“Take me to your trees. Take me to your breakfasts, your sunsets, your bad dreams, your shoes, your nouns. Take me to your fingers.”— Margaret Atwood, amazon.com
“When you're young, you think everything you do is disposable. You move from now to now, crumpling time up in your hands, tossing it away. You're your own speeding car. You think you can get rid of things, and people too—leave them behind. You don't yet know about the habit they have, of coming back.”— Margaret Atwood, amazon.comTagged: Youth, Growing Up, Time
“Potential has a shelf life.”— Margaret Atwood, amazon.comTagged: Potential, Opportunity, Going For It, Ambition
“Why does the mind do such things? Turn on us, rend us, dig the claws in. If you get hungry enough, they say, you start eating your own heart. Maybe it's much the same.”— Margaret Atwood, amazon.comTagged: Mind, Perception, Obsessiveness, Obsessing
“If we were all on trial for our thoughts, we would all be hanged.”— Margaret Atwood, amazon.comTagged: Thoughts, Perspective, Perception
“When you are in the middle of a story it isn't a story at all, but only a confusion; a dark roaring, a blindness, a wreckage of shattered glass and splintered wood; like a house in a whirlwind, or else a boat crushed by the icebergs or swept over the rapids, and all aboard powerless to stop it. It's…”— Margaret Atwood, amazon.comTagged: Confusion, Middles, Stories, Uncertainty
“I’m working on my own life story. I don’t mean I’m putting it together; no, I’m taking it apart. It’s mostly a question of editing. If you’d wanted the narrative line you should have asked earlier, when I still knew everything and was more than willing to tell.”— Margaret Atwood, amazon.comTagged: Life, Story, Confusion, Uncertainty, Change
“I wanted to forget the past, but it refused to forget me; it waited for sleep, then cornered me.”— Margaret Atwood, amazon.comTagged: The Past, Nostalgia, Moving On, Forgetting
“Happiness is a garden walled with glass: there's no way in or out. In Paradise there are no stories, because there are no journeys. It's loss and regret and misery and yearning that drive the story forward, along its twisted road.”— Margaret Atwood, amazon.comTagged: Happiness, Joy, Pain, Loss, Grieving
“We love each other, that’s true whatever it means, but we aren’t good at it; for some it’s a talent, for others only an addiction.”— Margaret Atwood, amazon.comTagged: Love, Addiction, Relationships
“What we share may be a lot like a traffic accident but we get one another. We are survivors of each other. We have been shark to one another, but also lifeboat. That counts for something.”— Margaret Atwood, amazon.comTagged: Love, Co-dependency, Relationships, Exes, Ex-Lovers
“I want everything back, the way it was. But there is no point to it, this wanting.”— Margaret Atwood, amazon.comTagged: Wanting, Desire, Change, Nostalgia
“Love blurs your vision; but after it recedes, you can see more clearly than ever. It's like the tide going out, revealing whatever's been thrown away and sunk: broken bottles, old gloves, rusting pop cans, nibbled fishbodies, bones. This is the kind of thing you see if you sit in the darkness with o…”— Margaret Atwood, amazon.comTagged: Love, Loving People, Future, Life, Confusion
“Ignoring isn’t the same as ignorance, you have to work at it.”— Margaret Atwood, amazon.comTagged: Igorance, Ignoring
“We yearned for the future. How did we learn it, that talent for insatiability?”— Margaret Atwood, amazon.comTagged: Future, Change, Yearning
“If you knew what was going to happen, if you knew everything that was going to happen next—if you knew in advance the consequences of your own actions—you'd be doomed. You'd be ruined as God. You'd be a stone. You'd never eat or drink or laugh or get out of bed in the morning. You'd never love anyon…”— Margaret Atwood, amazon.comTagged: Future, Clarity, Depression, Understanding, Big Picture
“Beginnings are sudden, but also insidious. They creep up on you sideways, they keep to the shadows, they lurk unrecognized. Then, later, they spring.”— Margaret Atwood, amazon.comTagged: Beginnings, Change, Endings
“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 up against a wall, everything a huge foreground, of details, close-ups, ha…”— Margaret Atwood, amazon.comTagged: Perspective, Life, Change
“A home filled with nothing but yourself. It's heavy, that lightness. It's crushing, that emptiness.”— Margaret Atwood, amazon.comTagged: self, Self-Concept, Emptiness, Sadness
“Hatred would have been easier. With hatred, I would have known what to do. Hatred is clear, metallic, one-handed, unwavering; unlike love.”— Margaret Atwood, amazon.comTagged: Hatred, Anger, Love
“I am not your justification for existence.”— Margaret Atwood, amazon.comTagged: Existence, justification, Love, Idealism, Idealizing Someone
“Farewells can be shattering, but returns are surely worse. Solid flesh can never live up to the bright shadow cast by its absence. Time and distance blur the edges; then suddenly the beloved has arrived, and it's noon with its merciless light, and every spot and pore and wrinkle and bristle stands c…”— Margaret Atwood, amazon.comTagged: Truth, Farewells, Goodbyes, Saying Goodbye, Returning
“When we think of the past it's the beautiful things we pick out. We want to believe it was all like that.”— Margaret Atwood, amazon.comTagged: The Past, Nostalgia, Truth, Perception, Memory
“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.”— Margaret Atwood, amazon.comTagged: Freedom, Stories, People, Life
“The best way of keeping a secret is to pretend there isn't one.”— Margaret Atwood, amazon.comTagged: Secrets, Keeping Secrets
“The only way you can write the truth is to assume that what you set down will never be read. Not by any other person, and not even by yourself at some later date. Otherwise you begin excusing yourself.”— Margaret Atwood, amazon.comTagged: Truth, Writing, Creativity
“But who can remember pain, once it’s over? All that remains of it is a shadow, not in the mind even, in the flesh. Pain marks you, but too deep to see. Out of sight, out of mind.”— Margaret Atwood, amazon.comTagged: Pain, Memory, Remembering
“Madness is only an amplification of what you already are.”— Margaret Atwood, amazon.comTagged: Madness, Personality, Mental Health, Mental Illness
“I see that there will be no end to imperfection, or to doing things the wrong way. Even if you grow up, no matter how hard you scrub, whatever you do, there will always be some other stain or spot on your face or stupid act, somebody frowning.”— Margaret Atwood, amazon.comTagged: Imperfection, Perfection, Expectations
“You can only be jealous of someone who has something you think you ought to have yourself.”— Margaret Atwood, amazon.comTagged: Jealousy, Desire