Margaret Atwood

"We still think of a powerful man as a born leader and a powerful woman as an anomaly."

"We ate the birds. We ate them. We wanted their songs to flow up through our throats and burst out of our mouths, and so we ate them. We wanted their feathers to bud from our flesh. We wanted their wings, we wanted to fly as they did, soar freely among the treetops and the clouds, and so we ate them. We speared them, we clubbed them, we tangled their feet in glue, we netted them, we spitted them, we threw them onto hot coals, and all for love, because we loved them. We wanted to be one with them. We wanted to hatch out of clean, smooth, beautiful eggs, as they did, back when we were young and agile and innocent of cause and effect, we did not want the mess of being born, and so we crammed the birds into our gullets, feathers and all, but it was no use, we couldn’t sing, not effortlessly as they do, we can’t fly, not without smoke and metal, and as for the eggs we don’t stand a chance. We’re mired in gravity, we’re earthbound. We’re ankle-deep in blood, and all because we ate the birds, we ate them a long time ago, when we still had the power to say no."

"But my dreaming self refuses to be consoled. It continues to wander, aimless, homeless, alone. It cannot be convinced of its safety by any evidence drawn from my waking life."

"War is what happens when language fails."

"That is how we writers all started: by reading. We heard the voice of a book speaking to us."

"Maybe I don't really want to know what's going on. Maybe I'd rather not know. Maybe I couldn't bear to know. The Fall was a fall from innocence to knowledge."

"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 takes you somewhere and you don’t know where it’ll go."

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

"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."

"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 wolves, capturing the wolves, taming the wolves. Being thrown to the wolves, or throwing others to the wolves so the wolves will eat them instead of you. Running with the wolf pack. Turning into a wolf. Best of all, turning into the head wolf. No other decent stories exist."

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

"A word after a word after a word is power."

"You fit into melike a hook into an eyea fish hookan open eye"

"Romance takes place in the middle distance. Romance is looking in at yourself through a window clouded with dew. Romance means leaving things out: where life grunts and shuffles, romance only sighs."

"So much for endings. Beginnings are always more fun. True connoisseurs, however, are known to favor the stretch in between, since it's the hardest to do anything with. That's about all that can be said for plots, which anyway are just one thing after another, a what and a what and a what."

"The Eskimo has fifty-names for snow because it is important to them there ought to be as many for love."

"A truth should exist,it should not be usedlike this. If I love youis that a fact or a weapon?"

"I would like to be the air that inhabits you for a moment only. I would like to be that unnoticed and that necessary."