Margaret Atwood, The Blind Assassin Quotes

Lose your temper and you lose the fight.

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

There were a lot of gods. Gods always come in handy, they justify almost anything.

Better not to invent her in her absence. Better to wait until she's actually here. Then he can make her up as she goes along.

The young habitually mistake lust for love, they're infested with idealism of all kinds.

Time rises and rises, and when it reaches the level of your eyes you drown.

More and more I feel like a letter—deposited here, collected there. But a letter addressed to no one.

He was deciding whether to cut her throat or love her forever.

This is how the girl who couldn't speak and the man who couldn't see fell in love.

The best way of keeping a secret is to pretend there isn't one.

Those who live alone slide into the habit of vertical eating: why bother with the niceties when there's no one to share or censure? But laxity in one area may lead to derangement in all.

She knows herself to be at the mercy of events, and she knows by now that events have no mercy.

Time in dreams is frozen. You can never get away from where you've been.

But what is a memorial, when you come right down to it, but a commemoration of wounds endured? Endured, and resented. Without memory, there can be no revenge.

I thought my heart was pure. We do like to have such good opinions of our own motives when we're about to do something harmful, to someone else.

Don’t interfere with false gods, you’ll get the gold paint all over your hands.

Every war is the war for whoever's lived through it.

Bless you. Be careful. Anyone intending to meddle with words needs such blessing, such warning.

You think you can get rid of things, and people too--leave them behind. You don't know yet about the habit they have, of coming back.

Where were we? I've forgotten. He was deciding whether to cut her throat or love her forever.Right. Yes. The usual choices.

But unshed tears can turn rancid. So can memory. So can biting your tongue. My bad nights were beginning. I couldn't sleep.

I was tired of her getting away with being so young.

That's the kind of stories I know. Sad ones. Anyway, taken to it's logical conclusion, every story is sad, because at the end everyone dies.

An odd thing souvenir-hunting: now becomes then even while it is still now.

I am not scoffing at goodness, which is far more difficult to explain than evil, and just as complicated. But sometimes it's hard to put up with.

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.

Sympathy from strangers can be ruinous.

...He was wrong about the sadness though: far better to have it when you're young. A sad pretty girl inspires the urge to console, unlike a sad old crone.

They were new money, without a doubt: so new it shrieked. Their clothes looked as it they'd covered themselves in glue, then rolled around in hundred-dollar bills.

What you don’t know won’t hurt you. A dubious maxim: sometimes what you don’t know can hurt you very much.

How did the war creep up? How did it gather itself together? What was it made from? What secrets, lies, betrayals? What loves and hatreds? What sums of money, what metals?

Could it be he was feeling a certain nostalgia for the war, despite its stench and meaningless carnage? For that questionless life of instinct?

Time: old cold time, old sorrow, settling down in layers like silt in a pond.

You shouldn't do that, " said Laura. "You could set yourself on fire.

I'm not senile, " I snapped. "If I burn the house down it will be on purpose.