I walk away from him. It’s enormously pleasing to me, this walking away. It’s like being able to make people appear and vanish, at will.
MARGARET ATWOODStick a shovel into the ground almost anywhere and some horrible thing or other will come to light. Good for trade, we thrive on bones; without them there’d be no stories.
More Margaret Atwood Quotes
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I’m from the generation that had the boys’ door and the girls’ door when you went to school, and you got in big trouble if you went in the wrong one.
MARGARET ATWOOD -
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.
MARGARET ATWOOD -
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 -
The way love feels is always only approximate. I would like to be without shame. I would like to be shameless. I would like to be ignorant. Then I would not know how ignorant I was.
MARGARET ATWOOD -
I lie on the floor, washed by nothing and hanging on. I cry at night. I am afraid of hearing voices, or a voice. I have come to the edge, of the land. I could get pushed over.
MARGARET ATWOOD -
I’m not used to girls, or familiar with their customs. I feel awkward around them, I don’t know what to say. I know the unspoken rules of boys, but with girls I sense that I am always on the verge of some unforeseen, calamitous blunder.
MARGARET ATWOOD -
I’m bad at picking heroes.
MARGARET ATWOOD -
We are silent, considering shortfalls. There’s not much time left, for us to become what we once intended. Jon had potential, but it’s not a word that can be used comfortably any more. Potential has a shelf-life.
MARGARET ATWOOD -
The heart with letters on it shining like a light bulb through the trim hole painted in the chest, art history.
MARGARET ATWOOD -
Canada was built on dead beavers.
MARGARET ATWOOD -
I did … learn an important distinction in graduate school: a speculation about who had syphilis when is gossip if it’s about your friends, a plot element if it’s about a character in a novel, and scholarship if it’s about John Keats.
MARGARET ATWOOD -
Waste not want not. I am not being wasted. Why do I want?
MARGARET ATWOOD -
I didn’t go to school for a full year until I was 12. In the summer I was a wild child in the woods, with no shoes, and in the fall it was back to the city, shoe shops and school.
MARGARET ATWOOD -
I was kidnapped by literature at a young age and never wanted to be ransomed.
MARGARET ATWOOD -
Better never means better for everyone… It always means worse, for some.
MARGARET ATWOOD