The best quotes by the author we have brought to you
“A wave of blood goes up to my head, my stomach shrinks together, as if something dangerous has just missed hitting me. It’s as if I’ve been caught stealing, or telling a lie; or as if I’ve heard other people talking about me, saying bad things about me, behind my back. There’s the same flush of shame, of guilt and terror, and of cold disgust with myself. But I don’t know where these feelings have come from, what I’ve done.” (Cat’s Eye Quotes)
Margaret Atwood
Cat’s Eye
“All fathers except mine are invisible in daytime; daytime is ruled by mothers. But fathers come out at night. Darkness brings home the fathers, with their real, unspeakable power. There is more to them than meets the eye.”
Margaret Atwood
Cat’s Eye
“And yet it disturbs me to learn I have hurt someone unintentionally. I want all my hurts to be intentional.”
Margaret Atwood
Cat’s Eye
“Another belief of mine: that everyone else my age is an adult, whereas I am merely in disguise.”
Margaret Atwood
Cat’s Eye
“But I began then to think of time as having a shape, something you could see, like a series of liquid transparencies, one laid on top of another.”
Margaret Atwood
Cat’s Eye
“Craziness was considered funny, like all other things that were in reality frightening and profoundly shameful.”
Margaret Atwood
Cat’s Eye
“Everything is post these days, as if we’re all just a footnote to something earlier that was real enough to have a name of its own.”
Margaret Atwood
Cat’s Eye
“Forgiving men is so much easier than forgiving women.”
Margaret Atwood
Cat’s Eye
“Hatred would have been easier. With hatred, I would have known what to do. Hatred is clear, metallic, one-handed, unwavering; unlike love.”
Margaret Atwood
Cat’s Eye
“I can’t believe in my own sadness, I can’t take it seriously. I watch myself crying in the mirror, intrigued by the sight of tears.”
Margaret Atwood
Cat’s Eye
“I did not know how to paint or even what to paint, but I knew I had to begin.”
Margaret Atwood
Cat’s Eye
“I don’t want to see anyone. I lie in the bedroom with the curtains drawn and nothingness washing over me like a sluggish wave. Whatever is happening to me is my own fault. I have done something wrong, something so huge I can’t even see it, something that’s drowning me. I am inadequate and stupid, without worth. I might as well be dead.”
Margaret Atwood
Cat’s Eye
“I knew what love was supposed to be: obsession with undertones of nausea. ”
Margaret Atwood
Cat’s Eye
“I lie on the floor, washed by nothing and hanging on. I cry at night. I am afraid of hearing voices, or a voice. I have come to the edge, of the land. I could get pushed over.”
Margaret Atwood
Cat’s Eye
“I remember thinking when the girls were born, first one and then the other, that I should have had sons and not daughters. I didn’t feel up to daughters, I didn’t know how they worked. I must have been afraid of hating them. With sons I would have known what to do.”
Margaret Atwood
Cat’s Eye
“I see that there will be no end to imperfection, or to doing things the wrong way. Even if you grow up, no matter how hard you scrub, whatever you do, there will always be some other stain or spot on your face or stupid act, somebody frowning.” (Cat’s Eye Quotes)
Margaret Atwood
Cat’s Eye
“I want my father to be just my father, the way he has always been, not a separate person with an earlier, mythological life of his own. Knowing too much about other people puts you in their power, they have a claim on you, you are forced to understand their reasons for doing things and then you are weakened.”
Margaret Atwood
Cat’s Eye
“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.”
Margaret Atwood
Cat’s Eye
“I’m beginning to feel that I’ve discovered something worth knowing. There’s a way out of places you want to leave, but can’t. Fainting is like stepping sideways, out of your own body, out of time or into another time. When you wake up it’s later. Time has gone on without you.”
Margaret Atwood
Cat’s Eye
“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 am always on the verge of some unforeseen, calamitous blunder.”
Margaret Atwood
Cat’s Eye
“It has thrown off its disguise as a meal and has revealed itself to me for what it is, a large dead bird. I’m eating a wing. It’s the wing of a tame turkey, the stupidest bird in the world, so stupid it can’t even fly any more. I am eating lost flight.”
Margaret Atwood
Cat’s Eye
“It’s old light, and there’s not much of it. But it is enough to see by.”
Margaret Atwood
Cat’s Eye
“Knowing this secret, being the only one chosen to know, makes me feel important in a way. But it’s a negative importance, it’s the importance of a blank sheet of paper. I can know because I don’t count. I feel singled out, but also bereft.”
Margaret Atwood
Cat’s Eye
“Knowing too much about other people puts you in their power, they have a claim on you, you are forced to understand their reasons for doing things and then you are weakened.”
