Quotes from The Robber Bride

“Male fantasies, male fantasies, is everything run by male fantasies? Up on a pedestal or down on your knees, it's all a male fantasy: that you're strong enough to take what they dish out, or else too weak to do anything about it. Even pretending you aren't catering to male fantasies is a male fantasy: pretending you're unseen, pretending you have a life of your own, that you can wash your feet and comb your hair unconscious of the ever-present watcher peering through the keyhole, peering through the keyhole in your own head, if nowhere else. You are a woman with a man inside watching a woman. You are your own voyeur.”
― Margaret Atwood, quote from The Robber Bride

“Genius is an infinite capacity for causing pain.”
― Margaret Atwood, quote from The Robber Bride

“This has been her problem all her life: picturing other people's responses. She's too good at it. She can picture the response of anyone--other people's reactions, their emotions, their criticisms, their demands--but somehow they don't reciprocate. Maybe they can't. Maybe they lack the gift, if it is one.”
― Margaret Atwood, quote from The Robber Bride

“Just because there's a silence it doesn't mean that nothing is going on.”
― Margaret Atwood, quote from The Robber Bride

“Every ending is arbitrary, because the end is where you write The end. A period, a dot of punctuation, a point of stasis. A pinprick in the paper: you could put your eye to it and see through, to the other side, to the beginning of something else. Or, as Tony says to her students, Time is not a solid, like wood, but a fluid, like water or the wind. It doesn't come neatly cut into even-sized length, into decades and centuries. Nevertheless, for our purposes we have to pretend it does. The end of any history is a lie in which we all agree to conspire.”
― Margaret Atwood, quote from The Robber Bride

“How old do you have to get before wisdom descends like a plastic bag over your head and you learn to keep your big mouth shut? Maybe never. Maybe you get more frivolous with age.”
― Margaret Atwood, quote from The Robber Bride

“Where to start is the problem, because nothing begins when it begins and nothing's over when it's over, and everything needs a preface: a preface, a postscript, a chart of simultaneous events.”
― Margaret Atwood, quote from The Robber Bride

“Extreme good, extreme evil: the abilities required are similar.”
― Margaret Atwood, quote from The Robber Bride

“Karen wasn't hard, she was soft, too soft. A soft touch. Her hair was soft, her smile was soft, her voice was soft. She was so soft there was no resistance. Hard things sank into her, they went right through her, and if she made a real effort, out the other side. Then she didn't have to see them or hear them, or even touch them.”
― Margaret Atwood, quote from The Robber Bride

“But maybe, underneath, she loves him too much. Maybe it's her excessive love that pushes him away.”
― Margaret Atwood, quote from The Robber Bride

“You can't keep a cool head when you're drowning in love. You just thrash around a lot and scream, and wear yourself out.”
― Margaret Atwood, quote from The Robber Bride

“They are as happy as they can be, given who they are. Though if they'd been different people they might have been happier.”
― Margaret Atwood, quote from The Robber Bride

“When you alter yourself, the alterations become the truth...”
― Margaret Atwood, quote from The Robber Bride

“On the whole she fares better with the men, if they can work their way past the awkward preliminaries; if they can avoid calling her "little lady," or saying they weren't expecting her to be so feminine, by which they mean short. Though only the most doddering ones do that any more. If she weren't so tiny, though, she'd never get away with it. If she were six feet tall and built like a blockhouse; if she had hips. Then she'd be threatening, then she'd be an Amazon. It's the incongruity that grants her permission. A breath would blow you away, they beam down at her silently. You wish, thinks Tony, smiling up. Many have blown.”
― Margaret Atwood, quote from The Robber Bride

“The heart of Jesus glowed, because it was holy. Holy things glowed in general.”
― Margaret Atwood, quote from The Robber Bride

“They didn't realize that her clumsiness was not the ordinary kind, not poor coordination. It was just because she wasn't sure where the edges of her body ended and the rest of the world began.”
― Margaret Atwood, quote from The Robber Bride

“History is a construct...Any point of entry is possible and all choices are arbitrary. Still there are definitive moments...We can look at these events and say that after them things were never the same again.”
― Margaret Atwood, quote from The Robber Bride

“It's clear, it's fresh, like a mint candy.”
― Margaret Atwood, quote from The Robber Bride

“Those in pain have no time for the pain they cause.”
― Margaret Atwood, quote from The Robber Bride

“She looks like a very young old person, or a very old young person; but then, she's looked that way ever since she was two.”
― Margaret Atwood, quote from The Robber Bride

“But mostly she likes the fact that there's a reason for every death, and only one murderer at a time, and things get figured out at the end, and the murderer always gets caught.”
― Margaret Atwood, quote from The Robber Bride

