Margaret Atwood Love Quotations

A divorce is like an amputation: you survive it, but there's less of you.

The Eskimos had fifty-two names for snow because it was important to them: there ought to be as many for love.

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.

If I love you, is that a fact or a weapon?

I would like to be the air that inhabits you for a moment only. I would like to be that unnoticed and that necessary.

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

Romance takes place in the middle distance. Romance is looking in at yourself through a window clouded with dew. Romance means leaving things out: where life grunts and shuffles, romance only sighs.

Love's never a fair trade.

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.

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.

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

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.

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.

A truth should exist, it should not be used like this. If I love you is that a fact or a weapon?

Love is the pursuit of shadows ...

They are hypocrites, they think the Church is a cage to keep God in, so he will stay locked up there and not go wandering about the earth during the week, poking his nose into their business, and looking in the depths and darkness and doubleness of their hearts, and their lack of true charity; and they believed they need only be bothered about him on Sundays when they have their best clothes on and their faces straight, and their hands washed and their gloves on, and their stories all prepared.

Maybe that's what love is, I thought: it's being pissed off.

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

She wasn't ready to settle down, she told her friends. That was one way of putting it. Another was would have been that she had not found anyone to settle down with. There had been several men in her life, but they hadn't been convincing. They'd been somewhat like her table - quickly acquired, brightened up a little, but temporary. The time for that kind of thing was running out, however. She was tired of renting.

Love is giving, marriage is buying and selling. You can't put love into a contract.

...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.

Messy love is better than none, I guess. I am no authority on sane living.