The truth is seldom welcome, especially at dinner.

Variation on the Word SleepI would like to watch you sleeping,which may not happen.I would like to watch you,sleeping. I would like to sleepwith you, to enteryour sleep as its smooth dark waveslides over my...

You shouldn’t do that,” said Laura. “You could set yourself on fire.

If he had known unstructured space is a delugeand stocked his log house-boat with all the animals even the wolves, he might have floated. But obstinate hestated, The land is solid and stamped, watching his...

I feel despised there, for having so little money; also for once having had so much. I never actually had it, of course. Father had it, and then Richard. But money was imputed to me,...

Men are afraid that women will laugh at them. Women are afraid that men will kill them.

Then we had the irises, rising beautiful and cool on their tall stalks, like blown glass, like pastel water momentarily frozen in a splash, light blue, light mauve, and the darker ones, velvet and purple,...

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

I hope that people will finally come to realize that there is only one ‘race’ – the human race – and that we are all members of it.

We shouldn’t be saying ‘Save the planet’; we should be saying: ‘Save viable conditions in which people can live.’ That’s what we’re dealing with here.

I’m not interested in cutting the feet off my characters or stretching them to make them fit my certain political view.

Writers and books are cheap dates, especially when you compare the cost of a book with a ticket to the opera – or an NHL game.

Night falls. Or has fallen. Why is it that night falls, instead of rising, like the dawn? Yet if you look east, at sunset, you can see night rising, not falling; darkness lifting into the...

What a moron I was to think you were sweet and innocent, when it turns out you were actually college-educated the whole time!

It is very odd to be standing in a locked room in the Penitentiary, speaking with a strange man about France and Italy and Germany. A travelling man. He must be a wanderer, like Jeremiah...

But the body had its own cultural forms. It had its own art. Executions wereits tragedies, pornography was its romance.

I believe in the resistance as I believe there can be no light without shadow; or rather, no shadow unless there is also light.

One of the gravestones in the cemetery near the earliest church has an anchor on it and an hourglass, and the words In Hope.In Hope. Why did they put that above a dead person? Was...

War is what happens when language fails.

We were the people who were not in the papers. We lived in the blank white spaces at the edges of print. It gave us more freedom.We lived in the gaps between the stories.

In the old days, trouble was kept in the family, which is still the best place for it, not that there’s ever a best place for trouble. Why stir everything up again after that many...

But she went to tell the bees. She felt like an idiot doing it, but she’d promised. She remembered that it wasn’t enough just to think at them: you had to say the words out...

I always thought eating was a ridiculous activity anyway. I’d get out of it myself if I could, though you’ve got to do it to stay alive, they tell me.

Life is warped. I’m just in sync.

…otherwise, one of you, most likely the man, would go wandering off on a trajectory of his own, taking his addictive body with him and leaving you with bad withdrawal, which you could counteract by...

We still think of a powerful man as a born leader and a powerful woman as an anomaly.

Debt is part of the human condition. Civilization is based on exchanges – on gifts, trades, loans – and the revenges and insults that come when they are not paid back.

Science and fiction both begin with similar questions: What if? Why? How does it all work? But they focus on different areas of life on earth.

Foreignness is all around. Only in the heart of the heart of the country, namely the heart of the United States, can you avoid such a thing. In the center of an empire, you can...

Just think of it as a very, very long pen.

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.

A lot of people call you a feminist painter.””What indeed,” I say. “I hate party lines, I hate ghettos. Anyway. I’m too old to have invented it and you’re too young to understand it, so...

Nothing is more difficult than to understand the dead, I’ve found; but nothing is more dangerous than to ignore them.

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

As a species we’re doomed by hope, then?You could call it hope. That, or desperation.But we’re doomed without hope, as well, said Jimmy.Only as individuals, said Crake cheerfully.

We have learned to see the world in gasps.

Burst pipes were an English tradition, like so many others.Like, for instance, English men. Charm the knickers off you with their mellow vowels and frivolous verbiage, and then, once they’d got them off, panic and...

But I couldn’t have brought the child here, I never identified it as mine; I didn’t name it before it was born even, the way you’re supposed to. It was my husband’s, he imposed it...

What fabrications they are, mothers. Scarecrows, wax dolls for us to stick pins into, crude diagrams. We deny them an existence of their own, we make them up to suit ourselves — our own hungers,...

Now we come to forgiveness. Don’t worry about forgiving me right now. There are more important things. For instance: keep the others safe, if they are safe. Don’t let them suffer too much. If they...

The Three of them were beautiful, in the way all girls of that age are beautiful. It can’t be helped, that sort of beauty, nor can it be conserved; it’s a freshness, a plumpness of...

You will always have partial points of view, and you’ll always have the story behind the story that hasn’t come out yet. And any form of journalism you’re involved with is going to be up...

If you’re put on a pedestal, you’re supposed to behave yourself like a pedestal type of person. Pedestals actually have a limited circumference. Not much room to move around.

Within one’s own family, money is not the measure of things, unless the person is an absolute Scrooge. Only the most extreme kind of monster would put a price on everything.

You quickly find, when you are a hand-reader as I am, that nothing interests people so much as themselves.

Madness is only an amplification of what you already are.

The main thing is to keep yourself awake [on writing]

Being here with him is safety; it’s a cave, where we huddle together while the storm goes on outside. This is a delusion, of course. This room is one of the most dangerous places I...

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.

Creating some god for one’s inspirations was always a good way to avoid accusations of pride should the scheme succeed, as well as the blame if did not.