Margaret Atwood

Like the trains, she's never on time and always departing.

Messy love is better than none, I guess. I am no authority on sane living.

we lived in the gaps between the stories

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.

All I can hope for is a reconstruction: the way love feels is always only approximate.

Why are you so interested in amoebas?" "Oh, they're immortal," he said, "and sort of shapeless and flexible. Being a person is getting too complicated.

Craziness was considered funny, like all other things that were in reality frightening and profoundly shameful.

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.

To want is to have a weakness.

Axiom: you are a sea. Your eye- lids curve over chaos My hands where they touch you, create small inhabited islands soon you will be all earth: a known land, a country.

How easy it is to invent a humanity, for anyone at all.

Ordinary, said Aunt Lydia, is what you are used to. This may not seem ordinary to you now, but after a time it will. It will become ordinary.

Truly amazing, what people can get used to, as long as there are a few compensations.

We thought we had such problems. How were we to know we were happy?

I believe in the resistance as I believe there can be no light without shadow; or rather, no shadow unless there is also light.

Jimmy found himself wishing to make a dent in Crake, get a reaction; it was one of his weaknesses, to care what other people thought of him.

If you really want to stay the same age you are now forever and ever, she'd be thinking, try jumping off the roof: death's a sure-fire method for stopping time.

Not real can tell us about real.

Amazing how the heart clutches at anything familiar, whimpering Mine!Mine!

We've learned to see the world in gasps.

So this was the rest of his life. It felt like a party to which he'd been invited, but at an address he couldn't actually locate. Someone must be having fun at it, this life of his; only, right at the moment, it wasn't him.