Margaret Atwood
Cat’s Eye
“Last night I felt the approach of nothing. Not too close but on its way, like a wingbeat, like the cooling of the wind, the slight initial tug of an undertow.”
Margaret Atwood
Cat’s Eye
“Little girls are cute and small only to adults. To one another they are not cute. They are life sized.”
Margaret Atwood
Cat’s Eye
“Love blurs your vision; but after it recedes, you can see more clearly than ever. It’s like the tide going out, revealing whatever’s been thrown away and sunk: broken bottles, old gloves, rusting pop cans, nibbled fishbodies, bones. This is the kind of thing you see if you sit in the darkness with open eyes, not knowing the future. The ruin you’ve made.”
Margaret Atwood
Cat’s Eye
“Most mothers worry when their daughters reach adolescence but I was the opposite. I relaxed, I sighed with relief. Little girls are cute and small only to adults. To one another they are not cute. They are life sized.”
Margaret Atwood
Cat’s Eye
“Never pray for justice, because you might get some.”
Margaret Atwood
Cat’s Eye
“Old lovers go the way of old photographs, bleaching out gradually as in a slow bath of acid: first the moles and pimples, then the shadings. Then the faces themselves, until nothing remains but the general outlines.”
Margaret Atwood
Cat’s Eye
“Our curiosity is supposed to have limits, though these have never been defined exactly.”
Margaret Atwood
Cat’s Eye
“The alcohol smell is on my fingers, cold and remote, piercing like a steel pin going in. It smells like white enamel basins. When I look up at the stars in the nighttime, cold and white and sharp, I think they must smell like that.”
Margaret Atwood
Cat’s Eye
“The past isn’t quaint while you’re in it. Only at a safe distance, later, when you can see it as décor, not as the shape your life’s been squeezed into.”
Margaret Atwood
Cat’s Eye
“The world is being run by people my age, men my age, with falling-out hair and health worries, and it frightens me. When the leaders were older than me I could believe in their wisdom, I could believe they had transcended rage and malice and the need to be loved. Now I know better. I look at the faces in newspapers, in magazines, and wonder: what greeds, what furies drive them on?”
Margaret Atwood
Cat’s Eye
“There’s blood, a taste I remember. It tastes of orange popsicles, penny gumballs, red licorice, gnawed hair, dirty ice.”
Margaret Atwood
Cat’s Eye
“This is the middle of my life, I think of it as a place, like the middle of a river, the middle of a bridge, halfway across, halfway over. I’m supposed to have accumulated things by now: possessions, responsibilities, achievements, experience and wisdom. I’m supposed to be a person of substance.”
Margaret Atwood
Cat’s Eye
“This is what I miss, Cordelia: not something that’s gone, but something that will never happen. Two old women giggling over their tea.”
Margaret Atwood
Cat’s Eye
“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, by being murdered.” (Cat’s Eye Quotes)
Margaret Atwood
Cat’s Eye
“Time is not a line but a dimension, like the dimensions of space. If you can bend space you can bend time also, and if you knew enough and could move faster than light you could travel backward in time and exist in two places at once.”
Margaret Atwood
Cat’s Eye
“Today on the way home, it snows. Big, soft caressing flakes fall onto our skin like cold moths; the air fills with feathers.”
Margaret Atwood
Cat’s Eye
“Vanity is becoming a nuisance, I can see why women give it up, eventually. But I’m not ready for that yet.”
Margaret Atwood
Cat’s Eye
“We are survivors, of each other. We have been shark to one another, but also lifeboat. That counts for something.”
Margaret Atwood
Cat’s Eye
“What we share may be a lot like a traffic accident but we get one another. We are survivors of each other. We have been shark to one another, but also lifeboat. That counts for something.”
Margaret Atwood
Cat’s Eye
“When I am lonely for boys it’s their bodies I miss. I study their hands lifting the cigarettes in the darkness of the movie theaters, the slope of a shoulder, the angle of a hip. Looking at them sideways, I examine them in different lights. My love for them is visual: that is the part of them I would like to possess. Don’t move, I think. Stay like that, let me have that.”
Margaret Atwood
Cat’s Eye
“Women collect grievances, hold grudges and change shape. They pass hard, legitimate judgments, unlike the purblind guesses of men, fogged with romanticism and ignorance and bias and wish. Women know too much, they can neither be deceived nor trusted.”
Margaret Atwood
Cat’s Eye
“You don’t look back along time but down through it, like water. Sometimes this comes to the surface, sometimes that, sometimes nothing. Nothing goes away.”
Margaret Atwood
Cat’s Eye
