Margaret Atwood

I read for pleasure and that is the moment I learn the most.

When any civilization is dust and ashes," he said, "art is all that's left over. Images, words, music. Imaginative structures. Meaning__uman meaning, that is__s defined by them. You have to admit that.

You can't lead if no one will follow.

Falling in love, we said; I fell for him. We were falling women. We believed in it, this downward motion: so lovely, like flying, and yet at the same time so dire, so extreme, so unlikely. God is love, they once said, but we reversed that, and love, like heaven, was always just around the corner. The more difficult it was to love the particular man beside us, the more we believed in Love, abstract and total. We were waiting, always, for the incarnation. That word, made flesh.And sometimes it happened, for a time. That kind of love comes and goes and is hard to remember afterwards, like pain. You would look at the man one day and you would think, I loved you, and the tense would be past, and you would be filled with a sense of wonder, because it was such an amazing and precarious and dumb thing to have done; and you would know too why your friends had been evasive about it, at the time.There is a good deal of comfort, now, in remembering this.

A Paradox, the doughnut hole. Empty space, once, but now they've learned to market even that. A minus quantity; nothing, rendered edible. I wondered if they might be used-metaphorically, of course-to demonstrate the existence of God. Does naming a sphere of nothingness transmute it into being?

Like preachers, I sell vision,like perfume ads, desireor its facsimile. Like jokesor war, it__ all in the timing.I sell men back their worse suspicions:that everything__ for sale,

As we know from the study of history, no new system can impose itself upon a previous one without incorporating many of the elements to be found in the latter...

There is never only one, of anyone

Our big mistake was teaching them to read. We won't do that again.

My self is a thing that I must now compose...as one composes a speech. What I must present is a 'made' thing. Not something born.

To have them putting him on, trying him on, trying him out while he himself puts them on like a sock over a foot onto the stub of himself--his extra sensitive thumb, his tentacle, his delicate, stalked slug's eye which extrudes, expands, winces and shrivels back into himself when touched wrongly, grows big again. Bulging a little at the tip, traveling forward as if along a leaf into them, avid for vision. To achieve vision in this way; this journey into a darkness that is composed of women--a woman--who can see in darkness while he himself strains blindly forward.

According to Tobias, women hang around longer because they__e less capable of indignation and better at being humiliated, for what is old age but one long string of indignities? What person of integrity would put up with it?

I have periods now, like normal girls; I too am among the knowing, I too can sit out volleyball games and go to the nurse's for aspirin and waddle along the halls with a pad like a flattened rabbit tail wadded between my legs, sopping with liver-colored blood.

I am tempted to think that to be despised by her sex is a very great compliment to a woman.

Forgiving men is so much easier than forgiving women.

Vanity is becoming a nuisance, I can see why women give it up, eventually. But I'm not ready for that yet.

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

I'm not senile," I snapped. "If I burn the house down it will be on purpose.