret Atwood Alien Death Dreams Life Philosophy Sf

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 yourself. You must see the writing as emerging like a long scroll of ink from the index finger of your right hand; you must see your left hand erasing it.

~ Margaret Atwood

Margaret Atwood Truth Writing

The truth is seldom welcome, especially at dinner.

~ Margaret Atwood

Margaret Atwood Truth

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

~ Margaret Atwood

Margaret Atwood Truth

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

~ Margaret Atwood

Margaret Atwood Dogma Extremism Fanaticism God Inhumanity Justification Religion

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

~ Margaret Atwood

Margaret Atwood Balance God Heaven Hell

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

~ Margaret Atwood

Margaret Atwood God Heaven Hell

We understand more than we know.

~ Margaret Atwood

Margaret Atwood Knowledge Science Understanding Wisdom

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

~ Margaret Atwood

Margaret Atwood Compassion Wisdom Youth

Truly amazing, what people can get used to, as long as there are a few compensations.

~ Margaret Atwood

Margaret Atwood Happiness Human Nature Psychology Social Commentary

Neither of us says the word love, not once. It would be tempting fate; it would be romance, bad luck.

~ Margaret Atwood

Margaret Atwood Love Romance

I was taking something away from her, although she didn't know it. I was filching. Never mind that it was something she apparently didn't want or had no use for, had rejected even; still, it was hers, and if I took it away, this mysterious it I couldn't quite define.

~ Margaret Atwood

Margaret Atwood Love Romance

We yearned for the future. How did we learn it, that talent for insatiability?

~ Margaret Atwood

Margaret Atwood Future Hope Insatiability

One of the gravestones in the cemetery near the earliest church has an anchor on it and an hourglass, and the words In Hope.In Hope. Why did they put that above a dead person? Was it the corpse hoping, or those still alive?

~ Margaret Atwood

Margaret Atwood Death Hope

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

~ Margaret Atwood

Margaret Atwood Hope

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

~ Margaret Atwood

Margaret Atwood Death

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 that's how people got the idea of the immortality of the soul - it was a consequence of grammar.

~ Margaret Atwood

Margaret Atwood Death Grammar Immortality

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.

~ Margaret Atwood

Margaret Atwood Death Youth

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 hereyou scratched your itchwe did much lessthan what you didyou judged us badyou had the spearyou had the wordat your commandwe scrubbed the bloodof our deadparamours from floors, from chairsfrom stairs, from doors,we knelt in waterwhile you staredat our bare feetit was not fairyou licked our fearit gave you pleasureyou raised your handyou watched us fallwe danced on airthe ones you failedthe ones you killed

~ Margaret Atwood

Margaret Atwood Death

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 on them to weight them down.

~ Margaret Atwood

Margaret Atwood Death

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.

~ Margaret Atwood

Margaret Atwood Death

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.

~ Margaret Atwood

Margaret Atwood Burden Poetry Weight

Where do the words gowhen we have said them?

~ Margaret Atwood

Margaret Atwood Poetry Words
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