Margaret Atwood Quotes

We were the people who were not in the papers. We lived in the blank white spaces at the edges of print. It gave us more freedom.
We lived in the gaps between the stories.

Modesty is invisibility. Never forget it. To be seen – to be seen – is to be – her voice trembled – penetrated. What you must be, girls, is impenetrable.

You don’t believe the sky is falling until a chunk of it falls on you.

You can’t help what you feel, but you can help how you behave.

What I need is perspective. The illusion of depth, created by a frame, the arrangement of shapes on a flat surface. Perspective is necessary. Otherwise there are only two dimensions. Otherwise you live with your face squashed against a wall, everything a huge foreground, of details, close-ups, hairs, the weave of the bedsheet, the molecules of the face. Your own skin like a map, a diagram of futility, crisscrossed with tiny roads that lead nowhere. Otherwise you live in the moment. Which is not where I want to be.

We get along by a symbiotic adjustment of habits and with a minimum of that pale-mauve hostility you often find among women.

Truly amazing, what people can get used to, as long as there are a few compensations.

The moment of betrayal is the worst, the moment when you know beyond any doubt that you’ve been betrayed: that some other human being has wished you that much evil.

Sanity is a valuable possession; I hoard it the way people once hoarded money. I save it, so I will have enough, when the time comes.

Freedom, like everything else, is relative.

All you have to do, I tell myself, is keep your mouth shut and look stupid. It shouldn’t be that hard.

You must cultivate poverty of spirit. Blessed are the meek. She didn’t go on to say anything about inheriting the earth.