Margaret Atwood

"Don’t interfere with false gods, you’ll get the gold paint all over your hands."

"Ger says that Kat has a tendency to push things to extremes, to go over the edge, merely from a juvenile desire to shock, which is hardly a substitute for wit. One of these days, he says, she will go way too far. Too far for him, is what he means."

"A Tennyson garden, heavy with scent, languid; the return of the word swoon."

"The sun is free, it is still there to be enjoyed."

"Where do the words gowhen we have said them?"

"If I were going to convert to any religion I would probably choose Catholicism because it at least has female saints and the Virgin Mary."

"There is something subversive about this garden of Serena's, a sense of buried things bursting upwards, wordlessly, into the light, as if to point, to say: Whatever is silenced will clamor to be heard, though silently."

"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."

"I don't want to see anyone. I lie in the bedroom with the curtains drawn and nothingness washing over me like a sluggish wave. Whatever is happening to me is my own fault. I have done something wrong, something so huge I can't even see it, something that's drowning me. I am inadequate and stupid, without worth. I might as well be dead."

"No mother is ever, completely, a child's idea of what a mother should be, and I suppose it works the other way around as well."

"You're sad because you're sad.It's psychic. It's the age. It's chemical.Go see a shrink or take a pill,or hug your sadness like an eyeless dollyou need to sleep.Well, all children are sadbut some get over it.Count your blessings. Better than that,buy a hat. Buy a coat or a pet.Take up dancing to forget."

"Nature is an expert in cost-benefit analysis,' she says. 'Although she does her accounting a little differently. As for debts, she always collects in the long run..."