Quote

Once a month I wake in the night, slippery with terror. I'm afraid, not because there's someone in the room, in the dark, in the bed, but because there isn't. I'm afraid of the emptiness, which lies beside me like a corpse.

Margaret Atwood

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Margaret Atwood
Age: 85
Born: 1939
Born: November 18
Essayist
Inventor
Literary Critic
Non-Fiction Writer
Novelist
Pedagogue
Poet
Science Fiction Writer
Writer
Ottawa (Ontario)
Margaret Eleanor Atwood
Room
Emptiness
Rooms
Month
Dark
Wake
Lying
Terror
Night
Bed
Corpse
Someone
Lies
Slippery
Like
Afraid
Corpses
Months
Beside

More quotes by Margaret Atwood

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I'm not senile, I snapped. If I burn the house down it will be on purpose.
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Children were vehicles for passing things along. These things could be kingdoms, rich wedding gifts, stories, grudges, blood feuds. Through children, alliances were forged through children, wrongs were avenged. To have a child was to set loose a force in the world.
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Time has not stood still. It has washed over me, washed me away, as if I'm nothing more than a woman of sand, left by a careless child too near the water.
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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.
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Some cleric putting a match to her. /Neither of them looks happy about it. /Once lit, she'll burn like a book, /like a book that was ever finished, /like a locked-up library.
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We battled in secret, undeclared, and after a while I no longer fought back because I never won. The only defense was flight, invisibility.
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He was deciding whether to cut her throat or love her forever.
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I didn't much like it, this grudge-holding against the past.
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Confronted by too much emptiness ... 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?
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for me the novel is a social vehicle, it reflects society.
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I'm a Red Tory. To get a fix on this category, you have to go back to the 19th century. The Tories were the ones who believed that those in power had a responsibility to the community, that money should not be the measure of all things.
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I write as if I've lived a lot of things I haven't lived.
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It isn't chic for women to be drunk. Men drunks are more excusable, more easily absolved, but why? It must be thought they have better reasons.
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Better never means better for everyone... It always means worse, for some.
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But in the end, back she comes. There's no use resisting. She goes to him for amnesia, for oblivion. She renders herself up, is blotted out enters the darkness of her own body, forgets her name. Immolation is what she wants, however briefly. To exist without boundaries.
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I was once a graduate student in Victorian literature, and I believe as the Victorian novelists did, that a novel isn't simply a vehicle for private expression, but that it also exists for social examination. I firmly believe this.
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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.
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Farewells can be shattering, but returns are surely worse. Solid flesh can never live up to the bright shadow cast by its absence.
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Where do you draw the line, between love and greed? We never did know, we always wanted more. We want to take it all in, for one last time, we want to eat the world with our eyes.
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This is how the girl who couldn't speak and the man who couldn't see fell in love.
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