Quotes By Person: Margaret Atwood

“Men such as him do not have to clean up the messes they make, but we have to clean up our own messes, and theirs into the bargain. In that way they are like children, they do not have to think ahead, or worry about the consequences of what they do.”

-Alias Grace, Margaret Atwood

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“The difference between a civilized man and a barbarous fiend—a madman, say—lies, perhaps, merely in a thin veneer of willed self-restraint.”

-Alias Grace, Margaret Atwood

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“The way I understand things, the Bible may have been thought out by God, but it was written down by men. And like everything men write down, such as the newspapers, they got the main story right but some of the details wrong.”

-Alias Grace, Margaret Atwood

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“Unrequited love, at that period of my life, the only kind I seemed capable of feeling. This caused me much pain, but in retrospect I had to see the advantages. It provided all the emotional jolts of the other kind without any of the risks, it did not interfere with my life, which, although meager, was mine and predictable, and it involved no decisions. In the world of stark physical reality it might call for the removal of my ill-fitting garments (in the dark or the bathroom, if possible: no woman wants a man to see her safety pins), but it left undisturbed metaphysical counterparts. My Plutonic vision of myself resembled an Egyptian mummy, a mysteriously wrapped object that might or might not fall into dust if uncovered. But unrequited love demanded no stripteases.”

-Hair Jewellery, Margaret Atwood

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“Madness is private... Madness is only an amplification of what you already are”

-Surfacing, Margaret Atwood

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“Reverie intrudes at intervals.

She imagines him imagining her. This is her salvation.

In spirit she walks the city, traces its labyrinths, its dingy mazes, each assignation, each rendezvous, each door and stair and bed. What he said, what she said, what they did, what they did then. Even the times they argued, fought, parted, agonized, rejoiced. How they'd loved to cut themselves on each other, taste their own blood. We were ruinous together, she thinks. But how else can we live, these days, except in the midst of ruin?

Sometimes she wants to put a match to him, have done with him, finish with that endless, useless longing. At the very least, daily time and the entropy of her own body should take care of it- wear her threadbare, wear her out, erase that place in her brain. But no exorcism has been enough, nor has she tried very hard at it. Exorcism is not what she wants. She wants that terrified bliss, like falling out of an airplane by mistake. She wants his famished look.

The last time she'd seen him, when they'd gone back to his room- it was like drowning: everything darkened and roared, but at the same time it was very silvery, and slow, and clear.

This is what it means, to be in thrall.”

-The Blind Assassin, Margaret Atwood

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“Falling in love, I said. Falling into it, we all did then, one way or another. How could he have made such light of it? Sneered, even. As if it was trivial for us, a frill, a whim. It was, on the contrary, heavy going. It was the central thing; it was the way you understood yourself; if it never happened to you, not ever, you would be like a mutant, a creature from outer space. Everyone knew that.

Falling in love, we said; I fell for him. We were falling women. We believed in it, this downward motion: so lovely, like flying, and yet at the same time so dire, so extreme, so unlikely. God is love, they said once, but we reversed that, and love, like Heaven, was always just around the corner. The more difficult it was to love the particular man beside us, the more we believed in Love, abstract and total. We were waiting, always, for the incarnation. That word, made flesh.

And sometimes it happened, for a time. That kind of love comes and goes and is hard to remember afterwards, like pain. You would look at the man one day and you would think, I loved you, and the tense would be past, and you would be filled with a sense of wonder, because it was such an amazing and precarious and dumb thing to have done; and you would know too why your friends had been evasive about it, at the time. ”

-The Handmaid's Tale, Margaret Atwood

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