1,705 Quotes by Margaret Atwood

She is over sixty, her mind's made up.

This thing I'm doing can hardly be called living. Instead I'm lying dormant, like a bacterium in a glacier. Getting time over with. That's all.

In the desert there is no sign that says, 'Thou shalt not eat stones.

They say, Grace, why don’t you ever smile or laugh, we never see you smiling, and I say I suppose Miss I have gotten out of the way of it, my face won’t bend in that direction any more.

Alone among the animals, we suffer from the future perfect tense.

Hang on to the words," he tells himself. The odd words, the old words, the rare ones. Valance. Norn. Serendipity. Pibroch. Lubricious. When they're gone out of his head, these words, they'll be gone, everywhere, forever. As if they had never been.

Was she in any way like us? thinks Tony. Or, to put it the other way around: Are we in any way like her?

It's simple,' Kat told them. 'You bombard them with images of what they ought to be, and you make them feel grotty for being the way they are. You're working with the gap between reality and perception. That's why you have to hit them with something new, something they've never seen before, something they aren't. Nothing sells like anxiety.

Stupidity is the same as evil if you judge by the results.