Margaret Atwood

Choice of evils debates always produce extremism - people choose what they hope is the lesser evil, then call it good and demonize the other choice. It will be a challenge for your generation to synthesize - to move beyond Us versus Them, to We.

In the spring, at the end of the day, you should smell like dirt.

When any civilization is dust and ashes," he said, "art is all that's left over. Images, words, music. Imaginative structures. Meaning—human meaning, that is—is defined by them. You have to admit that.

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.

But maybe boredom is erotic, when women do it, for men.

We were the people who were not in the papers. We lived in the blank white spaces at the edges of print. It gave us more freedom. We lived in the gaps between the stories.

I tend to feel if people say they're going to do something, they will, if given the chance.

Old lovers go the way of old photographs, bleaching out gradually as in a slow bath of acid: first the moles and pimples, then the shadings. Then the faces themselves, until nothing remains but the general outlines.

I spent much of my childhood in northern Quebec, and often there was no radio, no television - there wasn't a lot to entertain us. When it rained, I stayed inside reading, writing, drawing.

It's evening, one of those gray water-color washes, like liquid dust.

Perhaps they were looking for passion; perhaps they delved into this book as into a mysterious parcel - a gift box at the bottom of which, hidden in layers of rustling tissue paper, lay something they'd always longed for but couldn't ever grasp.

Within one's own family, money is not the measure of things, unless the person is an absolute Scrooge. Only the most extreme kind of monster would put a price on everything.

Ten days after the war ended, my sister Laura drove a car off a bridge.

While in a vintage restaurant..."the past isn't quaint while you're in it. Only at a safe distance, later, when you see it as decor, not as the shape your life's been squeezed into.

Support your libraries... or else!

Remember that, my child. Remember you are half water. If you can't go through an obstacle, go around it. Water does.

I am afraid of falling into hopeless despair, over my wasted life, and I am still not sure how it happened.

He was deciding whether to cut her throat or love her forever.

For an instant she felt them, their identities, almost their substance, pass over her head like a wave. At some time she would be — or no, already she was like that too; she was one of them, her body the same, identical, merged with that other flesh that choked the air in the flowered room with its sweet organic scent; she felt suffocated by this thick sargasso-sea of femininity.

'1984' is not a wonder tale. Not only could it happen, but it has happened, but under different names.

They spent the first three years of school getting you to pretend stuff and then the rest of it marking you down if you did the same thing.