Every habit he’s ever had is still there in his body, lying dormant like flowers in the desert. Given the right conditions, all his old addictions would burst into full and luxuriant bloom.

Don’t let the bastards grind you down.

Publishing a book is like stuffing a note into a bottle and hurling it into the sea. Some bottles drown, some come safe to land, where the notes are read and then possibly cherished, or...

We ate the birds. We ate them. We wanted their songs to flow up through our throats and burst out of our mouths, and so we ate them. We wanted their feathers to bud from...

Nature is an expert in cost-benefit analysis,’ she says. ‘Although she does her accounting a little differently. As for debts, she always collects in the long run…

A voice is a human gift; it should be cherished and used, to utter fully human speech as possible. Powerlessness and silence go together.

Never pray for justice, because you might get some.

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.

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

I’m a strict, strict agnostic. It’s very different from a casual, ‘I don’t know.’ It’s that you cannot present as knowledge something that is not knowledge. You can present it as faith, you can present...

Canada is a balloon-puncturing country. You are not really allowed to be an icon unless you also make an idiot of yourself.

The society in ‘The Handmaid’s Tale’ is a throwback to the early Puritans whom I studied extensively at Harvard under Perry Miller, to whom the book is dedicated.

Science never makes things that do not have to do with what we feel, by which I mean what we want and what we fear.

I follow suit, said the lion, vacating his coat of arms and movie logos; and the eagle said, Get me off this flag.

Thinking he knows can be a trap. An ex-professor once told him he had a diamond-hard intellect and he’d been flattered at the time. Now he considers the nature of diamonds. Although sharp and glittering...

To want is to have a weakness.

Her face is silting up, like a pond; layers are accumulating. Every once in a while, when she can afford the time, she spends a few days at a spa north of the city, drinking...

Some people write letters, in the library.

Two-thirty comes during Testifying. It’s Janine, telling about how she was gang-raped at fourteen and had an abortion.But whose fault was it? Aunt Helena says, holding up one plump finger. Her fault, her fault, her...

Romance takes place in the middle distance. Romance is looking in at yourself through a window clouded with dew. Romance means leaving things out: where life grunts and shuffles, romance only sighs.

So we couldn’t mingle with them, but we could eavesdrop. We got our knowledge that way–we caught it like germs.

From her handbag she takes a round gilt compact with violets on the cover. She opens it, unclosing her other self, and runs her fingertip around the corners of her mouth, left one, right one;...

He keeps his voice kindly but remote. A cross between a pedagogue, soothsayer, and a benevolent uncle – that should be his tone.

What would that be like – to long, to yearn for someone who is right there before your eyes, day in and day out?

They spent the first three years of school getting you to pretend stuff and then the rest of it marking you down if you did the same thing.

With the young writers now it’s F and C all day long, which he, personally, finds boring.

Or he’d watch the news: more plagues, more famines, more floods, more insect or microbe or small-mammal outbreaks, more droughts, more chickenshit boy-soldier wars in distant countries. Why was everything so much like itself?

You’re never going to kill storytelling, because it’s built into the human plan. We come with it.

People use technology only to mean digital technology. Technology is actually everything we make.

Genres aren’t closed boxes. Stuff flows back and forth across the borders all the time.

I have been known to buy e-versions of my books because I was in a hotel room and I needed one right away to look up something in it; very handy for that – you...

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

More powerful than God, more evil than the Devil; the poor have it, the rich lack it, and if you eat it you die?

But if you happen to be a man, sometime in the future, and you’ve made it this far, please remember: you will never be subjected to the temptation of feeling you must forgive, a man,...

Genius is an infinite capacity for causing pain.

Hatred would have been easier. With hatred, I would have known what to do. Hatred is clear, metallic, one-handed, unwavering; unlike love.

You might even provide a Heaven for them. We need You for that. Hell we can make for ourselves.

This is what I miss, Cordelia: not something that’s gone, but something that will never happen. Two old women giggling over their tea.

Even sex was no longer what it had once been, though he was still as addicted to it as ever. He felt jerked around by his own dick, as if the rest of him was...

But thoughtless ingratitude is the armour of the young; without it, how would they ever get through life? The old wish the young well, but they wish them ill also: they would like to eat...

I wasn’t even sure I wanted a man in my life again; by that time I’d exhausted the notion that the answer to a man is another man, and I was out of breath.

Touch comes before sight, before speech. It is the first language and the last, and it always tells the truth.

It is shocking how many crimes the Bible contains. The Governor’s wife should cut them all out and paste them into her scrapbook.

Before the Civil War, Canada was at the top of the underground railroad. If you made it into Canada, you were safe unless someone came and hauled you back. That was also true during the...

If it’s all instruction, you get annoyed with it and bored, and you stop reading. If it’s all entertainment, you read it quite quickly, your heart going pitty-pat, pitty-pat. But when you finish, that’s it....

Communications technology changes possibilities for communication, but that doesn’t mean it changes the inherited structure of the brain. So you may think that you’re addicted to online reading, but as soon as it isn’t available...

The thing about delirium is you think it’s great, but it actually isn’t.

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

Put yourself in a different room, that’s what the mind is for.

[Northrop] Frye was concerned mostly with literary criticism, and myths interested him as structural elements in works of literature. He used the word myth to mean story, without attaching any connotation of truth or falsehood...