Margaret Atwood

"You can think clearly only with your clothes on."

"He was not a monster, to her. Probably he had some endearing trait: he whistled, off key, in the shower, he had a yen for truffles, he called his dog Liebchen and made it sit up for little pieces of raw steak. How easy it is to invent a humanity, for anyone at all."

"Freedom, like everything else, is relative."

"A divorce is like an amputation; you survive, but there’s less of you."

"Well, maybe Im a latent homosexual." He considered that for a moment. "Or maybe Im a latent heterosexual. Anyway, Im pretty latent. I dont know why. Of course, Ive taken a number of stabs at it, but then I start thinking about the futility of it all and I give up. Maybe its because youre expected to do something and after a certain point all I want to do is lie there and stare at the ceiling."

"The Eskimo has fifty-two names for snow because it is important to them; there ought to be as many for love."

"I would rather dance as a ballerina, though faultily, than as a flawless clown."

"He had that faint sick look in his eyes, as if he wanted to give her something, charity for instance."

"Another belief of mine: that everyone else my age is an adult, whereas I am merely in disguise."

"Why do men feel threatened by women?" I asked a male friend of mine. (I love that wonderful rhetorical device, "a male friend of mine." Its often used by female journalists when they want to say something particularly bitchy but dont want to be held responsible for it themselves. It also lets people know that you do have male friends, that you arent one of those fire-breathing mythical monsters, The Radical Feminists, who walk around with little pairs of scissors and kick men in the shins if they open doors for you. "A male friend of mine" also gives — let us admit it — a certain weight to the opinions expressed.) So this male friend of mine, who does by the way exist, conveniently entered into the following dialogue. "I mean," I said, "men are bigger, most of the time, they can run faster, strangle better, and they have on the average a lot more money and power." "Theyre afraid women will laugh at them," he said. "Undercut their world view." Then I asked some women students in a quickie poetry seminar I was giving, "Why do women feel threatened by men?" "Theyre afraid of being killed," they said."

"Time is not a line but a dimension, like the dimensions of space."

"A movie about the past is not the same as the past."