Margaret Atwood

“If writing novels - and reading them - have any redeeming social value, it's probably that they force you to imagine what it's like to be somebody else. Which increasingly is something we all need to know.”

“Men and women tried each other on, casually, like suits, rejecting whatever did not fit.”

“The Eskimo has fifty-names for snow because it is important to them there ought to be as many for love.”

“When I was 16, I started publishing all kinds of things in school magazines.”

“I grew up with the biologists. I know how they think.”

“If one of the arguments against eating meat is to do with cruelty and animal intelligence, then lab meat avoids that. There's also the environmental argument for it.”

“We shouldn't be saying 'Save the planet'; we should be saying: 'Save viable conditions in which people can live.' That's what we're dealing with here.”

“Once upon a time, novelists of the 19th century, such as Charles Dickens, published in serial form.”

“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?”

“He was a dork, a dink, a dong… Why should the male member be used as a term of abuse? No man hated his own dorkdinkdong, quite the opposite. But maybe it was an affront that any other man had one. That must be the truth.”

“Nature is an expert in cost-benefit analysis,' she says. 'Although she does her accounting a little differently. As for debts, she always collects in the long run...”

“In the end, we'll all become stories”

“I pray where I am, sitting by the window, looking out through the curtain at the empty garden. I don't even close my eyes. Out there or inside my head, it's an equal darkness. Or light.My God. Who Art in the Kingdom of Heaven, which is within.I wish you would tell me Your Name, the real one I mean. But You will do as well as anything.I wish I knew what You were up to. But whatever it is, help me to get through it, please. Though maybe it's not our doing: I don't believe for an instant that what's going on out there is what You meant.I have enough daily bread, so I won't waste time on that. It isn't the main problem. The problem is getting it down without choking on it.Now we come to forgiveness. Don't worry about forgiving me right now. There are more important things. For instance: keep the others safe, if they are safe. Don't let them suffer too much. If they have to die, let it be fast. You might even provide a Heaven for them. We need You for that. Hell we can make for ourselves.I suppose I should say I forgive whoever did this, and whatever they're doing now. I'll try, but it isn't easy.Temptation comes next. At the Center, temptation was anything much more than eating and sleeping. Knowing was a temptation. What you don't know won't tempt you, Aunt Lydia used to say.Maybe I don't really want to know what's going on. Maybe I'd rather not know. Maybe I couldn't bear to know. The Fall was a fall from innocence to knowledge.I think about the chandelier too much, though it's gone now. But you could use a hook, in the closet. I've considered the possibilities. All you'd have to do, after attaching yourself, would be to lean your weight forward and not fight.Deliver us from evil.Then there's Kingdom, power, and glory. It takes a lot to believe in those right now. But I'll try it anyway. In Hope, as they say on the gravestones.You must feel pretty ripped off. I guess it's not the first time.If I were You I'd be fed up. I'd really be sick of it. I guess that's the difference between us.I feel very unreal talking to You like this. I fee as if I'm talking to a wall. I wish You'd answer. I feel so alone.All alone by the telephone. Except that I can't use the telephone. And if I could, who could I call?Oh God. It's no joke. Oh God oh God. How can I keep on living.”

“There's a difference between describing and evoking something. You can describe something and be quite clinical about it. To evoke it, you call it up in the reader. That's what writers do when they're good.”

“Our problem right now is that we're so specialized that if the lights go out, there are a huge number of people who are not going to know what to do. But within every dystopia there's a little utopia.”

“This form of love is like the painof childbirth: so intenseit's hard to remember afterwards,”

“As Charles Darwin said,'The economy shown by Nature in her resources is striking,'' says the Spirit. 'All wealth comes from Nature. Without it, there wouldn't be any economics. The primary wealth is food, not money. Therefore anything that concerns the handling of the land also concerns me.”

“I feel despised there, for having so little money; also for once having had so much. I never actually had it, of course. Father had it, and then Richard. But money was imputed to me, the same way crimes are imputed to those who've simply been present at them.”

“A bachelor, a studio, those were the names for that kind of apartment. Separate entrance it would say in the ads, and that meant you could have sex, unobserved.”

“But thoughtless ingratitude is the armour of the young; without it, how would they ever get through life? The old wish the young well, but they wish them ill also: they would like to eat them up, and absorb their vitality, and remain immortal themselves. Without the protection of surliness and levity, all children would be crushed by the past - the past of others, loaded on their shoulders. Selfishness is their saving grace.”