Margaret Atwood

“A word after a word after a word is power.”

“Via the conduit of a wild dog pack, she has now made the ultimate Gift to her fellow Creatures, and has become part of God's great dance of proteins.”

“you can't change the past,Aunt Lou used to say.Oh, but I wanted to;that was the one thing I really wanted to do”

“UPYou wake up filled with dread.There seems no reason for it.Morning light sifts through the window,there is birdsong,you can't get out of bed.It's something about the crumpled sheetshanging over the edge like junglefoliage, the terry slippers gapingtheir dark pink mouths for your feet,the unseen breakfast--some of itin the refrigerator you do not dareto open--you will not dare to eat.What prevents you? The future. The future tense,immense as outer space.You could get lost there.No. Nothing so simple. The past, its densityand drowned events pressing you down,like sea water, like gelatinfilling your lungs instead of air.Forget all that and let's get up.Try moving your arm.Try moving your head.Pretend the house is on fireand you must run or burn.No, that one's useless.It's never worked before.Where is it coming form, this echo,this huge No that surrounds you,silent as the folds of the yellowcurtains, mute as the cheerfulMexican bowl with its cargoof mummified flowers?(You chose the colours of the sun,not the dried neutrals of shadow.God knows you've tried.)Now here's a good one:you're lying on your deathbed.You have one hour to live.Who is it, exactly, you have neededall these years to forgive?”

“Genres aren't closed boxes. Stuff flows back and forth across the borders all the time.”

“If you're waiting for the perfect moment, you'll never write a thing because it will never arrive. I have no routine. I have no foolproof anything. There's nothing foolproof.”

“from under the ground, from under the waters,they clutch at us, they clutch at us,we won’t let go.”

“Things that are falling apart encourage me: whatever else, I’m in better shape than they are.”

“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.”

“Human tool-makers always make tools that will help us get what we want, and what we want hasn't changed for thousands of years because as far as we can tell the human template hasn't changed either. We still want the purse that will always be filled with gold, and the Fountain of Youth. We want the table that will cover itself with delicious food whenever we say the word, and that will be cleaned up afterwards by invisible servants. We want the Seven-League Boots so we can travel very quickly, and the Hat of Darkness so we can snoop on other people without being seen. We want the weapon that will never miss, and the castle that will keep us safe. We want excitement and adventure; we want routine and security. We want to have a large number of sexually attractive partners, and we also want those we love to love us in return, and be utterly faithful to us. We want cute, smart children who will treat us with the respect we deserve. We want to be surrounded by music, and by ravishing scents and attractive visual objects. We don't want to be too hot or too cold. We want to dance. We want to speak with the animals. We want to be envied. We want to be immortal. We want to be gods.But in addition, we want wisdom and justice. We want hope. We want to be good.”

“Life is warped. I'm just in sync.”

“Then there's the twoof us. This wordis far too short for us, it has onlyfour letters, too sparseto fill those deep barevacuums between the starsthat press on us with their deafness.It's not love we don't wishto fall into, but that fear.This word is not enough but it willhave to do. It's a singlevowel in this metallicsilence, a mouth that saysO again and again in wonderand pain, a breath, a fingergrip on a cliffside. You canhold on or let go.”

“An eye for an eye only leads to more blindness.”

“It must have been an endless breathing in: between the wish to know and the wish to praise there was no seam.”

“Debt is part of the human condition. Civilization is based on exchanges - on gifts, trades, loans - and the revenges and insults that come when they are not paid back.”

“Vampires get the joy of flying around and living forever, werewolves get the joy of animal spirits. But zombies, they're not rich, or aristocratic, they shuffle around. They're a group phenomenon, they're not very fast, they're quite sickly. So what's the pleasure of being one?”

“Confronted by too much emptiness, said Adam One, the brain invents. Loneliness creates company as thirst creates water. How many sailors have been wrecked in pursuit of islands that were merely a shimmering?”

“I won't fatten them in cages, though. I won't ply them with poisoned fruit items. I won't change them into clockwork images or talking shadows. I won't drain out their life's blood. They can do all those things for themselves.”

“Storytelling is a very old human skill that gives us an evolutionary advantage. If you can tell young people how you kill an emu, acted out in song or dance, or that Uncle George was eaten by a croc over there, don't go there to swim, then those young people don't have to find out by trial and error.”

“A place with no handholds,no landmarks,no past at all:That would have been too much like dying”