Margaret Atwood - God Quotes

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Those walls and bars are there for a reason, said Crake. Not to keep us out, but to keep them in. Mankind needs barriers in both cases. Them? Nature and God. I thought you didn't believe in God, said Jimmy. I don't believe in Nature either, said Crake. Or not with a capital N.

Margaret Atwood
Reenie never went in much for God. There was mutual respect, and if you were in trouble naturally you'd call on him, as with lawyers; but as with lawyers, it would have to be bad trouble.

Margaret Atwood
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
God is not
the voice in the whirlwind
god is the whirlwind
at the last
judgment we will all be trees.

Margaret Atwood
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
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
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
There is so much silence between the words,
you say. You say, The sensed absence
of God and the sensed presence
amount to much the same thing,
only in reverse.
You say, I have too much white clothing.
You start to hum.
Several hundred years ago
this could have been mysticism
or heresy. It isn't now.
Outside there are sirens.
Someone's been run over.
The century grinds on.

Margaret Atwood
In the evenings there's been thunder, a distant bumping and stumbling, like God on a sullen binge.

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

Margaret Atwood
More powerful than God, more evil than the Devil; the poor have it, the rich lack it, and if you eat it you die?

Margaret Atwood
All Creatures know that some must die That all the rest may take and eat; Sooner or later, all transform Their blood to wine, their flesh to meat. But Man alone seeks Vengefulness, And writes his abstract Laws on stone; For this false Justice he has made, He tortures limb and crushes bone. Is this the image of a god? My tooth for yours, your eye for mine? Oh, if Revenge did move the stars Instead of Love, they would not shine.

Margaret Atwood
God gave unto the Animals A wisdom past our power to see: Each knows innately how to live, Which we must learn laboriously.

Margaret Atwood