1
We shouldn't have been so scornful; we should have had compassion. But compassion takes work, and we were young.Margaret Atwood
2
...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
3
Glenn used to say the reason you can't really imagine yourself being dead was that as soon as you say, 'I'll be dead, ' you've said the word I, and so you're still alive inside the sentence. And that's how people got the idea of the immortality of the soul - it was a consequence of grammar.Margaret Atwood
4
If you really want to stay the same age you are now forever and ever, she'd be thinking, try jumping off the roof: death's a sure-fire method for stopping time.Margaret Atwood
5
Via the conduit of a wild dog pack, she has now made the ultimate Gift to her fellow Creatures, and has become part of God's great dance of proteins.Margaret Atwood
6
So we couldn't mingle with them, but we could eavesdrop. We got our knowledge that way--we caught it like germs.Margaret Atwood
7
What am I living for and what am I dying for are the same question.Margaret Atwood
8
But it seems she’d wanted children after all, because when she was told she’d been accidentally sterilized she could feel all the light leaking out of her.Margaret Atwood
9
According to Adam One, the Fall of Man was multidimensional. The ancestral primates fell out of the trees; then they fell from vegetarianism into meat-eating. Then they fell from instinct into reason, and thus into technology; from simple signals into complex grammar, and thus into humanity; from firelessness into fire, and thence into weaponry; and from seasonal mating into an incessant sexual twitching. Then they fell from a joyous life in the moment into the anxious contemplation of the vanished past and the distant future. .Margaret Atwood
10
But she went to tell the bees. She felt like an idiot doing it, but she'd promised. She remembered that it wasn't enough just to think at them: you had to say the words out loud. Bees were the messengers between this world and the other worlds, Pilar had said. Between the living and the dead. They carried the Word made air.Margaret Atwood
11
You couldn’t leave words lying around where our enemies might find them.Margaret Atwood
12
Confronted by too much emptiness, said Adam One, the brain invents. Loneliness creates company as thirst creates water. How many sailors have been wrecked in pursuit of islands that were merely a shimmering?Margaret Atwood
13
Why do we want other people to like us, even if we don't really care about them all that much?Margaret Atwood
14
If someone wants to suck your toes, those toes should be worth sucking.Margaret Atwood
15
Yet each flower, each twig, each pebble, shines as though illuminated from within, as once before, on her first day in the Garden. It’s the stress, it’s the adrenalin, it’s a chemical effect: she knows this well enough. But why is it built in? she thinks. 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
16
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
17
Also I could hear Amanda’s voice: Why are you being so weak? Love’s never a fair trade. So Jimmy’s tired of you, so what, there’s guys all over the place like germs, and you can pick them like flowers and toss them away when they’re wilted. But you have to act like you’re having a spectacular time and every day’s a party.Margaret Atwood