Margaret Atwood

The Eskimos had fifty-two names for snow because it was important to them there ought to be as many for love.

Fear has a smell as Love does.

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.

There are some women who seem to be born without fear just as there are people who are born without the ability to feel pain. ... Providence appears to protect such women maybe out of astonishment.

If the national mental illness of the United States is megalomania that of Canada is paranoid schizophrenia.

The truly fearless think of themselves as normal.

It's impossible to say a thing exactly the way it was, because of what you say can never be exact, you always have to leave something out, there are too many parts, sides, crosscurrents, nuances; too many gestures, which could mean this or that, too many shapes which can never be fully described, too many flavors, in the air or on the tongue, half-colors, too many.

The door of Reverend Verringer__ impressive manse is opened by an elderly female with a face like a pine plank; the Reverend is unmarried, and has need of an irreproachable housekeeper. Simon is ushered into the library. It is so self-consciously the right sort of library that he has an urge to set fire to it.

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.

More powerful than God, more evil than the Devil; the poor have it, the rich lack it, and if you eat it you die?

If he had known unstructured space is a delugeand stocked his log house-boat with all the animals even the wolves, he might have floated. But obstinate hestated, The land is solid and stamped, watching his foot sink down through the stone up to his knee. From "Progressive insanities of a pioneer

Does feminist mean large unpleasant person who'll shout at you or someone who believes women are human beings? To me it's the latter, so I sign up

I sink down into my body as into a swamp, fenland, where only I know the footing_.I__ a cloud, congealed around a central object, the shape of a pear, which is hard and more real than I am and glows red within its translucent wrapping. Inside it is a space, huge as the sky at night and dark and curved like that, though black-red rather than black.

God works in mysterious ways his wonders to perform, as Reenie used to say. Could it be that Myra is my designated guardian angel? Or is she instead a foretaste of Purgatory? And how do you tell the difference?

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

__ow I'm awake to the world. I was asleep before. That's how we let it happen. When they slaughtered Congress, we didn't wake up. When they blamed terrorists and suspended the constitution, we didn't wake up then, either. Nothing changes instantaneously. In a gradually heating bathtub, you'd be boiled to death before you knew it.

A word after a word after a word is power.

You think you can get rid of things, and people too--leave them behind. You don't know yet about the habit they have, of coming back.