Setting fire to the roofs, getting away with the loot, suiting herself. She studied modern philosophy, read Sartre on the side, smoked Gitanes, and cultivated a look of bored contempt. But inwardly, she was seething with unfocused excitement, and looking for someone to worship.


Margaret Atwood

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I wonder if anyone who needs a snappy song service can really appreciate the meaning of the cross.
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From that time on, the world was hers for the reading. She would never be lonely again, never miss t...
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I bare my soul and you are suspicious! No, Scarlett, this is a bona fide honorable declaration. I ad...
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A divorce is like an amputation: you survive it, but there's less of you.
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An eye for an eye only leads to more blindness.
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If I waited for perfection... I would never write a word.
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When things are really dismal, you can laugh, or you can cave in completely.
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Reading and writing, like everything else, improve with practice. And, of course, if there are no yo...
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When you can't tell the difference between your own pleasure and your pain then you're an addict.
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Once upon a time you could wander around one country, then the next and then maybe you'd go to Engla...
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They've removed anything you can tie a rope to.
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No one knows what cuases an outer landscape to become an inner one.
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Happiness is a garden walled with glass: there's no way in or out. In Paradise there are no stories,...
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Touch comes before sight, before speech. It is the first language and the last, and it always tells ...
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Stupidity is the same as evil if you judge by the results.
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Longed for him. Got him. Shit.
MARGARET ATWOOD
If you knew what was going to happen, if you knew everything that was going to happen next—if you ...
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But who can remember pain, once it’s over? All that remains of it is a shadow, not in the mind eve...
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I would like to be the air that inhabits you for a moment only. I would like to be that unnoticed an...
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I wonder which is preferable, to walk around all your life swollen up with your own secrets until yo...
MARGARET ATWOOD
If i thought this would never happen again I would die.
But this is wrong, nobody dies from lac...
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That was when they suspended the Constitution. They said it would be temporary. There wasn't even an...
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There's an epigram tacked to my office bulletin board, pinched from a magazine -- "Wanting to meet a...
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But remember that forgiveness too is a power. To beg for it is a power, and to withhold or bestow it...
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Water does not resist. Water flows. When you plunge your hand into it, all you feel is a caress. Wat...
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Popular art is the dream of society; it does not examine itself.
MARGARET ATWOOD
The Eskimos had 52 names for snow because it was important to them; there ought to be as many for lo...
MARGARET ATWOOD
A word after a word after a word is power.
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I've never understood why people consider youth a time of freedom and joy. It's probably because the...
MARGARET ATWOOD
She even had a kind of special position among men: she was an exception, she fitted none of the cate...
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Men are not to be told anything they might find too painful; the secret depths of human nature, the ...
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The basic Female body comes with the following accessories: garter belt, panty-girdle, crinoline, ca...
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Never pray for justice, because you might get some.
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If I were going to convert to any religion I would probably choose Catholicism because it at least h...
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I hope that people will finally come to realize that there is only one 'race' - the human race - and...
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A divorce is like an amputation: you survive it, but there's less of you
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Another belief of mine: that everyone else my age is an adult, whereas I am merely in disguise.
MARGARET ATWOOD
War is what happens when language fails.
MARGARET ATWOOD
Miranda nods, because she knows that to be true: noble people don't do things for the money, they si...
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Men are afraid that women will laugh at them. Women are afraid that men will kill them.
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This is how the girl who couldn't speak and the man who couldn't see fell in love.
MARGARET ATWOOD
I'm a strict, strict agnostic. It's very different from a casual, 'I don't know.'...
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Little girls are cute and small only to adults. To one another they are not cute. They are life-size...
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A voice is a human gift; it should be cherished and used, to utter fully human speech as possible. P...
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I hate to tell you this, but you will never actually go to a galaxy far, far away and encounter Dart...
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The answers you get from literature depend on the questions you pose.
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In the spring, at the end of the day, you should smell like dirt.
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I grew up with the biologists. I know how they think.
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I've never bought into any sort of hard and fast, this-box/that-box characterization. People are...
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Was this a betrayal, or was it an act of courage? Perhaps both. Neither one involves forethought: su...
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The genesis of a poem for me is usually a cluster of words. The only good metaphor I can think of is...
