"War is what happens when language fails."
— Margaret Atwood

"Don't let the bastards grind you down."
— Margaret Atwood (The Handmaid's Tale)

"Perhaps I write for no one. Perhaps for the same person children are writing for when they scrawl their names in the snow."
— Margaret Atwood

"Another belief of mine; that everyone else my age is an adult, whereas I am merely in disguise."
— Margaret Atwood

"If you knew what was going to happen, if you knew everything that was going to happen next -- if you knew in advance the consequences of your own actions -- you'd be doomed. You'd be ruined as God. You'd be a stone. You'd never eat or drink or laugh or get out of bed in the morning.
You'd never dare to."
— Margaret Atwood (Der blinde Mörder / The Blind Assassin)

"I would like to be the air that inhabits you for a moment only. I would like to be that unnoticed and that necessary."
— Margaret Atwood

"Ignoring isn’t the same as ignorance, you have to work at it."
— Margaret Atwood (The Handmaid's Tale)

"A word after a word after a word is power."
— Margaret Atwood

"I read for pleasure and that is the moment I learn the most."
— Margaret Atwood

"Love blurs your vision; but after it recedes, you can see more clearly than ever. It's like the tide going out, revealing whatever's been thrown away and sunk: broken bottles, old gloves, rusting pop cans, nibbled fishbodies, bones. This is the kind of thing you see if you sit in the darkness with open eyes, not knowing the future. The ruin you've made."
— Margaret Atwood (Cat's Eye)

"In the spring, at the end of the day, you should smell like dirt."
— Margaret Atwood

"Romance takes place in the middle distance. Romance is looking in at yourself through a window clouded with dew. Romance means leaving things out: where life grunts and shuffles, romance only sighs."
— Margaret Atwood

"Falling in love, we said; I fell for him. We were falling women. We believed in it, this downward motion: so lovely, like flying, and yet at the same time so dire, so extreme, so unlikely. God is love, they once said, but we reversed that, and love, like heaven, was always just around the corner. The more difficult it was to love the particular man beside us, the more we believed in Love, abstract and total. We were waiting, always, for the incarnation. That word, made flesh.

And sometimes it happened, for a time. That kind of love comes and goes and is hard to remember afterwards, like pain. You would look at the man one day and you would think, I loved you, and the tense would be past, and you would be filled with a sense of wonder, because it was such an amazing and precarious and dumb thing to have done; and you would know too why your friends had been evasive about it, at the time.

There is a good deal of comfort, now, in remembering this."
— Margaret Atwood (The Handmaid's Tale)

"The only way you can write the truth is to assume that what you set down will never be read. Not by any other person, and not even by yourself at some later date. Otherwise you begin excusing yourself. You must see the writing as emerging like a long scroll of ink from the index finger of your right hand; you must see your left hand erasing it."
— Margaret Atwood (The Blind Assassin)

"And she finds it difficult to believe -- that a person would love her even when she isn't trying. Trying to figure out what other people need, trying to be worthy."
— Margaret Atwood

"Touch comes before sight, before speech. It is the first language and the last, and it always tells the truth."
— Margaret Atwood (Der blinde Mörder / The Blind Assassin)

"You fit into me
like a hook into an eye

a fish hook
an open eye"
— Margaret Atwood

"Wanting to meet an author because you like his work is like wanting to meet a duck because you like paté."
— Margaret Atwood

"The Eskimo has fifty-names for snow because it is important to them; there ought to be as many for love."
— Margaret Atwood

"The true story is vicious and multiple and untrue after all. Why do you need it? Don’t ever ask for the true story."
— Margaret Atwood

"Women have curious ways of hurting someone else. They hurt themselves instead; or else they do it so the guy doesn't even know he's been hurt until much later. Then he finds out. Then his dick falls off."
— Margaret Atwood (Der blinde Mörder / The Blind Assassin)

"Gone mad is what they say, and sometimes, run mad, as if mad is a different direction, like west; as if mad is a different house you could step into, or a separate country entirely. But when you go mad you don't go any other place, you stay where you are. And somebody else comes in."
— Margaret Atwood (Alias Grace)

"Longed for him. Got him. Shit."
— Margaret Atwood

"Siren Song

This is the one song everyone
would like to learn: the song
that is irresistible:

the song that forces men
to leap overboard in squadrons
even though they see beached skulls

the song nobody knows
because anyone who had heard it
is dead, and the others can’t remember.
Shall I tell you the secret
and if I do, will you get me
out of this bird suit?
I don’t enjoy it here
squatting on this island
looking picturesque and mythical
with these two feathery maniacs,
I don’t enjoy singing
this trio, fatal and valuable.

