Margaret Atwood

I'm not senile," I snapped. "If I burn the house down it will be on purpose.

A rat in a maze is free to go anywhere, as long as it stays inside the maze.

If you get hungry enough, they say, you start eating your own heart.

Which of us can resist the temptation of being thought indispensable?

Extreme good, extreme evil: the abilities required are similar.

I didn't want him to become gray and multi-dimensional and complicated like everyone else. Was every Heathcliff a Linton in disguise?

You can mean more than one. You can mean thousands. I'm not in any immediate danger, I'll say to you. I'll pretend you can hear me. But it's no good, because I know you can't.

You think I'm not a goddess? Try me. This is a torch song. Touch me and you'll burn.

What is the real breath of a man — the breathing out or the breathing in?

It made him feel invisible—not that he wanted to feel anything else.

I am not my childhood,' Snowman says out loud.

This is what I miss, Cordelia: not something that’s gone, but something that will never happen. Two old women giggling over their tea.

Better never means better for everyone... It always means worse, for some.

The body is so easily damaged, so easily disposed of, water and chemicals is all it is, hardly more to it than a jellyfish drying on sand.

You can wet the rim of a glass and run your finger around the rim and it will make a sound. This is what I feel like: this sound of glass. I feel like the word shatter. I want to be with someone.

Pink is supposed to weaken your enemies, make them go soft on you, which must be why it's used for baby girls. It's a wonder the military hasn't got on to this.

Publishing a book is like stuffing a note into a bottle and hurling it into the sea. Some bottles drown, some come safe to land, where the notes are read and then possibly cherished, or else misinterpreted, or else understood all too well by those who hate the message. You never know who your readers might be.

Better not to invent her in her absence. Better to wait until she's actually here. Then he can make her up as she goes along.

Then sail, my fine lady, on the billowing wave - The water below is as dark as the grave, And maybe you'll sink in your little blue boat - It's hope, and hope only, that keeps us afloat

It was like being in an elevator cut loose at the top. Falling, falling, and not knowing when you will hit.

He doesn't know which is worse, a past he can't regain or a present that will destroy him if he looks at it too clearly. Then there's the future. Sheer vertigo.