Cat’s Eye Quotes

“I am in love with his need”
― Margaret Atwood, Cat’s Eye

“I need to feel physical pain, to attach myself to daily life.”
― Margaret Atwood, Cat’s Eye

“He was entitled to his own versions, his own conjurings. as I am. I may have served his ends, but he served mine as well.”
― Margaret Atwood, Cat’s Eye

“I have the window seat. In the two seats beside me are two old ladies, old women, each with a knitted cardigan, each with yellowy-white hair and thick-lensed glasses with a chain for around the neck, each with a desiccated mouth lipsticked bright red with bravado... They seem to me amazingly carefree. They have saved up for this trip and they are damn well going to enjoy it, despite the arthritis of one, the swollen legs of the other. They're rambunctious, they're full of beans; they're tough as thirteen, they're innocent and dirty, they don't give a hoot. Responsibilities have fallen away from them, obligations, old hates and grievances; now for a short while they can play again like children, but this time without the pain.”
― Margaret Atwood, Cat’s Eye

“I’m not mad because I’m a woman,” I say. “I’m mad because you’re an asshole.”
― Margaret Atwood , Cat’s Eye

“I’m developing a knack for this, I can sniff out hidden misery in others now with hardly any effort at all.”
― Margaret Atwood, Cat's Eye

“I’d been reading modern French novels, and William Faulkner as well. I knew what love was supposed to be: obsession, with undertones of nausea.”
― Margaret Atwood, Cat's Eye

“You don’t look back along time but down through it, like water. Sometimes this comes to the surface, sometimes that, sometimes nothing. Nothing goes away.”
― Margaret Atwood, Cat’s Eye

“I buy licorice whips, jelly beans, many-layered blackballs with the seed in the middle, packages of fizzy sherbet you suck up through a straw. I dole them out equally, these offerings, these atonements, into the waiting hands of my friends. In the moment just before giving, I am loved.”
― Margaret Atwood, Cat's Eye

“I stand there on the top step, frozen with hate. What I hate is not Grace or even Cordelia. I can’t go as far as that. I hate Mrs. Smeath, because what I thought was a secret, something going on among girls, among children, is not one. It has been discussed before, and tolerated. Mrs. Smeath has known and approved. She has done nothing to stop it. She thinks it serves me right.”
― Margaret Atwood, Cat's Eye

“If my eyes could shoot out fatal rays like the ones in comic books I would incinerate her on the spot. She is right, I am a heathen. I cannot forgive.”
― Margaret Atwood, Cat's Eye

“I can see this idea gathering in Cordelia as well. Maybe she’s gone too far, hit, finally, some core of resistance in me. If I refuse to do what she says this time, who knows where my defiance will end?”
― Margaret Atwood, Cat's Eye

“Grace and Cordelia and Carol hang around the edges of my life, enticing, jeering, growing paler and paler every day, less and less substantial. I hardly hear them any more because I hardly listen.”
― Margaret Atwood, Cat's Eye

“Time is missing. Nobody mentions anything about this missing time, except my mother. Once in a while she says, “That bad time you had,” and I am puzzled. What is she talking about? I find these references to bad times vaguely threatening, vaguely insulting: I am not the sort of girl who has bad times, I have good times only. There I am, in the Grade Six class picture, smiling broadly. Happy as a clam, is what my mother says for happy. I am happy as a clam: hardshelled, firmly closed.”
― Margaret Atwood, Cat's Eye

“I have an uneasy feeling, as if something’s buried down there, a nameless, crucial thing, or as if there’s someone still on the bridge, left by mistake, up in the air, unable to get to the land. But it’s obvious there’s no one.”
― Margaret Atwood, Cat's Eye

