Margaret Atwood

“Fatigue is here, in my body, in my legs and eyes. That is what gets you in the end. Faith is only a word, embroidered.”

“By telling you anything at all I'm at least believing in you, I believe you're there, I believe you into being. Because I'm telling you this story I will your existence. I tell, therefore yo...”

“Perhaps I write for no one. Perhaps for the same person children are writing for when they scrawl their names in the snow.”

“All stories are about wolves. All worth repeating, that is. Anything else is sentimental drivel. All of them? Sure, he says. Think about it. There's escaping from the wolves, fighting the wo...”

“It's impossible to say a thing exactly the way it was, because of what you say can never be exact, you always have to leave something out, there are too many parts, sides, crosscurrents, nua...”

“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...”

“Good writing takes place at intersections, at what you might call knots, at places where the society is snarled or knotted up.”

“Everyone thinks writers must know more about the inside of the human head, but that's wrong. They know less, that's why they write. Trying to find out what everyone else takes for granted.”

“For me the experience of writing is really an experience of losing control.… I think it’s very much like dreaming or like surfing. You go out there and wait for a wave, and when it comes it...”

“Religious people of any serious kind made her nervous: they were like men in raincoats who might or might not be flashers.”

“Nature full strength is more than we can take, Adam One used to say. It's a potent hallucinogen, a soporific, for the untrained Soul. We're no longer at home in it. We need to dilute it. We...”

“I learned about religion the way most children learned about sex, [in the schoolyard]. . . . They terrified me by telling me there was a dead man in the sky watching everything I did and I r...”

“I look at him with the nostalgic affection men are said to feel for their wars, their fellow veterans. I think, I once threw things at this man. I threw a glass ashtray, a fairly cheap one w...”

“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.”

“If you worked out enough, maybe the man would too. Maybe you would be able to work it out together, as if the two of you were a puzzle that could be solved; otherwise, one of you, most likel...”

“Time folds you in its arms and gives you one last kiss, and then it flattens you out and folds you up and tucks you away until it's time for you to become someone else's past time, and then...”

“He has to find more and better ways of occupying his time. His time, what a bankrupt idea, as if he's been given a box of time belonging to him alone, stuffed to the brim with hours and minu...”

“Time is not a line but a dimension, like the dimensions of space. If you can bend space you can bend time also, and if you knew enough and could move faster than light you could travel backw...”

“Time: old cold time, old sorrow, settling down in layers like silt in a pond.”

“I shiver: whose feet are walking on my grave? Time, I plead to the air, just a little more time. That's all I need.”