Catherine Diana > Catherine's Quotes

“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, The Year of the Flood

“Human understanding is fallible, and we see through a glass, darkly. Any religion is a shadow of God. But the shadows of God are not God.”
― Margaret Atwood, The Year of the Flood

“...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, The Year of the Flood

“Remember,' she'd tell her staff, 'every customer wants to feel like a princess, and princesses are selfish and overbearing.”
― Margaret Atwood, The Year of the Flood

“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, The Year of the Flood

“Amazing how the heart clutches at anything familiar, whimpering Mine!Mine!”
― Margaret Atwood, The Year of the Flood

“She said love was useless, because it led you into dumb exchanges in which you gave too much away, and then you got bitter and mean.”
― Margaret Atwood, The Year of the Flood

“Now I can see how that can happen. You can fall in love with anybody--a fool, a criminal, a nothing. There are no good rules.”
― Margaret Atwood, The Year of the Flood

“It's better to hope than mope!”
― Margaret Atwood, The Year of the Flood

“What restless woman can resist a man with a shovel in one hand and a glowing rose bush in the other, and a moderately crazed glitter in his eyes that might be mistaken for love?”
― Margaret Atwood, The Year of the Flood

“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, The Year of the Flood

“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, The Year of the Flood

“It's kind of shocking to hear Toby called a babe; sort of like calling God a studmuffin.”
― Margaret Atwood, The Year of the Flood

“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, The Year of the Flood

“The human moral keyboard is limited, Adam One used to say: there's nothing you can play on it that hasn't been played before. And, my dear Friends, I am sorry to say this, but it has its lower notes.”
― Margaret Atwood, The Year of the Flood

“Unlike some other religions, we have never felt it served a higher purpose to lie to children about geology.”
― Margaret Atwood, The Year of the Flood

“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, The Year of the Flood

“But compassion takes work, and we were young.”
― Margaret Atwood, The Year of the Flood

“Nature may be dumb as a sack of hammers, Zeb used to say, but it's smarter than you.”
― Margaret Atwood, The Year of the Flood

“Now I can see how that can happen. You can fall in love with anybody — a fool, a criminal, a nothing. There are no good rules.”
― Margaret Atwood, The Year of the Flood

“We dangle by a flimsy thread,
Our little lives are grains of sand:
The Cosmos is a tiny sphere
Held in the hollow of God's hand.

Give up your anger and your spite,
And imitate the Deer, the Tree;
In sweet Forgiveness find your joy,
For it alone can set you free.”
― Margaret Atwood, The Year of the Flood

“Maybe sadness was a kind of hunger, she thought. Maybe the two went together.”
― Margaret Atwood, The Year of the Flood

“The Human Words of God speak of the Creation in terms that could be understood by the men of old. There is no talk of galaxies or genes, for such terms would have confused them greatly! But must we therefore take as scientific fact the story that the world was created in six days, thus making a nonsense of observable data?”
― Margaret Atwood, The Year of the Flood

“The light flickers on all of us and makes us look softer and more beautiful than we really are. But sometimes it makes us darker and scarier too, when the faces go into shadow and you can’t see the eyes, only the eye sockets. Deep pools of blackness welling out of our heads. My”
― Margaret Atwood, The Year of the Flood

“War is what happens when language fails.”
― Margaret Atwood

“Another belief of mine: that everyone else my age is an adult, whereas I am merely in disguise.”
― Margaret Atwood, Cat's Eye

“Men are afraid that women will laugh at them. Women are afraid that men will kill them.”
― Margaret Atwood

“If you knew what was going to happen, if you knew everything that was going to happen next—if you knew in advance the consequences of your own actions—you'd be doomed. You'd be ruined as God. You'd be a stone. You'd never eat or drink or laugh or get out of bed in the morning. You'd never love anyone, ever again. You'd never dare to.”
― Margaret Atwood, The Blind Assassin

“Longed for him. Got him. Shit.”
― Margaret Atwood

“Stupidity is the same as evil if you judge by the results.”
― Margaret Atwood, Surfacing