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Time is compressed like the fist I close on my knee... I hold inside it the clues and solutions and ...
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They spent the first three years of school getting you to pretend stuff and then the rest of it mark...
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Beginnings are sudden, but also insidious. They creep up on you sideways, they keep to the shadows, ...
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Every aspect of human technology has a dark side, including the bow and arrow.
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Some people mistakenly think nature is very nice and benevolent and never betrays.
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The thing about delirium is you think it's great, but it actually isn't.
MARGARET ATWOOD
We have to rethink our whole energy approach, which is hard to do because we're so dependent on ...
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MARGARET ATWOOD
The truly fearless think of themselves as normal.
MARGARET ATWOOD
Or perhaps she's just softening me up: she's a Baptist, she'd like me to find Jesus, or vice versa, ...
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I don't want to see anyone. I lie in the bedroom with the curtains drawn and nothingness washing ove...
MARGARET ATWOOD
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MARGARET ATWOOD
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MARGARET ATWOOD
The myth that everyone once read great literature is just a myth.
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If you're waiting for the perfect moment, you'll never write a thing because it will never a...
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Debt is part of the human condition. Civilization is based on exchanges - on gifts, trades, loans - ...
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I particularly like Twitter, because it's short and can be very funny and informative. It's ...
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I do have a life,' says Charis, blinking wet eyes.

'You have a rich inner life,' says Ton...
MARGARET ATWOOD
Night falls. Or has fallen. Why is it that night falls, instead of rising, like the dawn?
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No mother is ever, completely, a child's idea of what a mother should be, and I suppose it works the...
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But despite everything, we didn't do badly by one another, we did as well as most. I wish she were h...
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But people will do anything rather than admit that their lives have no meaning. No use, that is. No ...
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Better never means better for everyone... It always means worse, for some.
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There's always something to occupy the inquiring mind.
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Romance takes place in the middle distance. Romance is looking in at yourself through a window cloud...
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Modesty is invisibility...Never forget it. To be seen—to be seen—is to be...penetrated. W...
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In theory I can do almost anything; certainly I have been told how. In practice I do as little as po...
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Sauve qui peut. To survive
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Fatigue is here, in my body, in my legs and eyes. That is what gets you in the end. Faith is only a ...
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Many believed what they were told: that the welfare of the entire kingdom depended on their selfless...
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She did understand, or at least she understood that she was supposed to understand. She understood, ...
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When I am writing fiction, I believe I am much better organized, more methodical - one has to be whe...
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We do like to have such good opinions of our own motives when we're about to do something harmful, t...
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I believe that everyone else my age is an adult whereas I am merely in disguise.
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How could I have been so ignorant? she thinks. So stupid, so unseeing, so given over to carelessness...
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The society in 'The Handmaid's Tale' is a throwback to the early Puritans whom I studied...
MARGARET ATWOOD
You could tell 'The Handmaid's Tale' from a male point of view. People have mistakenly f...
MARGARET ATWOOD
Glenn used to say the reason you can't really imagine yourself being dead was that as soon as you sa...
MARGARET ATWOOD
You want the truth, of course. You want me to put two and two together. But two and two doesn’t ne...
MARGARET ATWOOD
But in the end, back she comes. There's no use resisting. She goes to him for amnesia, for oblivion....
MARGARET ATWOOD
When you're unhinged, things make their way out of you that should be kept inside, and other things ...
MARGARET ATWOOD
Why is it we want so badly to memorialize ourselves? Even while we're still alive. We wish to assert...
MARGARET ATWOOD
It wasn't so easy though, ending the war. A war is a huge fire; the ashes from it drift far, and set...
MARGARET ATWOOD
The young habitually mistake lust for love, they're infested with idealism of all kinds.
MARGARET ATWOOD
I'm not senile," I snapped. "If I burn the house down it will be on purpose.
MARGARET ATWOOD
She knows herself to be at the mercy of events, and she knows by now that events have no mercy.
MARGARET ATWOOD
Why does the mind do such things? Turn on us, rend us, dig the claws in. If you get hungry enough, t...
MARGARET ATWOOD
Why is it we want so badly to memorialize ourselves? Even while we're still alive. We wish to assert...
