A bachelor, a studio, those were the names for that kind of apartment. Separate entrance it would say in the ads, and that meant you could have sex, unobserved.

— Margaret Atwood

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 tirelessness into fire, and thence into weaponry; and from seasonal mating into an incessant sexual twitching. Then they fell from a joyous life at the moment into the anxious contemplation of the vanished past and the distant future.

— Margaret Atwood

According to Tobias, women hang around longer because they’re less capable of indignation and better at being humiliated, for what is old age but one long string of indignities? What person of integrity would put up with it?

— Margaret Atwood

A divorce is like an amputation: you survive it but there's less of you.

— Margaret Atwood

After having imposed itself on us like the egomaniac it is, clamoring about its own needs, foisting upon us its own sordid and perilous desires, the body's final trick is simply to absent itself. Just when you need it, just when you could use an arm or a leg, suddenly the body has other things to do. It falters, it buckles under you; it melts away as if made of snow, leaving nothing much. Two lumps of coal, an old hat, a grin made of pebbles. The bones dry sticks, easily broken.

— Margaret Atwood

After they had skated around the pond several times, my father asked my mother to marry him. I expect he did it awkwardly, but awkwardness in men was a sign of sincerity then.

— Margaret Atwood

Ah men, why do you want all this attention? I can write poems for myself, make love to a doorknob if absolutely necessary. What do you have to offer me can't find otherwise except humiliation? Which I no longer need.

— Margaret Atwood

A home filled with nothing but yourself. It's heavy, that lightness. It's crushing, that emptiness.

— Margaret Atwood

Alcohol's a depressant, it will let me down later.

— Margaret Atwood

All stories are about wolves. All worth repeating, that is. Anything else is sentimental drivel.

— Margaret Atwood