The best quotes by the author we have brought to you
“Also we must be a beacon of hope, because if you tell people there’s nothing they can do, they will do worse than nothing.” (The Year of the Flood Quotes)
Margaret Atwood
The Year of the Flood
“As with all knowledge, once you knew it, you couldn’t imagine how it was that you hadn’t known it before. Like stage magic, knowledge before you knew it took place before your very eyes, but you were looking elsewhere.”
Margaret Atwood
The Year of the Flood
“Between the living and the dead. They carried the Word made air.”
Margaret Atwood
The Year of the Flood
“But it seems she’d wanted children after all, because when she was told she’d been accidentally sterilized she could feel all the light leaking out of her.”
Margaret Atwood
The Year of the Flood
“But maybe he was destructive by nature since he messed up every girl he touched”
Margaret Atwood
The Year of the Flood
“Confronted by too much emptiness, said Adam One, the brain invents. Loneliness creates company as thirst creates water. How many sailors have been wrecked in pursuit of islands that were merely a shimmering?”
Margaret Atwood
The Year of the Flood
“Glenn used to say the reason you can’t really imagine yourself being dead was that as soon as you say, ‘I’ll be dead,’ you’ve said the word I, and so you’re still alive inside the sentence. And that’s how people got the idea of the immortality of the soul – it was a consequence of grammar.”
Margaret Atwood
The Year of the Flood
“His generation believed that if there was trouble all you’d have to do was shoot someone and then it would be okay.”
Margaret Atwood
The Year of the Flood
“Human understanding is fallible, and we see through a glass, darkly. Any religion is a shadow of God. But the shadows of God are not God.”
Margaret Atwood
The Year of the Flood
“I could see how you could do extreme things for the person you loved. Adam One said that when you loved a person, that love might not always get returned the way you wanted, but it was a good thing anyway because love went out all around you like an energy wave, and a creature you didn’t know would be helped by it.”
Margaret Atwood
The Year of the Flood
“I tried to visualize my jealousy as a yellowy-brown cloud boiling around inside me, then going out through my nose like smoke and turning into a stone and falling down into the ground. That did work a little. But in my visualization a plant covered with poison berries would grow out of the stone, whether I wanted it to or not.”
Margaret Atwood
The Year of the Flood
“If you really want to stay the same age you are now forever and ever, she’d be thinking, try jumping off the roof: death’s a sure-fire method for stopping time.”
Margaret Atwood
The Year of the Flood
“It begins as disbelief and ends in sorrow, but in between those two phases her whole body shakes with anger.”
Margaret Atwood
The Year of the Flood
“It is better to journey than to arrive, as long as we journey in firm faith and for selfless ends.”
Margaret Atwood
The Year of the Flood
“It is not only the body that travels, Adam One used to say, it is also the Soul. And the end of one journey is the beginning of another.”
Margaret Atwood
The Year of the Flood
“It would be nice to believe that love should be dished out in a fair way so that everyone got some. But that wasn’t how it was going to be for me.”
Margaret Atwood
The Year of the Flood
“It’s wrong to give so much time over to mourning, she tells herself. Mourning and brooding. There’s nothing to be accomplished by it.”
Margaret Atwood
The Year of the Flood
“May I remind you all about the importance of hand-washing, seven times a day at least, and after every encounter with a stranger. It is never too early to practise this essential precaution. Avoid anyone who is sneezing.” (The Year of the Flood Quotes)
Margaret Atwood
The Year of the Flood
“Maybe sadness was a kind of hunger, she thought. Maybe the two went together.”
Margaret Atwood
The Year of the Flood
“Maybe that’s what love is, I thought: it’s being pissed off.”
Margaret Atwood
The Year of the Flood
“Mushrooms were the roses in the garden of that unseen world, because the real mushroom plant was underground. The parts you could see – what most people called a mushroom – was just a brief apparition. A cloud flower.”
Margaret Atwood
The Year of the Flood
“Nature full strength is more than we can take, Adam One used to say. It’s a potent hallucinogen, a soporific, for the untrained Soul. We’re no longer at home in it. We need to dilute it. We can’t drink it straight. And God is the same. Too much God and you overdose. God needs to be filtered.”
Margaret Atwood
The Year of the Flood
“One day, he said that what you had to do in any adversarial situation was to kill the king, as in chess. I said people didn’t have kings any more. He said he meant the centre of power, but today it wouldn’t be a single person, it would be the technological connections.”
Margaret Atwood
The Year of the Flood
“Remember,’ she’d tell her staff, ‘every customer wants to feel like a princess, and princesses are selfish and overbearing.”
Margaret Atwood
The Year of the Flood
“She found herself stepping into ritual as if into a pair of stone shoes.”
Margaret Atwood
The Year of the Flood
“She said love was useless, because it led you into dumb exchanges in which you gave too much away, and then you got bitter and mean.”
Margaret Atwood
The Year of the Flood
“Sucked into the well of knowledge, you could only plummet, learning more and more, but not getting any happier.”
Margaret Atwood
The Year of the Flood
“The Adams and the Eves used to say, We are what we eat, but I prefer to say, we are what we wish. Because if you can’t wish, why bother?”
Margaret Atwood
The Year of the Flood
“The answer can only be that God has given Adam free will, and therefore Adam may do things that God Himself cannot anticipate in advance.”
Margaret Atwood
The Year of the Flood
“The edge of the forest. She’d like to avoid going in there, among the trees. Nature may be dumb as a sack of hammers, Zeb used to say, but it’s smarter than you.”
Margaret Atwood
The Year of the Flood
“The Gardeners were right about that part: reading someone else’s secret words does give you power over them.”
Margaret Atwood
The Year of the Flood
“The Human moral keyboard is limited, Adam One used to say: there’s nothing you can play on it that hasn’t been played before. And, my dear Friends, I am sorry to say this, but it has its lower notes.”
Margaret Atwood
The Year of the Flood
“Unlike some other religions, we have never felt it served a higher purpose to lie to children about geology.”
Margaret Atwood
The Year of the Flood
“We shouldn’t have been so scornful; we should have had compassion. But compassion takes work, and we were young.”
Margaret Atwood
The Year of the Flood
“We would not be Human if we did not prefer to be the devourers rather than the devoured, but either is a blessing. Should your life be required of you, rest assured that it is required by Life.” (The Year of the Flood Quotes)
Margaret Atwood
The Year of the Flood
“What am I living for and what am I dying for are the same question.”
Margaret Atwood
The Year of the Flood
“What restless woman can resist a man with a shovel in one hand and a glowing rose bush in the other, and a moderately crazed glitter in his eyes that might be mistaken for love?”
Margaret Atwood
The Year of the Flood
“Yet each flower, each twig, each pebble, shines as though illuminated from within, as once before, on her first day in the Garden. It’s the stress, it’s the adrenalin, it’s a chemical effect: she knows this well enough. But why is it built in? She thinks. Why are we designed to see the world as supremely beautiful just as we’re about to be snuffed? Do rabbits feel the same as the fox teeth bite down on their necks? Is it mercy?”
Margaret Atwood
The Year of the Flood
“You can forget who you are if you’re alone too much.”
Margaret Atwood
The Year of the Flood
“You can’t live with such fears and keep on whistling. The waiting builds up in you like a tide. You start wanting it to be done with. You find yourself saying to the sky, Just do it. Do your worst. Get it over with.”
Margaret Atwood
The Year of the Flood
“You create your own world by your inner attitude, the Gardeners used to say.”
Margaret Atwood
The Year of the Flood
