The Blind Assassin Quotes

The best quotes by the author we have brought to you

Margaret Atwood (Author of The Blind Assassin)

“A hot wind was blowing around my head, the strands of my hair lifting and swirling in it, like ink spilled in water.” (The Blind Assassin Quotes)
Margaret Atwood
The Blind Assassin

“A Paradox, the doughnut hole. Empty space, once, but now they’ve learned to market even that. A minus quantity; nothing, rendered edible. I wondered if they might be used-metaphorically, of course-to demonstrate the existence of God. Does naming a sphere of nothingness transmute it into being?”
Margaret Atwood
The Blind Assassin

“A sad pretty girl inspires the urge to console, unlike a sad old crone.”
Margaret Atwood
The Blind Assassin

“All stories are about wolves. All worth repeating, that is. Anything else is sentimental drivel.”
Margaret Atwood
The Blind Assassin

“An unearned income encourages self-pity in those already prone to it.”
Margaret Atwood
The Blind Assassin

“Beginnings are sudden, but also insidious. They creep up on you sideways, they keep to the shadows, they lurk unrecognized. Then, later, they spring.”
Margaret Atwood
The Blind Assassin

“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.”
Margaret Atwood
The Blind Assassin

“But how can she ever get out of it, her life, except through him?”
Margaret Atwood
The Blind Assassin

“But why bother about the end of the world? It’s the end of the world every day, for someone. Time rises and rises, and when it reaches the level of your eyes you drown.”
Margaret Atwood
The Blind Assassin

“Don’t misunderstand me. I am not scoffing at goodness, which is far more difficult to explain than evil, and far more complicated. But sometimes it’s hard to put up with.”
Margaret Atwood
The Blind Assassin

“Farewells can be shattering, but returns are surely worse. Solid flesh can never live up to the bright shadow cast by its absence. Time and distance blur the edges; then suddenly the beloved has arrived, and it’s noon with its merciless light, and every spot and pore and wrinkle and bristle stands clear.”
Margaret Atwood
The Blind Assassin

“Forced to chose between one irascible tyrant and another, Laura had chosen the one which was greater, and also further away.”
Margaret Atwood
The Blind Assassin

“Happiness is a garden walled with glass: there’s no way in or out. In Paradise there are no stories, because there are no journeys. It’s loss and regret and misery and yearning that drive the story forward, along its twisted road.”
Margaret Atwood
The Blind Assassin

“He loved her; in some ways he was devoted to her. But he couldn’t reach her, and it was the same on her side. It was as if they’d drunk some fatal potion that would keep them forever apart, even though they lived in the same house, ate at the same table, slept in the same bed.”
Margaret Atwood
The Blind Assassin

“He’d wanted us to be more like boys, and now we were. You don’t teach boys to be charming. It makes people think they are devious.”
Margaret Atwood
The Blind Assassin

“How could I have been so ignorant? she thinks. So stupid, so unseeing, so given over to carelessness. But without such ignorance, such carelessness, how could we live? 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 as 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.” (The Blind Assassin Quotes)
Margaret Atwood
The Blind Assassin

“I felt confused, and also inadequate; whatever he was asking or demanding, it was beyond me. this was the first time a man would expect more from me than i was capable of giving, but it wouldn’t be the last.”
Margaret Atwood
The Blind Assassin

“I must admit it’s a surprise to find myself still here, still talking to you. I prefer to think of it as talking, although of course it isn’t: I’m saying nothing, you’re hearing nothing. The only thing between us is this black line: a thread thrown onto the empty page, into the empty air.”
Margaret Atwood
The Blind Assassin

“I should have known better than to rely on pills. You can’t buy unconsciousness quite so cheaply.”
Margaret Atwood
The Blind Assassin

“I suppose it’s everyone’s fate to be reduced to quaintness by those younger than themselves.”
Margaret Atwood
The Blind Assassin

“I thought my heart was pure. We do like to have such good opinions of our own motives when we’re about to do something harmful, to someone else.”
Margaret Atwood
The Blind Assassin

“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

“In their dreams they touch, they intertwine, it’s more like a collision, and that is the end of flying. They fall to earth, fouled parachutists, botched and cindery angels, love streaming out behind them like torn silk. Enemy groundfire comes up to meet them.”
Margaret Atwood
The Blind Assassin

“Like the trains, she’s never on time and always departing.”
Margaret Atwood
The Blind Assassin

“Lose your temper and you lose the fight.”
Margaret Atwood
The Blind Assassin

“Love is giving, marriage is buying and selling. You can’t put love into a contract.”
Margaret Atwood
The Blind Assassin

“Nothing is more difficult than to understand the dead, I’ve found; but nothing is more dangerous than to ignore them.”
Margaret Atwood
The Blind Assassin

