“ It's always an imprudence to step between a man and the reflection of his own cleverness. Margaret Atwood
“ It's a lifelong failing: she has never been prepared. But how can you have a sense of wonder if you're prepared for everything? Prepared for the sunset. Prepared for the moonrise. Prepared for the ice… Margaret Atwood
“ It's Janine, telling about how she was gang-raped at fourteen and had an abortion. She told the same story last week. She seemed almost proud of it, while she was telling. It may not even be true. At… Margaret Atwood
“ It was the thumbprints of human imperfection that used to move him, the flaws in the design: the lopsided smile, the wart next to the navel, the mole, the bruise. Was it consolation he’d had in mind,… Margaret Atwood
“ It is remarkable, I have since thought, how once a man has a few coins, no matter how he came by them, he thinks right away that he is entitled to them, and to whatever they can buy, and fancies himse… Margaret Atwood
“ In reduced circumstances the desire to live attaches itself to strange objects. I would like a pet: a bird, say, or a cat. A familiar. Anything at all familiar. Margaret Atwood
“ If you can call it talking, these clipped whispers, projected through the funnels of our white wings. It’s more like a telegram, a verbal semaphore. Amputated speech. Margaret Atwood
“ I'm a fool, to confuse this with goodness. I am not good.I know too much to be good. I know myself.I know myself to be vengeful, greedy, secretive and sly. Margaret Atwood
“ I would like to say my hair turned whiteovernight, but it didn’t.Instead it was my heart:bleached out like meat in water Margaret Atwood
“ I will never be that old, thinks Joanne. I will die before I'm thirty. She knows this absolutely. It's a tragic but satisfactory thought. If necessary, if some wasting disease refuses to carry her off… Margaret Atwood
“ I was nervous. How was I to know he loved me? It might be just an affair. Why did we ever say just? Though at that time men and women tried each other on, casually, like suits, rejecting whatever did… Margaret Atwood
“ I thought everyone would be familiar with this figure: if I'd studied a thing in school I assumed it was general knowledge. I hadn't yet discovered that I lived in a sort of transparent balloon, drift… Margaret Atwood
“ I feel angry. I'm not proud of myself for this, or for any of it. But then, that's the point. Margaret Atwood
“ I admired her lack of compunction, the courage of her bad manners, the energy of simple rage. Throwing a bag of spaghetti had a simplicity to it, a recklessness, a careless grandeur. It got things ove… Margaret Atwood
“ He’s a young man, my own age or a little older, which is young for a man although not for a woman, as at my age a woman is an old maid but a man is not an old bachelor until he’s fifty, and even then… Margaret Atwood
“ He’d developed a strangely tender feeling towards such words, as if they were children abandoned in the woods and it was his duty to rescue them. Margaret Atwood
“ He was twisted as a pretzel, he was a tinfoil-halo shitnosed frogstomping king rat asshole, but he wasn't stupid. Margaret Atwood