MARGARET ATWOOD
Home is where the heart is, I thought now, gathering myself together in Betty's Luncheonette. I had ...
MARGARET ATWOOD
Should is a futile word. It's about what didn't happen. It belongs in a parallel universe. It...
MARGARET ATWOOD
What is it the I'll want from you? Not love: that would be too much to ask. Not forgiveness, which i...
MARGARET ATWOOD
There were a lot of gods. Gods always come in handy, they justify almost anything.
MARGARET ATWOOD
Women have curious ways of hurting someone else. They hurt themselves instead; or else they do it so...
MARGARET ATWOOD
Farewells can be shattering, but returns are surely worse. Solid flesh can never live up to the brig...
MARGARET ATWOOD
The only way you can write the truth is to assume that what you set down will never be read. Not by ...
MARGARET ATWOOD
There would be no Sherlock Holmes if it were not for serial publication.
MARGARET ATWOOD
The best way of keeping a secret is to pretend there isn't one.
MARGARET ATWOOD
Anybody who writes a book is an optimist. First of all, they think they're going to finish it. Secon...
MARGARET ATWOOD
Ignoring isn’t the same as ignorance, you have to work at it.
MARGARET ATWOOD
We thought we had such problems. How were we to know we were happy?
MARGARET ATWOOD
The moment of betrayal is the worst, the moment when you know beyond any doubt that you've been betr...
MARGARET ATWOOD
Put yourself in a different room, that's what the mind is for.
MARGARET ATWOOD
The answers you get from literature depend on the questions you pose
MARGARET ATWOOD
I think of this as a democratizing device.
MARGARET ATWOOD
I'm curious. If someone says 'Don't open that door', I'm right there!
MARGARET ATWOOD
The main thing is to keep yourself awake [on writing]
MARGARET ATWOOD
For years I wanted to be older, and now I am.
MARGARET ATWOOD
He's very in depth, on the dark side. He's interested in structure and how things work. After readin...
MARGARET ATWOOD
The Orange prize has been pivotal in the careers of many women writers - it's given them that extra ...
MARGARET ATWOOD
Just think of it as a very, very long pen.
MARGARET ATWOOD
Because I am a mother, I am capable of being shocked; as I never was when I was not one
MARGARET ATWOOD
This above all, to refuse to be a victim.
MARGARET ATWOOD
We thought we were running away from the grownups, and now we are the grownups.
MARGARET ATWOOD
A ratio of failures is built into the process of writing. The wastebasket has evolved for a reason.
MARGARET ATWOOD
Does feminist mean large unpleasant person who'll shout at you or someone who believes women are hum...
MARGARET ATWOOD
They all disowned their parents long ago, the way you are supposed to
MARGARET ATWOOD
You need a certain amount of nerve to be a writer.
MARGARET ATWOOD
Foreignness is all around. Only in the heart of the heart of the country, namely the heart of the Un...
MARGARET ATWOOD
Any death is stupid from the viewpoint of whoever is undergoing it, Adam One used to say, because no...
MARGARET ATWOOD
Also I could hear Amanda’s voice: Why are you being so weak? Love’s never a fair trade. So Jimmy...
MARGARET ATWOOD
I lie on the floor, washed by nothing and hanging on. I cry at night. I am afraid of hearing voices,...
MARGARET ATWOOD
Life is warped. I'm just in sync.
MARGARET ATWOOD
I thought everyone would be familiar with this figure: if I'd studied a thing in school I assumed it...
MARGARET ATWOOD
We were revisionists; what we revised was ourselves.
MARGARET ATWOOD
My parents are like younger, urchinlike brothers and sisters whose faces are dirty and who blurt out...
MARGARET ATWOOD
Now we come to forgiveness. Don't worry about forgiving me right now. There are more important thing...
MARGARET ATWOOD
Our heaven is their hell, said God. I like a balanced universe.
MARGARET ATWOOD
Human tool-makers always make tools that will help us get what we want, and what we want hasn't chan...
MARGARET ATWOOD
She doesn't think it's a good idea to know the future, because you can hardly ever change it, so why...
MARGARET ATWOOD
The possibility of injury or death was a strong attraction: as the online world became more and more...
MARGARET ATWOOD