I could end this with a moral,as if this were a fable about animals,though no fables are really about animals.

Men are not to be told anything they might find too painful; the secret depths of human nature, the sordid physicalities, might overwhelm or damage them. For instance, men often faint at the sight of...

… all this talking, this rather liquid confessing, was something I didn’t think I could ever bring myself to do. It seemed foolhardy to me, like an uncooked egg deciding to to come out of...

I’m not used to girls, or familiar with their customs. I feel awkward around them, I don’t know what to say. I know the unspoken rules of boys, but with girls I sense that I...

We’ll choose knowledge no matter what, we’ll maim ourselves in the process, we’ll stick our hands into the flames for it if necessary. Curiosity is not our only motive; love or grief or despair or...

It was Colonel Parkman who upped stakes, crossed the border, and named our town, thus perversely commemorating a battle in which he’d lost. (Though perhaps that’s not so unusual: many people take a curatorial interest...

There I am, in the Grade Six class picture, smiling broadly. Happy as a clam, is what my mother says for happy. I am happy as a clam: hardshelled, firmly closed.

Knowing was a temptation. What you don’t know won’t tempt you.

The beauty is an illusion, and also a warning: there’s a dark side to beauty, as with poisonous butterflies.

Expand your world. (Stories about wizards and spells) are very frequently about power relationships…

Writing poetry is a state of free float

We want to get there faster. Get where? Wherever we are not. But a human soul can only go as fast as a man can walk, they used to say. In that case, where are...

There’s an epigram tacked to my office bulletin board, pinched from a magazine — “Wanting to meet an author because you like his work is like wanting to meet a duck because you like p...

An empty drainpipe. An amplifier. A stab at getting laid.

The object is very clear in the fight against racism; you have reasons why you’re opposed to it. But when you’re writing a novel, you don’t want the reader to come out of it voting...

Reading and writing are connected. I learned to read very early so I could read the comics, which I then started to draw.

For years I wanted to be older, and now I am.

A reader can never tell if it’s a real thimble or an imaginary thimble, because by the time you’re reading it, they’re the same. It’s a thimble. It’s in the book.

i sometimes felt as if these marks on my body were a kind of code, which blossomed, then faded, like invisible ink held to a candle. But if they were a code, who held the...

Pearls are congealed oyster spit.

But there’s something missing in them, even the nice ones. It’s like they’re permanently absent-minded, like that can’t quite remember who they are.

Extreme emotions could be lethal. If I can’t have you nobody will, and so forth. Death could set in.

Falling in love, we said; I fell for him. We were falling women. We believed in it, this downward motion: so lovely, like flying, and yet at the same time so dire, so extreme, so...

Our heaven is their hell, said God. I like a balanced universe.

Helen of Troy Does Counter DancingThe world is full of womenwho’d tell me I should be ashamed of myselfif they had the chance. Quit dancing.Get some self-respectand a day job.Right. And minimum wage,and varicose veins,...

Sex is like a drink, it’s bad to start brooding about it too early in the day.

Humanity is so adaptable […] Truly amazing, what people can get used to, as long as there are a few compensations.

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...

I and the girl in the picture have ceased to be the same person. I am her outcome, the result of the life she once lived headlong; whereas she, if she can be said to...

Girls did that then – knocked themselves out to support some man’s notion of his own genius. What was Gavin doing to help pay the rent? Not much, though she suspected him of dealing pot...

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

As soon as you have a language that has a past tense and a future tense you’re going to say, ‘Where did we come from, what happens next?’ The ability to remember the past helps...

I spent much of my childhood in northern Quebec, and often there was no radio, no television – there wasn’t a lot to entertain us. When it rained, I stayed inside reading, writing, drawing.

The myth that everyone once read great literature is just a myth.

This murdered girl troubles me. After the first shock, nobody at school says much about her. Even Cordelia does not want to talk about her. It’s as if this girl has done something shameful, herself,...

She even had a kind of special position among men: she was an exception, she fitted none of the categories they commonly used when talking about girls; she wasn’t a cock-teaser, a cold fish, an...

[A]nother thing about myths: they gather in and circumscribe their target audience. They make a collection into a collective.

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

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.