Margaret Atwood
Love blurs your vision; but after it recedes, you can see more clearly than ever. It's like the tide going out, revealing whatever's been thrown away and sunk: broken bottles, old gloves, rusting pop cans, nibbled fishbodies, bones. This is the kind of thing you see if you sit in the darkness with open eyes, not knowing the future.Collection: Eye
If all fossil fuel were to go POOF! tomorrow, the result would be a cataclysmic social upheaval, with food riots, warlords, shutdowns, breakdown of social order, water shortages, and outbreaks of bloodshed and disease.Collection: Water
Anybody who writes a book is an optimist. First of all, they think they're going to finish it. Second, they think somebody's going to publish it. Third, they think somebody's going to read it. Fourth, they think somebody's going to like it. How optimistic is that?Collection: Book
There's something to be said for hunger: at least it lets you know you're still alive.Collection: Alive
I wanted to forget the past, but it refused to forget me; it waited for sleep, then cornered me.Collection: Sleep
The world is being run by people my age, men my age, with falling-out hair and health worries, and it frightens me. When the leaders were older than me I could believe in their wisdom, I could believe they had transcended rage and malice and the need to be loved. Now I know better. I look at the faces in newspapers, in magazines, and wonder: what greeds, what furies drive them on?Collection: Running
There's something final about saying you were married once. It's like saying you were dead once. It shuts them up.Collection: Finals
Without the light, no chance; without the dark, no dance.Collection: Dark
I exist in two places, here and where you are.Collection: Two
Good writing takes place at intersections, at what you might call knots, at places where the society is snarled or knotted up.Collection: Writing
When I was 16 I started publishing all kinds of things in school magazines. My main feedback came from my English teacher, Miss Bessie B. Billings, who said, 'I can't understand this at all, dear, so it must be good.Collection: Teacher
I don't want to look at something that determines me so completely.Collection: Looks
There is no fool like an educated fool.Collection: Fool
If he wants to be an asshole, it's a free country. Millions before him have made the same life choice.Collection: Country
Hope drives us to invent new fixes for old messes, which in turn create ever more dangerous messes. Hope elects the politician with the biggest empty promise; and as any stockbroker or lottery seller knows, most of us will take a slim hope over prudent and predictable frugality. Hope, like greed, fuels the engine of capitalism.Collection: Greed
Powerlessness and silence go together.Collection: Silence
Potential has a shelf life.Collection: Shelves
Nature is to zoos as God is to churches.Collection: Nature
Don't wait until you're 'in the mood.' Get into the mood by writing.Collection: Writing
...we must be a beacon of hope, because if you tell people there's nothing they can do, they will do worse than nothing.Collection: People
Blondes are like white mice, you only find them in cages. They wouldn’t last long in nature. They’re too conspicuous.Collection: White
In his student days, he used to argue that if a woman has no other course open to her but starvation, prostitution, or throwing herself from a bridge, then surely the prostitute, who has shown the most tenacious instinct for self-preservation, should be considered stronger and saner than her frailer and no longer living sisters. One couldn't have it both ways, he'd pointed out: if women are seduced and abandoned they're supposed to go mad, but if they survive, and seduce in their turn, then they were mad to begin with.Collection: Self
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.Collection: Silent
Amazing how the heart clutches at anything familiar, whimpering Mine!Mine!Collection: Heart
it's doors I'm afraid of because I can't see through them, its the door opening by itself in the wind I'm afraid of.Collection: Doors
I didn't much like it, this grudge-holding against the past.Collection: Past
Whatever the scientists may come up with, writers and artists will continue to portray altered mental states, simply because few aspects of our nature fascinate people so much. The so-called mad person will always represent a possible future for every member of the audience - who knows when such a malady may strike?Collection: Artist
We pulled the seeds out and scattered them on their flossy parachutes, leaving only the leathery brownish yellow tongue, soft as the inside of an elbow.Collection: Yellow
I define science fiction as fiction in which things happen that are not possible today - that depend, for instance, on advanced space travel, time travel, the discovery of green monsters on other planets or galaxies, or that contain various technologies we have not yet developed.Collection: Technology
Money as such is, as Oscar Wilde said, perfectly useless. You can't eat it, drink it, shelter yourself from the cold with it, wear it, or make love with it unless deeply disturbed. In and of itself, it has no emotions, no mind, and no conscience. It doesn't put out flowers or have children, and it makes a lousy pet. It has meaning only when it circulates, and is exchanged for other things; and money doesn't do that for itself. People do that, using money as a symbolic token.Collection: Children
I would like to believe this is a story I’m telling. I need to believe it. I must believe it. Those who can believe that such stories are only stories have a better chance. If it’s a story I’m telling, then I have control over the ending. Then there will be an ending, to the story, and real life will come after it. I can pick up where I left off.Collection: Real
What’s with her?” says the painter. “She’s mad because she’s a woman,” Jon says. This is something I haven’t heard for years, not since high school. Once it was a shaming thing to say, and crushing to have it said about you, by a man. It implied oddness, deformity, sexual malfunction. I go to the living room doorway. “I’m not mad because I’m a woman,” I say. “I’m mad because you’re an asshole.Collection: Crush
I have long since decided if you wait for the perfect time to write, you'll never write. There is no time that isn't flawed somehow.Collection: Writing
Does feminist mean large unpleasant person who'll shout at you or someone who believes women are human beings. To me it's the latter, so I sign upCollection: Inspirational
Where do you draw the line, between love and greed? We never did know, we always wanted more. We want to take it all in, for one last time, we want to eat the world with our eyes.Collection: Eye
What we share may be a lot like a traffic accident but we get one another. We are survivors of each other. We have been shark to one another, but also lifeboat. That counts for something.Collection: Sharks
In theory I can do almost anything; certainly I have been told how. In practice I do as little as possible. I pretend to myself that I would be quite happy in a hermit's cave, living on gruel, if someone else would make the gruel. Gruel, like so many other things, is beyond me.Collection: Practice
The only way you can write the truth is to assume that what you set down will never be read.Collection: Writing
Walking along past the store windows, into which she peers with her usual eagerness, her usual sense that maybe, today, she will discover behind them something that will truly be worth seeing, she feels as if her feet are not on cement at all but on ice. The blade of the skate floats, she knows, on a thin film of water, which it melts by pressure and which freezes behind it. This is the freedom of the present tense, this sliding edge.Collection: Past
Things might have been different if she hadn't been able to drift; if she'd had to concentrate on her next meal, instead of dwelling on all the injuries she felt we'd done her. An unearned income encourages self-pity in those already prone to it.Collection: Self
I think the book you always like best is the one you're about to write.Collection: Book
I feel like cotton candy: sugar and air. Squeeze me and I’d turn into a small sickly damp wad of weeping pinky-red.Collection: Air
Plato said that poets should be excluded from the ideal republic because they are such liars. I am a poet, and I affirm that this is true. About no subject are poets tempted to lie so much as about their own lives; I know one of them who has floated at least five versions of his autobiography, none of them true. I of course - being also a novelist - am a much more truthful person than that. But since poets lie, how can you believe me?Collection: Plato
Maybe sadness was a kind of hunger, she thought. Maybe the two went together.Collection: Sadness
Her glass wings are gone.Collection: Glasses
It wasn't so easy though, ending the war. A war is a huge fire; the ashes from it drift far, and settle slowly.Collection: War
For drinking Life there are two cups: The No Cup is bitter, the Yes Cup is yummy -- Now, which one would you rather have in your tummy?Collection: Life
Hunger is a powerful reorganizer of the conscience.Collection: Powerful