1,705 Quotes by Margaret Atwood

Where were we? I've forgotten. He was deciding whether to cut her throat or love her forever.Right. Yes. The usual choices.

Luke was not the first man for me, and he might not have been the last. If he hadn't been frozen that way. Stopped dead in time, in midair, among the trees back there, in the act of falling.

They seemed to be able to choose. We seemed to be able to choose, then. We were a society dying of too much choice.

Also she went in for culture, which gave her a certain moral authority. It wouldn't now; but people believed, then, that culture could make you better - a better person. They believed it could uplift you, or the women believed it. They hadn't yet seen Hitler at the opera house.

I didn't much like it, this grudge-holding against the past.

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.

He wants to see, he wants to know, only to see and know. I'm aware that it is this mentality, this curiosity, which is responsible for the hydrogen bomb and the imminent demise of civilization and that we would all be better off if we were still at the stone-worshipping stage. Though surely it is not this affable inquisitiveness that should be blamed.

Madness is only an amplification of what you already are.

I don't smile. Why tempt her to friendship?