Blind Assassin Quotes & Sayings

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

Stick a shovel in the ground almost anywhere and some horrible thing or other will come to light. — Margaret Atwood

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

One look at a banana and you can tell it came from outer space. — Margaret Atwood

You don't know won't hurt you. A dubious maxim: sometimes what you don't know can hurt you very much. (The Blind Assassin, 137). — Margaret Atwood

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

If you'd told me even a year before ... that I'd wind up whispering my sins in the confessional or on my knees saying the rosary, I would've laughed myself cockeyed. More likely pastime?Pole dancer. International spy. Drug mule. Assassin.
I drive under a sky black as graphite to meet my new spiritual director ... a bulky Franciscan nun named Sister Margaret, patiently going blind behind fish-tank glasses that magnify her eyes like goggles. — Mary Karr

Sympathy from strangers can be ruinous. — Margaret Atwood

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

In case you're wondering, vanity never ends. — Margaret Atwood

For a moment, she wasn't Mia Corvere, daughter of a murdered house, parched with the thirst for revenge. Not a fledgling assassin or a servant of a goddess. Just a girl. And he a boy. Their eyes blind to all but each other. Aalea's voice echoing in her ears. — Jay Kristoff

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 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