“Art is long and life is brief and mortality looms.”
― Margaret Atwood, quote from The Robber Bride

“Her face is silting up, like a pond; layers are accumulating. Every once in a while, when she can afford the time, she spends a few days at a spa north of the city, drinking vegetable juice and having ultrasound treatments, in search of her original face, the one she knows is under there somewhere; she comes back feeling toned up and virtuous, and hungry.”
― Margaret Atwood, quote from The Robber Bride

“The story of Zenia ought to begin when Zenia began. It must have been someplace long ago and distant in space, thinks Tony; someplace bruised, and very tangled. A European print, hand-tinted, ochre-coloured, with dusty sunlight and a lot of bushes in it- bushes with thick leaves and ancient twisted roots, behind which, out of sight in the undergrowth and hinted at only by a boot protruding, or a slack hand, something ordinary but horrifying is taking place.”
― Margaret Atwood, quote from The Robber Bride

“he doesn't know it, but this touching she does is not only compassionate, but possessive.”
― Margaret Atwood, quote from The Robber Bride

“She walks towards Karen and Karen feels a cool wind against her skin, and the grandmother holds out both of her knobby old hands, and Karen puts out her own hands and touches her, and her hands feel as if sand is falling over them. There's a smell of milkweed flowers and garden soil. The grandmother keeps on walking; her eyes are light blue, and her cheek comes against Karen's, cool grains of dry rice. Then she's like the dots on the comic page, close up, and then she's only a swirl in the air, and then she's gone.”
― Margaret Atwood, quote from The Robber Bride

“Condoms seemed to her inherently wicked. But they were also inherently funny. They were like rubber gloves with only one finger, and every time she saw one she had to be severe with herself or she’d get the giggles, a terrifying thought because the man might think you were laughing at him, at his dick, at its size, and that would be fatal.”
― Margaret Atwood, quote from The Robber Bride

“She probably has a row of men's dicks nailed to her wall, like stuffed animal heads.”
― Margaret Atwood, quote from The Robber Bride

“She stood for a long time, breathing in and breathing in, the scent of the trees and dogs and night flowers and water, because this was the best thing, it was what she wanted, to be outside in the night by herself. She wasn't sick any longer.”
― Margaret Atwood, quote from The Robber Bride

About the author

Popular quotes

“Don’t look down when someone’s talking to you. You look them straight in the eyes. You’re bigger than that.”
― Jettie Woodruff, quote from Suit

“Kate felt very offended. 'I am not an elf,' she insisted. 'I'm an Englishwoman!”
― Clare B. Dunkle, quote from The Hollow Kingdom

“Her face was fair and pretty, with eyes like two bits of night sky, each with a star dissolved in the blue.”
― George MacDonald, quote from The Princess and the Goblin

“Killing children or adults -- equally horrible.”
― NisiOisiN, quote from Death Note: Another Note - The Los Angeles BB Murder Cases

“What are you so angry about?" my mother had asked me the last time I had gone home to visit.

Why aren't you more angry, I had wanted to ask her. But I couldn't talk to my mother that way. She understood that I did not want to live her life, to work as a waitress, until my toes curled in and my feet hurt all the time, to marry a man who would beat my children and treat me as if I had no right to object to object to anything he chose to do. She didn't want that life for me either. She wanted me happy and successful, to live unafraid among people who loved me, and to do things she had never been able to do and tell her all about them.

So I told her, about the shelter, the magazine, readings and discussion groups. I told her about trying to write stories, though I hesitated to send send her all that I wrote. And there were far too many times when I would sit down to write my mama and stare at the paper unable to puzzle out how to explain how urgent and unimportant it was to change how women's lives were shaped. Not only that we should be paid equal money for equally difficult work, but that we should genuinely begin to think about what word we might choose to undertake, how we might live our daily lives. Why should I have to marry at all? Or explain myself if I chose to love a woman? Why could I not spend my hours writing stories instead of raising children or keeping house or working some deadly boring job just to cover the rent of an apartments where I was not safe anyway.”
― Marilyn French, quote from The Women's Room

Interesting books

About BookQuoters

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.

We thoughtfully gather quotes from our favorite books, both classic and current, and choose the ones that are most thought-provoking. Each quote represents a book that is interesting, well written and has potential to enhance the reader’s life. We also accept submissions from our visitors and will select the quotes we feel are most appealing to the BookQuoters community.

Founded in 2023, BookQuoters has quickly become a large and vibrant community of people who share an affinity for books. Books are seen by some as a throwback to a previous world; conversely, gleaning the main ideas of a book via a quote or a quick summary is typical of the Information Age but is a habit disdained by some diehard readers. We feel that we have the best of both worlds at BookQuoters; we read books cover-to-cover but offer you some of the highlights. We hope you’ll join us.