“Now she imagines him dreaming. She imagines him dreaming of her, as she is dreaming of him. Through a sky the color of wet slate they fly towards each other on dark invisible wings.”
Margaret Atwood
The Blind Assassin

“One look at a banana and you can tell it came from outer space.”
Margaret Atwood
The Blind Assassin

“People always forget about prophecies unless they come true.”
Margaret Atwood
The Blind Assassin

“Perhaps they were looking for passion; perhaps they delved into this book as into a mysterious parcel – a gift box at the bottom of which, hidden in layers of rustling tissue paper, lay something they’d always longed for but couldn’t ever grasp.”
Margaret Atwood
The Blind Assassin

“She had her reasons. Not that they were the same as anybody else’s reasons.”
Margaret Atwood
The Blind Assassin

“Stick a shovel into the ground almost anywhere and some horrible thing or other will come to light. Good for trade, we thrive on bones; without them there’d be no stories.”
Margaret Atwood
The Blind Assassin

“The ancestral voices were prophesying war because ancestral voices never shut up, and they hate to be wrong, and war is a sure thing, sooner or later.”
Margaret Atwood
The Blind Assassin

“The best way of keeping a secret is to pretend there isn’t one.”
Margaret Atwood
The Blind Assassin

“The only way you can write the truth is to assume that what you set down will never be read. Not by any other person, and not even by yourself at some later date. Otherwise you begin excusing yourself. You must see the writing as emerging like a long scroll of ink from the index finger of your right hand; you must see your left hand erasing it.” (The Blind Assassin Quotes)
Margaret Atwood
The Blind Assassin

“The only way you can write the truth is to assume that what you set down will never be read. Not by any other person, and not even by yourself at some later date.”
Margaret Atwood
The Blind Assassin

“The picture is of happiness, the story not. Happiness is a garden walled with glass: there’s no way in or out. In Paradise there are no stories, because there are no journeys. It’s loss and regret and misery and yearning that drive the story forward, along its twisted road.”
Margaret Atwood
The Blind Assassin

“The young habitually mistake lust for love, they’re infested with idealism of all kinds.”
Margaret Atwood
The Blind Assassin

“There were a lot of gods. Gods always come in handy, they justify almost anything.”
Margaret Atwood
The Blind Assassin

“There’s nothing like a shovel full of dirt to encourage literacy.”
Margaret Atwood
The Blind Assassin

“They did not set out to disappoint their father, not on purpose, but neither did they wish to shoulder the lumpy, enervating burden of the mundane.”
Margaret Atwood
The Blind Assassin

“They were both in their own ways earnest; they both wanted to achieve some worthy end or other, change the world for the better. Such alluring, such perilous ideals!”
Margaret Atwood
The Blind Assassin

“Things might have been different if she hadn’t been able to drift; if she’d had to concentrate on her next meal, instead of dwelling on all the injuries she felt we’d done her. An unearned income encourages self-pity in those already prone to it.”
Margaret Atwood
The Blind Assassin

“Things written down can cause a great deal of harm. All too often, people don’t consider that.”
Margaret Atwood
The Blind Assassin

“This is how the girl who couldn’t speak and the man who couldn’t see fell in love.”
Margaret Atwood
The Blind Assassin

“Time rises and rises, and when it reaches the level of your eyes you drown.”
Margaret Atwood
The Blind Assassin

“To pronounce the name of the dead is to make them live again, said the ancient Egyptians: not always what one might wish.”
Margaret Atwood
The Blind Assassin

“To pronounce the name of the dead is to make them live again.”
Margaret Atwood
The Blind Assassin

“Touch comes before sight, before speech. It is the first language and the last, and it always tells the truth.”
Margaret Atwood
The Blind Assassin

“What was the rationale for all this pillaging? Souvenirs. These people needed something to remember themselves by. An odd thing, souvenir-hunting: now becomes then even while it is still now. You don’t really believe you’re there, and so you nick the proof, or something you mistake for it.”
Margaret Atwood
The Blind Assassin

“When you’re young, you think everything you do is disposable. You move from now to now, crumpling time up in your hands, tossing it away. You’re your own speeding car. You think you can get rid of things, and people too – leave them behind. You don’t yet know about the habit they have, of coming back.”
Margaret Atwood
The Blind Assassin

“Why is it we want so badly to memorialize ourselves? Even while we’re still alive. We wish to assert our existence, like dogs peeing on fire hydrants.”
Margaret Atwood
The Blind Assassin

“Women have curious ways of hurting someone else. They hurt themselves instead; or else they do it so the guy doesn’t even know he’s been hurt until much later. Then he finds out. Then his dick falls off.”
Margaret Atwood
The Blind Assassin

“You want the truth, of course. You want me to put two and two together. But two and two doesn’t necessarily get you the truth. Two and two equals a voice outside the window. Two and two equals the wind. The living bird is not its labeled bones.”
Margaret Atwood
The Blind Assassin