• "All she has left is the picture. Also the story of it."

-Margaret Atwood, The Blind Assassin

• “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, The Blind Assassin

• "Nothing is more difficult than to understand the dead, I've found; but nothing is more dangerous than to ignore them."

-Margaret Atwood, The Blind Assassin

• "But why bother about the end of the world? It's the end of the world every day, for someone."

-Margaret Atwood, The Blind Assassin

• "But thoughtless ingratitude is the armour of the young; without it, how would they ever get through life?

-Margaret Atwood, The Blind Assassin

• "But in life, a tragedy is not one long scream. It includes everything that led up to it."

-Margaret Atwood, The Blind Assassin

• "She imagines him imagining her. This is her salvation."

-Margaret Atwood, The Blind Assassin

• "How'd they'd loved to cut themselves on each other, taste their own blood. We were ruinous together, she thinks. But how else can we live, these days, except in the midst of ruin?"

-Margaret Atwood, The Blind Assassin

• "On impulse he might die for her, but living for her would be quite different. He has no talent for monotony."

-Margaret Atwood, The Blind Assassin “When you're young, you think everything you do is disposable. You move from now to now, crumpling time up in your hands, tossing it away. You're your own speeding car. You think you can get rid of things, and people too—leave them behind. You don't yet know about the habit they have, of coming back.Time in dreams is frozen. You can never get away from where you've been.” -Margaret Atwood, The Blind Assassin

• "I should have known better than to rely on pills. You can't buy unconsciousness quite so cheaply."

-Margaret Atwood, The Blind Assassin

• "...But then, the rich have always been kleptomaniacs."

-Margaret Atwood, The Blind Assassin

• "It's paradise, but we can't get out of it. And anything you can't get out of is Hell."

-Margaret Atwood, The Blind Assassin

• "That's the kind of stories I know. Sad ones. Anyway, taken to its logical conclusion, every story is sad, because at the end everyone dies."

-Margaret Atwood, The Blind Assassin

• "All stories are about wolves. All worth repeating, that is. Anything else is sentimental drivel."

-Margaret Atwood, The Blind Assassin

• "Does naming a sphere of nothingness transmute it into being?"

-Margaret Atwood, The Blind Assassin

• "Sympathy from strangers can be ruinous."

-Margaret Atwood, The Blind Assassin

• "Her cruelties were accidental."

-Margaret Atwood, The Blind Assassin

• "Things written down can cause a great deal of harm. All too often, people don't consider that."

-Margaret Atwood, The Blind Assassin

• "But that's God's point, she'd doubtless argue- the fruitlessness. He's always liked futility. He thinks it's noble."

-Margaret Atwood, The Blind Assassin

• "To get away with that, you have to be beautiful."

-Margaret Atwood, The Blind Assassin

• "The only way you can write the truth is to assume that what you set down will never be read."

-Margaret Atwood, The Blind Assassin

• "Women have curious ways of hurting someone else. They hurt themselves instead; or else they do it so the guy doesn't even know he's been hurt until much later."

-Margaret Atwood, The Blind Assassin

• "Better not to invent her in her absence. Better to wait until she's actually here. Then he can make her up as she goes along."

-Margaret Atwood, The Blind Assassin

• "He always knows when she's lying. Or he thinks he knows. Thinking he knows can be a trap."

-Margaret Atwood, The Blind Assassin

• "A nightmare can kill you."

-Margaret Atwood, The Blind Assassin

• "...Realism was beside the point."

-Margaret Atwood, The Blind Assassin

• "She developed the ability to subtract herself in the blink of an eye- one minute she'd be focused on you, the next she'd be elsewhere."

-Margaret Atwood, The Blind Assassin

• "And that's when you know it's over. As soon as you start thinking about the beginning, it's the end."

-Junot Diaz

• "Selena's going watery at the edges, starting to lose hold of the boundary line where she leaves off and other things start. Over by the punch table Chris Harper tilts back his head to drink and Selena can taste it, someone bashes into her hip and she can't tell whether the pain belongs to her or them, Becca's arms rise and they feel like hers. She knows to stop dancing."

-Tana French, The Secret Place

• “The smallest deed is better than the greatest intention.”

― John Burroughs