Quotes from The Year of the Flood

“What am I living for and what am I dying for are the same question.”
― Margaret Atwood, quote from The Year of the Flood

“Maybe that's what love is, I thought: it's being pissed off.”
― Margaret Atwood, quote from The Year of the Flood

“You can forget who you are if you're alone too much.”
― Margaret Atwood, quote from The Year of the Flood

“...we must be a beacon of hope, because if you tell people there's nothing they can do, they will do worse than nothing.”
― Margaret Atwood, quote from The Year of the Flood

“Remember,' she'd tell her staff, 'every customer wants to feel like a princess, and princesses are selfish and overbearing.”
― Margaret Atwood, quote from The Year of the Flood

“I could see how you could do extreme things for the person you loved. Adam One said that when you loved a person, that love might not always get returned the way you wanted, but it was a good thing anyway because love went out all around you like an energy wave, and a creature you didn't know would be helped by it.”
― Margaret Atwood, quote from The Year of the Flood

“We shouldn't have been so scornful; we should have had compassion. But compassion takes work, and we were young.”
― Margaret Atwood, quote from The Year of the Flood

“How easy it is, treachery. You just slide into it.”
― Margaret Atwood, quote from The Year of the Flood

“Amazing how the heart clutches at anything familiar, whimpering Mine!Mine!”
― Margaret Atwood, quote from The Year of the Flood

“Why are we designed to see the world as supremely beautiful just as we're about to be snuffed? Do rabbits feel the same as the fox teeth bite down on their necks? Is it mercy?”
― Margaret Atwood, quote from The Year of the Flood

“All Creatures know that some must die
That all the rest may take and eat;
Sooner or later, all transform
Their blood to wine, their flesh to meat.

But Man alone seeks Vengefulness,
And writes his abstract Laws on stone;
For this false Justice he has made,
He tortures limb and crushes bone.

Is this the image of a god?
My tooth for yours, your eye for mine?
Oh, if Revenge did move the stars
Instead of Love, they would not shine.”
― Margaret Atwood, quote from The Year of the Flood

“I tried to visualize my jealousy as a yellowy-brown cloud boiling around inside me, then going out through my nose like smoke and turning into a stone and falling down into the ground. That did work a little. But in my visualization a plant covered with poison berries would grow out of the stone, whether I wanted it to or not.”
― Margaret Atwood, quote from The Year of the Flood

“She said love was useless, because it led you into dumb exchanges in which you gave too much away, and then you got bitter and mean.”
― Margaret Atwood, quote from The Year of the Flood

“Without the light, no chance; without the dark, no dance.”
― Margaret Atwood, quote from The Year of the Flood

“Maybe sadness was a kind of hunger, she thought. Maybe the two went together.”
― Margaret Atwood, quote from The Year of the Flood

“Now I can see how that can happen. You can fall in love with anybody--a fool, a criminal, a nothing. There are no good rules.”
― Margaret Atwood, quote from The Year of the Flood

“You couldn’t leave words lying around where our enemies might find them.”
― Margaret Atwood, quote from The Year of the Flood

“I'm fine," said Pilar, "for the moment. And the moment is the only time we can be fine in.”
― Margaret Atwood, quote from The Year of the Flood

“As with all knowledge, once you knew it, you couldn't imagine how it was that you hadn't known it before. Like stage magic, knowledge before you knew it took place before your very eyes, but you were looking elsewhere.”
― Margaret Atwood, quote from The Year of the Flood

“It's better to hope than mope!”
― Margaret Atwood, quote from The Year of the Flood

“The Adams and the Eves used to say, We are what we eat, but I prefer to say, we are what we wish. Because if you can't wish, why bother?”
― Margaret Atwood, quote from The Year of the Flood

“But reality has too much darkness in it. Too many crows”
― Margaret Atwood, quote from The Year of the Flood

“She knows she's deceiving herself about that, but she prefers to deceive herself. She desperately needs to believe such pure joy is still possible.”
― Margaret Atwood, quote from The Year of the Flood

“Thus the time passed. Toby stopped counting it. In any case, time is not a thing that passes, said Pilar: it’s a sea on which you float.”
― Margaret Atwood, quote from The Year of the Flood

“Why can't I believe? she asked the darkness.
Behind her eyelids she saw an animal. It was golden colour, with gentle green eyes and canine teeth, and curly wool instead of fur. It opened its mouth, but it did not speak. Instead, it yawned.
It gazed at her. She gazed at it. "You are the effect of a carefully calibrated blend of plant toxins," she told it.
Then she fell asleep.”
― Margaret Atwood, quote from The Year of the Flood

“What restless woman can resist a man with a shovel in one hand and a glowing rose bush in the other, and a moderately crazed glitter in his eyes that might be mistaken for love?”
― Margaret Atwood, quote from The Year of the Flood

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“Wishing is the beginning of imagination. They practice wishing when they are young things, and then -when they have grown - they have a developed imagination. Which can do some harm - greed, that kind of thing - but more often does them some good. They can imagine that things might be different. Might be other than they seem. Could be better.”
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