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Margaret Atwood

Margaret Atwood Books

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Oryx And Crake

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Cat's Eye

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Bluebeard's Egg

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The Penelopiad

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Cat’s Eye

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The Testaments

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Alias Grace

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Surfacing

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The Tent

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Wilderness Tips

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Lady Oracle

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Dearly

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MaddAddam

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The Door

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Bodily Harm

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Dancing Girls

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Fourteen Days

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Hag-Seed

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Interlunar

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Related Quotes

“He would place his mouth, still full of sleep, on hers, and perhaps pull her back into the bedroom and down into the bed with him, into that liquid pool of flesh, his mouth sliding over her, furry pleasure, the covers closing over them as they sank into weightlessness. But he hadn't done that for some time. He had been waking earlier and earlier; she, on the other hand, had been having trouble getting out of bed. She was losing that compulsion, that joy, whatever had nagged her out into the cold morning air, driven her to fill all those notebooks, all those printed pages. Instead, she would roll herself up in the blankets after Bernie got up, tucking in all the corners, muffling herself in wool. She had begun to have the feeling that nothing was waiting for her outside the bed's edge. No emptiness but nothing, the zero with legs in the arithmetic book. 'I'm off,' he'd say to her groggy bundled back. She'd be awake enough to hear this; then she would lapse back into a humid sleep. His absence was one more reason for not getting up.”

SadnessHeartbreakLives Of The Poets
Book:Dancing Girls and Other Stories
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“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?”

MetaphorSecretsSimileMargaret AtwoodThe Blind Assassin
Book:The Blind Assassin
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“The poems that used to entrance me in the days of Miss Violence now struck me as overdone and sickly. Alas, burthen, thine, cometh, aweary—the archaic language of unrequited love. I was irritated with such words, which rendered the unhappy lovers—I could now see—faintly ridiculous, like poor moping Miss Violence herself. Soft-edged, blurry, soggy, like a bun fallen into the water. Nothing you'd want to touch,”

PoetryLanguageRidiculousUnrequited LoveSimileMargaret AtwoodArchaicThe Blind Assassin
Book:The Blind Assassin
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“He said, I won't have one of those things in the house. It gives a young girl a false notion of beauty, not to mention anatomy. If a real woman was built like that she'd fall on her face. She said, If we don't let her have one like all the other girls she'll feel singled out. It'll become an issue. She'll long for one and she'll long to turn into one. Repression breeds sublimation. You know that. He said, It's not just the pointy plastic tits, it's the wardrobes. The wardrobes and that stupid male doll, what's his name, the one with the underwear glued on. She said, Better to get it over with when she's young. He said, All right but don't let me see it. She came whizzing down the stairs, thrown like a dart. She was stark naked. Her hair had been chopped off, her head was turned back to front, she was missing some toes and she'd been tattooed all over her body with purple ink, in a scrollwork design. She hit the potted azalea, trembled there for a moment like a botched angel, and fell. He said, I guess we're safe.”

HumorWomenBeautyGirlsFeminineRole ModelsFemininityGender RolesBarbieGender Stereotypes
Book:The Female Body
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“Mr. Foote was right: no one can guess. No one knows the final outcome, though why is it called an outcome? No one comes out, eventually. "We aren't going to make it out of here alive," Tig used to say as a joke, although it wasn't one. And if you did guess, if you could foresee, would that be better? No: you'd live in grief all the time, you'd be mourning things that hadn't happened yet.”

DeathGriefDyingOutcomesMourningEndingEndings
Book:Old Babes in the Wood: Stories
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“By now you must have guessed: I come from another planet. But I will never say to you, Take me to your leaders. Even I - unused to your ways though I am - would never make that mistake. We ourselves have such beings among us, made of cogs, pieces of paper, small disks of shiny metal, scraps of coloured cloth. I do not need to encounter more of them. Instead I will say, Take me to your trees. Take me to your breakfasts, your sunsets, your bad dreams, your shoes, your nouns. Take me to your fingers; take me to your deaths. These are worth it. These are what I have come for.”

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Book:Good Bones and Simple Murders
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“Προσευχόμασταν παρακαλώντας για κενότητα, ώστε να είμαστε άξιες το κενό αυτό να γεμίσει: με χάρη, με αγάπη, με αυταπάρνηση, με σπέρμα και μωρά. Ω Θεέ μου, Βασιλέα του σύμπαντος κόσμου, Σ' ευχαριστώ που δε με έπλασες άντρα. Ω Θεέ μου, εκμηδένισέ με. Κάνε με γόνιμη. Ταπείνωσε τη σάρκα μου, ίνα αναπαραχθώ. Δώσε μου πληρότητα...”

Women
Book:The Handmaid’s Tale
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“Arms covered, hair covered, skirts down to the knee before you were five and no more than two inches above the ankle after that, because the urges of men were terrible things and those urges needed to be curbed. The man eyes that were always roaming here and there like the eyes of tigers, those searchlight eyes, needed to be shielded from the alluring and indeed blinding power of us ... Whatever our shapes and features, we were snares and enticements despite ourselves, we were the innocent and blameless causes that through our very nature could make men drunk with lust ... We were custodians of an invaluable treasure that existed, unseen, inside us; we were precious flowers that had to be kept safely inside glass houses, or else we would be ambushed and our petals would be torn off and our treasure would be stolen ...”

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Book:The Testaments
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“He has been travelling blindly, whether forward he cannot say, without learning anything except that he has not yet learned anything, unless he counts the extent of his own ignorance, like those who have searched fruitlessly for the source of the Nile. Like them, he must take into account the possibility of defeat. Hopeless dispatches, scrawled on pieces of bark, sent out in cleft sticks from the swallowing jungle. Suffering from malaria. Bitten by snake. Send more medicine. The maps are wrong.”

DespairHopelessness
Book:Alias Grace
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“An old walrus-faced waiter attended to me; he had the knack of pouring the coffee and the hot milk from two jugs, held high in the air, and I found this entrancing, as if he were a child's magician. One day he said to me - he had some English - "Why are you sad?" "I'm not sad," I said, and began to cry. Sympathy from strangers can be ruinous. "You should not be sad," he said, gazing at me with his melancholy, leathery walrus eyes. "It must be the love. But you are young and pretty, you will have time to be sad later." The French are connoisseurs of sadness, they know all the kinds. This is why they have bidets. "It is criminal, the love," he said, patting my shoulder. "But none is worse.”

LoveSadnessFrench
Book:The Blind Assassin
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