Margaret Atwood - Love Quotes

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How could I be sleeping with this particular man?... Surely only true love could justify my lack of taste.

Margaret Atwood
And sometimes it happened, for a time. That kind of love comes and goes and is hard to remember afterwards, like pain. You would look at the man one day and you would think, I loved you, and the tense would be past, and you would be filled with a sense of wonder, because it was such an amazing and precarious and dumb thing to have done; and you would know too why your friends have been evasive about it, at the time.

Margaret Atwood
Love relationships between men and women do involve power structures because men in this society have different kinds of, and more, power than women do. The problem for a woman in a relationship is how to maintain her integrity, her own personal power while also in a relationship with a man.

Margaret Atwood
The newspaper journalists like to believe the worst; they can sell more papers that way, as one of them told me himself; for even upstanding and respectable people dearly love to read ill of others.

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
His mouth is on me, his hands, I can't wait and he's moving, already, love, it's been so long, I'm alive in my skin, again, arms around him, falling and water softly everywhere, never-ending.

Margaret Atwood
The young habitually mistake lust for love, they're infested with idealism of all kinds.

Margaret Atwood
Love was like a steamroller. There was no avoiding it; it went over you and you came out flat.

Margaret Atwood
Ah men, why do you want all this attention? I can write poems for myself, make love to a doorknob if absolutely necessary. What do you have to offer me I can't find otherwise except humiliation? Which I no longer need.

Margaret Atwood
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
You can't keep a cool head when you're drowning in love. You just trash around a lot and scream, and wear yourself out.

Margaret Atwood
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
Falling in love, although it resulted in altered body chemistry and was therefore real, was a hormonally induced delusional state, according to him. In addition it was humiliating, because it put you at a disadvantage, it gave the love object too much power. As for sex per se, it lacked both challenge and novelty, and was on the whole a deeply imperfect solution to the problem of intergenerational genetic transfer.

Margaret Atwood
Now I can see how that can happen. You can fall in love with anybody—a fool, a criminal, a nothing. There are no good rules.

Margaret Atwood
He has been trying to sing Love into existence again And he has failed

Margaret Atwood
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
This is how the girl who couldn't speak and the man who couldn't see fell in love.

Margaret Atwood
She had no images of this love. She could offer no anecdotes. It was a belief rather than a memory.

Margaret Atwood
The Eskimo has fifty-two names for snow because it is important to them; there ought to be as many for love.

Margaret Atwood
But we still find the world astounding, we can't get enough of it; even as it shrivels, even as its many lights flicker and are extinguished (the tigers, the leopard frogs, the plunging dolphin flukes), flicker and are extinguished, by us, by us, we gaze and gaze. Where do you draw the line, between love and greed? We never did know, we always wanted more. We want to take it all in, for one last time, we want to eat the world with our eyes.

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
But maybe, underneath, she loves him too much. Maybe it's her excessive love that pushes him away.

Margaret Atwood
Neither of us says the word love, not once. It would be tempting fate; it would be romance, bad luck.

Margaret Atwood
He was deciding whether to cut her throat or love her forever.

Margaret Atwood
The policemen's faces glisten too, they're holding themselves back, they love this, it's a ceremony, they're implementing a policy.

Margaret Atwood
Nobody dies from the lack of sex. It's lack of love we die from.

Margaret Atwood
I knew what love was supposed to be: obsession with undertones of nausea.

Margaret Atwood
I soon had a few thousand people I didn't know sending me messages like OMG! Is it really you? I love it when old ladies blog, one early follower remarked. … and they really shone when, during the Olympics, I said that "Own the podium" was too brash to be Canadian, and suggested "A podium might be nice." Their own variations poured onto a feed tagged #cpodium: "A podium! For me?" "Rent the podium, see if we like it." "Mind if I squeeze by you to get onto that podium?" I was so proud of them! It was like having 33,000 precocious grandchildren!

Margaret Atwood
How much needless despair has been caused by a series of biological mismatches, a misalignment of the hormones and pheromones? Resulting in the fact that the one you love so passionately won't or can't love you. As a species we're pathetic that way: imperfectly monogamous.

Margaret Atwood
All I can hope for is a reconstruction: the way love feels is always only approximate.

Margaret Atwood