“Stupidity is the same as evil if you judge by the results.”
― Margaret Atwood, quote from Surfacing
“They will not let you have peace, they don't want you to have anything they don't have themselves.”
― Margaret Atwood, quote from Surfacing
“Madness is only an amplification of what you already are.”
― Margaret Atwood, quote from Surfacing
“This above all, to refuse to be a victim. Unless I can do that I can do nothing.”
― Margaret Atwood, quote from Surfacing
“I would rather dance as a ballerina, though faultily, than as a flawless clown.”
― Margaret Atwood, quote from Surfacing
“The animals have no need for speech, why talk when you are a word.”
― Margaret Atwood, quote from Surfacing
“it's doors I'm afraid of because I can't see through them, its the door opening by itself in the wind I'm afraid of.”
― Margaret Atwood, quote from Surfacing
“There's more than one way to skin a cat, my father used to say; it bothered me, I didn't see why they would want to skin a cat even one way.”
― Margaret Atwood, quote from Surfacing
“We battled in secret, undeclared, and after a while I no longer fought back because I never won. The only defense was flight, invisibility.”
― Margaret Atwood, quote from Surfacing
“Anything that suffers and dies instead of us is Christ; if they didn't kill birds and fish they would have killed us. The animals die that we may live, they are substitute people, hunters in the fall killing the deer, that is Christ also. And we eat them, out of cans or otherwise; we are eaters of death, dead Christ-flesh resurrecting inside us, granting us life. Canned Spam, canned Jesus, even the plants must be Christ.”
― Margaret Atwood, quote from Surfacing
“When you can't tell the difference between your own pleasure and your pain then you're an addict.”
― Margaret Atwood, quote from Surfacing
“Being socially retarded is like being mentally retarded, it arouses in others disgust and pity and the desire to torment and reform.”
― Margaret Atwood, quote from Surfacing
“From any rational point of view I am absurd; but there are no longer any rational points of view.”
― Margaret Atwood, quote from Surfacing
“Language divides us into fragments, I wanted to be whole.”
― Margaret Atwood, quote from Surfacing
“...that's what Hiltler exemplified: not the triumph of evil but the failure of reason.”
― Margaret Atwood, quote from Surfacing
“A divorce is like an amputation, you survive but there's less of you.”
― Margaret Atwood, quote from Surfacing
“She must have heard the door opening and closing in the middle of the night; she produces a smile, warm, conspiratorial, and I know what circuits are closing in her head: by screwing Joe she's brought us back together. Saving the world, everyone wants to; men think they can do it with guns, women with their bodies, love conquers all, conquerors love all, mirages raised by words.”
― Margaret Atwood, quote from Surfacing
“speech to him was a task, a battle, words mustered behind his beard and issued one at a time, heavy and square like tanks.”
― Margaret Atwood, quote from Surfacing
“The trouble is all in the knob at the top of our bodies. I’m not against the body or the head either: only the neck, which creates the illusion that they are separate. The language is wrong, it shouldn’t have different words for them. If the head extended directly into the shoulders like a worm’s or a frog’s without that constriction, that lie, they wouldn’t be able to look down at their bodies and move them around as if they were robots or puppets; they would have to realize that if the head is detached from the body both of them will die.”
― Margaret Atwood, quote from Surfacing
“The heart with letters on it shining like a light bulb through the trim hole painted in the chest, art history.”
― Margaret Atwood, quote from Surfacing
“Second-hand American was spreading over him in patches, like mange or lichen. He was infested, garbled, and I couldn't help him: it would take such time to heal, unearth him, scrape down to where he was true.”
― Margaret Atwood, quote from Surfacing
“From her handbag she takes a round gilt compact with violets on the cover. She opens it, unclosing her other self, and runs her fingertip around the corners of her mouth, left one, right one; then she unswivels a pink stick and dots her cheeks and blends them, changing her shape, performing the only magic left to her.
Rump on a packsack, harem cushion, pink on the cheeks and black discreetly around the eyes, as red as blood as black as ebony, a seamed and folded imitation of a magazine picture that is itself an imitation of a woman who is also an imitation, the original nowhere, hairless lobed angel in the same heaven where God is a circle, captive princess in someone's head. She is locked in, she isn't allowed to eat or shit or cry or give birth, nothing goes in, nothing comes out. She takes her clothes off or puts them on, paper doll wardrobe, she copulates under strobe lights with the man's torso while his brain watches from its glassed-in control cubicle at the other end of the room, her face twists into poses of exultation and total abandonment, that is all. She is not bored, she has no other interests.”
