The Blind Assassin Quotes

“I wonder which is preferable, to walk around all your life swollen up with your own secrets until you burst from the pressure of them, or to have them sucked out of you, every paragraph, every sentence, every word of them, so at the end you're depleted of all that was once as precious to you as hoarded gold, as close to you as your skin - everything that was of the deepest importance to you, everything that made you cringe and wish to conceal, everything that belonged to you alone - and must spend the rest of your days like an empty sack flapping in the wind, an empty sack branded with a bright fluorescent label so that everyone will know what sort of secrets used to be inside you?”
― Margaret Atwood, The Blind Assassin

“We'll choose knowledge no matter what, we'll maim ourselves in the process, we'll stick our hands into the flames for it if necessary. Curiosity is not our only motive; love or grief or despair or hatred is what drives us on. We'll spy relentlessly on the dead; we'll open their letters, we'll read their journals, we'll go through their trash, hoping for a hint, a final word, an explanation, from those who have deserted us--who've left us holding the bag, which is often a good deal emptier than we'd supposed.”
― Margaret Atwood, The Blind Assassin

“Sympathy from strangers can be ruinous.”
― Margaret Atwood, The Blind Assassin

“The Three of them were beautiful, in the way all girls of that age are beautiful. It can't be helped, that sort of beauty, nor can it be conserved; it's a freshness, a plumpness of the cells, that's unearned and temporary, and that nothing can replicate. None of them was satisfied with it, however; already they were making attempts to alter themselves into some impossible, imaginary mould, plucking and pencilling away at their faces. I didn't blame them, having done the same once myself.”
― Margaret Atwood, The Blind Assassin

“She stubs out her cigarette in the brown glass ashtray, then settles herself against him, ear to his chest. She likes to hear his voice this way, as if it begins not in his throat but in his body, like a hum or a growl, or like a voice speaking from deep underground. Like the blood moving through her own heart: a word, a word, a word.”
― Margaret Atwood, The Blind Assassin

“The ancestral voices were prophesying war because ancestral voices never shut up, and they hate to be wrong, and war is a sure thing, sooner or later.”
― Margaret Atwood, The Blind Assassin

“One look at a banana and you can tell it came from outer space.”
― Margaret Atwood, The Blind Assassin

“In case you're wondering, vanity never ends.”
― Margaret Atwood

“Stick a shovel in the ground almost anywhere and some horrible thing or other will come to light.”
― Margaret Atwood, The Blind Assassin

“How I would like to have them back, those pointless afternoons - the boredom, the aimlessness, the unformed possibilities.”
― Margaret Atwood

“Already my childhood seemed far away—a remote age, faded and bittersweet, like dried flowers. Did I regret its loss, did I want it back? I didn't think so.”
― Margaret Atwood, The Blind Assassin

“I didn't know I was about to be left with her idea of me; with her idea of my goodness pinned onto me like a badge and no chance to throw it back at her (as would have been the normal course of affairs with a mother and a daughter—if she'd lived, as I'd grown older).”
― 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”
― Margaret Atwood

“The poems that used to entrance me in the days of Miss Violence now struck me as overdone and sickly. Alas, burthen, thine, cometh, aweary—the archaic language of unrequited love. I was irritated with such words, which rendered the unhappy lovers—I could now see—faintly ridiculous, like poor moping Miss Violence herself. Soft-edged, blurry, soggy, like a bun fallen into the water. Nothing you'd want to touch,”
― Margaret Atwood, The Blind Assassin

“Sometimes there would be couples, arm in arm—laughing, happy, amorous. Victims of an enormous fraud, and at the same time its perpetrators, or so I felt.”
― Margaret Atwood, The Blind Assassin

“Already they're the objects of narrow sideways looks, as if they had something to do with it; already they've assumed the cornered, angry air of the consciously innocent. I'm sure they're blameless, but they're alive, and whoever's left alive gets blamed. That's the rule in things like this. Unfair, but there it is.”
― Margaret Atwood, The Blind Assassin

“What did they want from it? Lechery, smut, confirmation of their worst suspicions. But perhaps some of them wanted, despite themselves, to be seduced. Perhaps they were looking for passion; perhaps they delved into this book as into a mysterious parcel - a gift box at the bottom of which, hidden in layers of rustling tissue paper, lay something they'd always longed for but couldn't ever grasp.”
― Margaret Atwood

“We would hear Reenie, later, on the subject of his politeness. Orphans were well mannered because good manners had been beaten into them, in the orphanages. Only an orphan could be so self-assured, but this aplomb of theirs concealed a vengeful nature – underneath, they were jeering at everyone. Well, of course they’d be vengeful, considering how they’d been fobbed off. Most anarchists and kidnappers were orphans.”
― Margaret Atwood