1,705 Quotes by Margaret Atwood

She's just jealous, people say, as if jealousy is something minor. But it's not, it's the worst, it's the worst feeling there is - incoherent and confused and shameful, and at the same time self-righteous and focused and hard as glass, like a view through a telescope. A feeling of total concentration, but total powerlessness.

Some people write letters, in the library.

We can’t remember what it is that we’ve forgotten. That we have been made to forget.

How shrunk, how dwindled, in our timesCreation's mighty seed -For Man has broke the FellowshipWith murder, lust, and greed.

He will exist for her at least, he will be created by her, he will have a place in her mythology after all.

She finds this objectivity of hers, this clarity, almost more depressing than she can bear, not because there is anything hideous or repellant about this man but because he has now returned to the ordinary level, the level of things she can see, in all their amazing and complex particularity, but cannot touch.

The door of Reverend Verringer’s impressive manse is opened by an elderly female with a face like a pine plank; the Reverend is unmarried, and has need of an irreproachable housekeeper. Simon is ushered into the library. It is so self-consciously the right sort of library that he has an urge to set fire to it.

The fact is that I hate this city. I've hated it so long I can hardly remember feeling any other way about it.

Touch comes before sight, before speech. It is the first language and the last, and it always tells the truth.