1,705 Quotes by Margaret Atwood

How did she end up in this madhouse? By putting one foot in front of the other and never taking her eyes off her feet. You could end up anywhere that way.

And if I talk to him, I'll say something wrong, give something away. I can feel it coming, a betrayal of myself.

I’m not used to girls, or familiar with their customs. I feel awkward around them, I don’t know what to say. I know the unspoken rules of boys, but with girls I sense that I am always on the verge of some unforeseen, calamitous blunder.

Sometimes there would be couples, arm in arm—laughing, happy, amorous. Victims of an enormous fraud, and at the same time its perpetrators, or so I felt.

So this was the rest of his life. It felt like a party to which he'd been invited, but at an address he couldn't actually locate. Someone must be having fun at it, this life of his; only, right at the moment, it wasn't him.

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 concerned tucked, like tired children, so neatly into their graves?

I am a believer in sensible choices, so different from many of my own. Also in sensible names for children.

And the vampires. You used to know where you stood with them – smelly, evil, undead – but now there are virtuous vampires and disreputable vampires, and sexy vampires and glittery vampires, and none of the old rules about them are true any more. Once you could depend on garlic, and on the rising sun, and on crucifixes. You could get rid of the vampires once and for all. But not any more.

What should I take? Something that will not be missed. In the wood at midnight, a magic flower.