I will tell the secret to you,
to you, only to you.
Come closer. This song

is a cry for help: Help me!
Only you, only you can,
you are unique

at last. Alas
it is a boring song
but it works every time."
— Margaret Atwood

"I don't want to see anyone. I lie in the bedroom with the curtains drawn and nothingness washing over me like a sluggish wave. Whatever is happening to me is my own fault. I have done something wrong, something so huge I can't even see it, something that's drowning me. I am inadequate and stupid, without worth. I might as well be dead."
— Margaret Atwood (Cat's Eye)

"Vanity is becoming a nuisance, I can see why women give it up, eventually. But I'm not ready for that yet."
— Margaret Atwood (Cat's Eye)

"We still think of a powerful man as a born leader and a powerful woman as an anomaly."
— Margaret Atwood

"Forgiving men is so much easier than forgiving women."
— Margaret Atwood (Cat's Eye)

"Old lovers go the way of old photographs, bleaching out gradually as in a slow bath of acid: first the moles and pimples, then the shadings. Then the faces themselves, until nothing remains but the general outlines."
— Margaret Atwood (Cat's Eye)

"Stupidity is the same as evil if you judge by the results."
— Margaret Atwood (Surfacing)

"Knowing too much about other people puts you in their power, they have a claim on you, you are forced to understand their reasons for doing things and then you are weakened."
— Margaret Atwood (Cat's Eye)

"How could I be sleeping with this particular man.... Surely only true love could justify my lack of taste."
— Margaret Atwood (Lady Oracle)

"Cleverness is a quality a man likes to have in his wife as long as she is some distance away from him. Up close, he'll take kindness any day of the week, if there's nothing more alluring to be had."
— Margaret Atwood (The Penelopiad: The Myth of Penelope and Odysseus)

"There is more than one kind of freedom. Freedom to and freedom from. In the days of anarchy, it was freedom to. Now you are being given freedom from. Don't underrate it."
— Margaret Atwood

"This is how the girl who couldn't speak and the man who couldn't see fell in love."
— Margaret Atwood (The Blind Assassin)

"When you're young, you think everything you do is disposable. You move from now to now, crumpling time up in your hands, tossing it away. You're your own speeding car. You think you can get rid of things, and people too - leave them behind. You don't yet know about the habit they have, of coming back.

Time in dreams is frozen. You can never get away from where you've been."
— Margaret Atwood (Der blinde Mörder / The Blind Assassin)

"A truth should exist,
it should not be used
like this. If I love you

is that a fact or a weapon?"
— Margaret Atwood

"Potential has a shelf life."
— Margaret Atwood (Cat's Eye)

"I wonder which is preferable, to walk around all your life swollen up with your own secrets until you burst from the pressure of them, or to have them sucked out of you, every paragraph, every sentence, every word of them, so at the end you're depleted of all that was once as precious to you as hoarded gold, as close to you as your skin - everything that was of the deepest importance to you, everything that made you cringe and wish to conceal, everything that belonged to you alone - and must spend the rest of your days like an empty sack flapping in the wind, an empty sack branded with a bright fluorescent label so that everyone will know what sort of secrets used to be inside you?"
— Margaret Atwood

"The best way of keeping a secret is to pretend there isn't one."
— Margaret Atwood

"We thought we were running away from the grownups, and now we are the grownups."
— Margaret Atwood

"Her glass wings are gone."
— Margaret Atwood (Lady Oracle)

"Never pray for justice, because you might get some."
— Margaret Atwood

"Why is it we want so badly to memorialize ourselves? Even while we're still alive. We wish to assert our existence, like dogs peeing on fire hydrants."
— Margaret Atwood (Der blinde Mörder / The Blind Assassin)

"Today on the way home, it snows. Big, soft caressing flakes fall onto our skin like cold moths; the air fills with feathers."
— Margaret Atwood (Cat's Eye)

"Canadians are fond of a good disaster, especially if it has ice, water, or snow in it. You thought the national flag was about a leaf, didn't you? Look harder. It's where someone got axed in the snow."
— Margaret Atwood

"But who can remember pain, once it’s over? All that remains of it is a shadow, not in the mind even, in the flesh. Pain marks you, but too deep to see. Out of sight, out of mind."
— Margaret Atwood (The Handmaid's Tale)

"No more photos. Surely there are enough. No more shadows of myself thrown by light onto pieces of paper, onto squares of plastic. No more of my eyes, mouths, noses, moods, bad angles. No more yawns, teeth, wrinkles. I suffer from my own multiplicity. Two or three images would have been enough, or four, or five. That would have allowed for a firm idea: This is she. As it is, I'm watery, I ripple, from moment to moment I dissolve into my other selves. Turn the page: you, looking, are newly confused. You know me too well to know me. Or not too well: too much."
— Margaret Atwood (The Tent)

"If we were all on trial for our thoughts, we would all be hanged."
— Margaret Atwood (Alias Grace)

"Was that the beginning, that evening? It's hard to know. Beginnings are sudden, but also insidious. They creep up on you sideways, they keep to the shadows, they lurk unrecognized. Then, later, they spring."
— Margaret Atwood (Der blinde Mörder / The Blind Assassin)