Margaret Atwood - Alias Grace (1996)

19 Sourced Quotes

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I am afraid of falling into hopeless despair, over my wasted life, and I am still not sure how it happened.

Margaret Atwood
Although from you I far must roam, do not be broken hearted. We two, who in the souls are one, are never truly parted.

Margaret Atwood
Where there's a doctor it's always a bad sign. Even when they are not doing the killing themselves it means a death is close, and in that way they are like ravens or crows.

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
When you are in the middle of a story it isn't a story at all, but only a confusion; a dark roaring, a blindness, a wreckage of shattered glass and splintered wood; like a house in a whirlwind, or else a boat crushed by the icebergs or swept over the rapids, and all aboard powerless to stop it.

Margaret Atwood
Soon it will be daybreak. Soon the day will break. I can't stop it from breaking in the same way it always does, and then from lying there broken; always the same day, which comes around again like clockwork. It begins with the day before the day before, and then the day before, and then it's the day itself. A Saturday. The breaking day. The day the butcher comes.

Margaret Atwood
It's only afterwards that it becomes anything like a story at all. When you're telling it, to yourself or to someone else.

Margaret Atwood
His father was self-made, but his mother was constructed by others, and such edifices are notoriously fragile.

Margaret Atwood
If we were all on trial for our thoughts, we would all be hanged.

Margaret Atwood
People dressed in a certain kind of clothing are never wrong. Also they never fart.

Margaret Atwood
While he writes, I feel as if he is drawing me; or not drawing me, drawing on me - drawing on my skin - not with the pencil he is using, but with an old-fashioned goose pen, and not with the quill end but with the feather end. As if hundreds of butterflies have settled all over my face, and are softly opening and closing their wings.

Margaret Atwood
I am certain that a Sewing Machine would relieve as much human suffering as a hundred Lunatic Asylums, and possibly a good deal more.

Margaret Atwood
If I am good enough and quiet enough, perhaps after all they will let me go; but it's not easy being quiet and good, it's like hanging on to the edge of a bridge when you've already fallen over; you don't seem to be moving, just dangling there, and yet it is taking all your strength.

Margaret Atwood
The road to death is a lonely highway, and longer than it appears, even when it leads straight down from the scaffold, by way of a rope; and it's a dark road, with never any moon shining on it, to light your way.

Margaret Atwood
Because you may think a bed is a peaceful thing, Sir, and to you it may mean rest and comfort and a good night's sleep. But it isn't so for everyone; and there are many dangerous things that may take place in a bed.

Margaret Atwood
For if the world treats you well, Sir, you come to believe you are deserving of it.

Margaret Atwood
A prison does not only lock its inmates inside, it keeps all others out. Her strongest prison is of her own construction.

Margaret Atwood
I don't know why they are all so eager to be remembered. What good will it do them? There are some things that should be forgotten by everyone, and never spoken of again.

Margaret Atwood
At moments like this I envy those who have found a safe haven in which to bestow their hearts; or perhaps I envy them for having a heart to bestow. I often feel that I myself am without one, and possess in its stead merely a heart shaped stone.

Margaret Atwood