The Heart Goes Last Quotes

“The past is so much safer, because whatever's in it has already happened. It can't be changed; so, in a way, there's nothing to dread.”
― Margaret Atwood, The Heart Goes Last

“If you do bad things for reasons you’ve been told are good, does it make you a bad person?”
― Margaret Atwood, The Heart Goes Last

“Oblivion is increasingly attractive to the young, and even to the middle-aged, since why retain your brain when no amount of thinking can even begin to solve the problem?”
― Margaret Atwood, The Heart Goes Last

“How dare she show herself to be everything he was so annoyed with her for not being?”
― Margaret Atwood, The Heart Goes Last

“You want your decisions taken away from you so you won’t be responsible for your own actions?”
― Margaret Atwood, The Heart Goes Last

“Don't cry anymore, she tells herself. Just do one thing at a time. Get from hour to hour and day to day like a frog jumping on lily pads.”
― Margaret Atwood, The Heart Goes Last

“That way nobody feels exploited.”
“Wait a minute,” says Stan. “Nobody’s exploited?”
“I said nobody feels exploited,” says Budge. “Different thing.”
― Margaret Atwood, The Heart Goes Last

“Looking back on his life, he sees himself spread out on the earth like a giant covered in tiny threads that have held him down. Tiny threads of petty cares and small concerns, and fears he took seriously at the time. Debts, timetables, the need for money, the longing for comfort; the earworm of sex, repeating itself over and over like a neural feedback loop. He’s been the puppet of his own constricted desires.”
― Margaret Atwood, The Heart Goes Last

“She gives him an LED smile: light, but no heat.”
― Margaret Atwood, The Heart Goes Last

“She’s been a distraction for him, but not a necessity of life. More like a super-strong mint: intense while it lasted but quickly finished.”
― Margaret Atwood, The Heart Goes Last

“Nothing is ever settled,” says Jocelyn. “Every day is different. Isn’t it better to do something because you’ve decided to? Rather than because you have to?”
― Margaret Atwood, The Heart Goes Last

“She's been a distraction for him, but not a necessity of life. More like a super-strong mint: intense while it lasted, but quickly finished.”
― Margaret Atwood, The Heart Goes Last

“Being upset is a warmer, close-up feeling, not a chilly distant feeling like laughing at people.”
― Margaret Atwood, The Heart Goes Last

“Powerful but insecure men don’t take well to rejection. Rage could result.”
― Margaret Atwood, The Heart Goes Last

“That was the original idea, but once you’ve got a controlled population with a wall around it and no oversight, you can do anything you want.”
― Margaret Atwood, The Heart Goes Last

“Because citizens were always a bit like inmates and inmates were always a bit like citizens, so Consilience and Positron have only made it official.”
― Margaret Atwood, The Heart Goes Last

“I don’t think they’ll ever replace the living and breathing,” says Gary. “They said that about e-books,” says Kevin. “You can’t stop progress.”
― Margaret Atwood, The Heart Goes Last

“Maybe she herself is a kind of fatal woman, like Marilyn Monroe in Niagara, with invisible spider webs coming out of her, entangling men because they can't help it, and the spider can't help it either because it's her nature. Maybe she's doomed to be sticky.”
― Margaret Atwood, The Heart Goes Last

“Chemistry can be like magic. It can be merciless.”
― Margaret Atwood, The Heart Goes Last

“Maybe all women should be robots, he thinks with a tinge of acid: the flesh-and-blood ones are out of control.”
― Margaret Atwood, The Heart Goes Last

“Here comes his hand, planing slowly across the white tablecloth like a manta ray in one of those deep-sea documentaries. It's descending onto her own hand, which she shouldn't have left so carelessly lying around on the table.”
― Margaret Atwood, The Heart Goes Last

“Don't cry any more, she tells herself. Just do one thing at a time. Get from hour to hour and day to day like a frog jumping lily pads.”
― Margaret Atwood, The Heart Goes Last

“Men don’t like to think about makeup, they like to think everything about you is genuine. Unless of course they want to think you’re a slut and everything about you is fake.”
― Margaret Atwood, The Heart Goes Last

“He can’t shake the feeling that this place is some sort of pyramid scheme, and that those who fail to understand that will be left empty-handed. But there’s no obvious reason for this feeling of his. Maybe he’s ungrateful by nature.”
― Margaret Atwood, The Heart Goes Last

“At first the solution was to build more prisons and cram more people into them, but that soon became prohibitively expensive. (Here Ed flicks through a few more slides.) Not only that, it resulted in platoons of prison graduates with professional-grade criminal skills they were more than willing to exercise once they were back in the outside world.”
― Margaret Atwood, The Heart Goes Last

“Is that all we are? he thinks. Unmistakable clothing, a hairstyle, a few exaggerated features, a gesture? —”
― Margaret Atwood, The Heart Goes Last

“Other women – women in the past, tougher women – have dealt with babies in confined spaces, such as ocean ships and covered wagons. But maybe not cars. It’s hard to get smells out of car upholstery, so you’d have to be extra careful about the spitting up and so forth. —”
― Margaret Atwood, The Heart Goes Last

“With no orders to follow, she occupies her mind by painting her nails, which is a very soothing thing to do when you’re anxious and keyed up. Some people like to throw objects, such as glasses of water or rocks, but nail painting is more positive. If more world leaders would take it up there would be less overall suffering, in her opinion.”
― Margaret Atwood, The Heart Goes Last

“The past is so much safer, because whatever’s in it has already happened. It can’t be changed; so, in a way, there’s nothing to dread.”
― Margaret Atwood, The Heart Goes Last

“I’M STARVED FOR YOU”
― Margaret Atwood, The Heart Goes Last