― Margaret Atwood, quote from Surfacing
“The trouble some people have being German, I thought, I have being human. In a way it was stupid to be more disturbed by a dead bird than by those other things, the wars and riots and the massacres in the newspapers. But for the wars and riots there was always an explanation, people wrote books about them saying why they happened: the death of the heron was causeless, undiluted.”
― Margaret Atwood, quote from Surfacing
“He thought of it as a contest, like the children at school who would twist your arm and say Give in? Give in? until you did; then they would let go. He didn't love me, it was an idea of himself he loved and he wanted someone to join him, anyone would do, I didn't matter so I didn't have to care.”
― Margaret Atwood, quote from Surfacing
“I leafed through all the men I had known to see whether or not I hated them. But then I realized it wasn't the men I hated, it was the Americans, the human beings, men and women both. They'd had their chance but they had turned against the gods, and it was time for me to choose sides. I wanted there to be a machine that could make them vanish, a button I could press that would evaporate them without disturbing anything else, that way there would be more room for the animals, they would be rescued.”
― Margaret Atwood, quote from Surfacing
“You all right?" he said again.
I didn't love him, I was far away from him, it was as though I was seeing him through a smeared window or glossy paper; he didn't belong here. But he existed, he deserved to be alive. I was wishing I could tell him how to change so he could get there, the place where I was.
"Yes," I said. I touched him on the arm with my hand. My hand touched his arm. Hand touched arm. Language divides us into fragments, I wanted to be whole.”
― Margaret Atwood, quote from Surfacing
“Do you love me, that's all," he said. "That's the only thing that matters."
It was the language again, I couldn't use it because it wasn't mine. He must have known what he meant but it was an imprecise word; the Eskimos had fifty-two names for snow because it was important to them, there ought to be as many for love.”
― Margaret Atwood, quote from Surfacing
“His drawings were not originals then, only copies. He must have been doing them as a sort of retirement hobby, he was an incurable amateur and enthusiast; if he'd become hooked (on these rock paintings) he would have combed the area for them, collecting them with his camera, pestering experts by letter whenever he found one; an old man's delusion of usefulness.”
― Margaret Atwood, quote from Surfacing
Margaret Atwood
Born place: in Ottawa, Ontario, Canada
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“Well,” I reply, using the calm tone I know gets under her skin. I wish I was noble enough not to enjoy it, but I came to terms with my lack of nobility long ago.”
― Amie Kaufman, quote from These Broken Stars
“This is what I like, sitting at a table and watching people go by. It does something to your outlook on life. The Anglo-Saxons make a great mistake not staring at people from a sidewalk table.”
― Patricia Highsmith, quote from The Talented Mr. Ripley
“I wonder, sometimes, whether men and women in fact are capable of learning from history--whether we progress from one stage to the next in an upward course or whether we just ride the cycles of boom and bust, war and peace, ascent and decline.”
― Barack Obama, quote from The Audacity of Hope: Thoughts on Reclaiming the American Dream
“He forgot about the woman. It was as if she didn't exist when he wasn't looking at her, and her voice and her attempt to cut herself free were the results of some absurd supernatural manifestation.
He opened the cottage door wide. You could see anything in the rain. The individual drops became streaks with the slowness of the eye; they merged and re-emerged as ciphers for the shapes you carried inside you; they lasted less than a heartbeat in your sight and they went on forever.
He saw a chair, and a ship that was not a ship; he saw a man with two shadows, and he saw that which cannot be seen - a concept; the adaptive, self-seeking urge to survive, to bend everything that can be reached to that end, and to remove and to add and to smash and to create so that one particular collection of cells can go on, can move onward and decide, and keeping moving and keeping deciding, knowing that - if nothing else - at least it lives.
And it had two shadows, it was two things: it was the need and it was the method. The need was obvious: to defeat what opposed its life. The method was that taking and bending of materials and people to one purpose, the outlook that everything could be used in the fight; that nothing could be excluded, that everything was a weapon, and the ability to handle those weapons, to find them and choose which one to aim and fire; that talent, that ability, that use of weapons.
A chair, and a ship that was not a ship, a man with two shadows, and...”
― Iain M. Banks, quote from Use of Weapons
“I have done this—made the sad prince laugh. Made his grieving parents smile. None but me. Think you only kings have power? Stand on a stage and hold the hearts of men in your hands. Make them laugh with a gesture, cry with a word. Make them love you. And you will know what power is.”
― Jennifer Donnelly, quote from Revolution
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The Case of the Miss...BookQuoters is a community of passionate readers who enjoy sharing the most meaningful, memorable and interesting quotes from great books. As the world communicates more and more via texts, memes and sound bytes, short but profound quotes from books have become more relevant and important. For some of us a quote becomes a mantra, a goal or a philosophy by which we live. For all of us, quotes are a great way to remember a book and to carry with us the author’s best ideas.
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