“This is what convinced me that it must have been Josef: it wouldn’t have occurred to him that they might have had reasons of their own for being crazy, apart from men. None of the blood in this film was real blood. Women were not real to Josef, any more than he was real to me. This was why I could treat his sufferings with such scorn and unconcern: he wasn’t real. The reason I’ve never dreamed about him was that he belonged already to the world of dreams: discontinuous, irrational, obsessive. I was unfair to him, of course, but where would I have been without unfairness? In thrall, in harness. Young women need unfairness, it’s one of their few defenses. They need their callousness, they need their ignorance. They walk in the dark, along the edges of high cliffs, humming to themselves, thinking themselves invulnerable.”
― Margaret Atwood, Cat's Eye

“Although I'm afraid of this idea and ashamed of it, and although in the daytime I find it melodramatic and ludicrous and refuse to believe in it, I also cherish it. It's like the secret bottle stashed away by alcoholics: I may have no desire to use it, right now, but I feel more secure knowing it's there. It's a fallback, it's a vice, it's an exit. It's a weapon.”
― Margaret Atwood, Cat’s Eye

“Every move I make is sodden with unreality. When no one is around, I bite my fingers. I need to feel physical pain, to attach myself to daily life.”
― Margaret Atwood, Cat’s Eye

“The north smells different from the city: clearer, thinner. You can see farther. A sawmill, a hill of sawdust, the teepee shape of a sawdust burner; the smokestacks of the copper smelters, the rocks around them bare of trees, burnt-looking, the heaps of blackened slag: I’ve forgotten about these things all winter, but here they are again, and when I see them I remember them, I know them, I greet them as if they are home.”
― Margaret Atwood, Cat’s Eye

“Occasionally I do cry for no reason, as it says you are supposed to. But I can't believe in my own sadness, I can't take it seriously. I watch myself crying in the mirror, intrigued by the sight of tears.”
― Margaret Atwood, Cat’s Eye

“I'm ashamed of my own reluctance, my lack of desire; but the truth is that I would be terrified to get into bed with a woman. Women collect grievances, hold grudges and change shape. They pass hard, legitimate judgements, unlike the purblind guesses of men, fogged with romanticism and ignorance and bias and wish. I can understand why men are afraid of them, as they are frequently accused of being.”
― Margaret Atwood, Cat’s Eye

“There is never only one, of anyone.”
― Margaret Atwood, Cat’s Eye

“The pain gave me something definite to think about, something immediate. It was something to hold onto.”
― Margaret Atwood, Cat’s Eye

“When I start feeling shaky I lie down, expecting nothing, and it arrives, washing over me in a wave of black vacancy”
― Margaret Atwood, Cat’s Eye

“I've come to enjoy the risk, the sensation of vertigo when I realize that I've shot right over the border of the socially acceptable, that I'm walking on thin ice, on empty air.”
― Margaret Atwood, Cat’s Eye

“Maybe nothing happened, maybe these emotions I remember are not the right emotions.”
― Margaret Atwood, Cat’s Eye

“... homelessness is a nationality now. Somehow the war never ended after all, it just broke up into pieces and got scattered, it gets in everywhere, you can't shut it out. Killing is endless now, it's an industry, there's money in it, and the good side and the bad side are pretty hard to tell apart.”
― Margaret Atwood, Cat’s Eye

“When the leaders were older than me I could believe in their wisdom, I could believe they had transcended rage and malice and the need to be loved. Now I know better. I look at the faces in newspapers, in magazines, and wonder: what greeds, what furies drive them on?”
― Margaret Atwood, Cat’s Eye

“Everything is post these days, as if we’re all just a footnote to something earlier that was real enough to have a name of its own.”
― Margaret Atwood, Cat’s Eye

“I know that these things must be memories, but they do not have the quality of memories. They are not hazy around the edges, but sharp and clear. They arrive detached from any context; they are simply there, in isolation, as an object glimpsed on the street is there.
I have no image of myself in relation to them. They are suffused with anxiety, but it’s not my own anxiety. The anxiety is in things themselves.”
― Margaret Atwood, Cat’s Eye