Extended excerpt  [Fiction]:

“I’m fond of him, I’d rather have him around than not; thought it would be nice if he meant something more to me. The fact that he doesn’t makes me sad: no one has since my husband. A divorce is like an amputation, you survive but there’s less of you.” (p. 47)

Source: Library – Surfacing (1972|1973 Simon & Schuster edition) International Standard Book Number (ISBN) 0671214500

Extended excerpt [Fiction]:

“All stories are about wolves. All worth repeating, that is. Anything else is sentimental drivel. All of them? Sure, he says. Think about it. There’s escaping from the wolves, fighting the wolves, capturing the wolves, taming the wolves. Being thrown to the wolves, or throwing others to the wolves so the wolves will eat them instead of you. Running with the wolf pack. Turning into a wolf. Best of all, turning into the head wolf. No other decent stories exist.” (p. 344)

Extended excerpt  [Fiction, character ‘Elaine Risley’]:

“Apart from all this, I do of course have a real life. I sometimes have trouble believing it, because it doesn’t seem like the kind of life I could ever get away with, or deserve. This goes along with another belief of mine: that everyone else my age is an adult, whereas I am merely in disguise.” (p. 14)

Source: Library – Cat’s Eye (1988|1989 Bantam Books ed.) International Standard Book Number (ISBN) 0553282476

Extended excerpt  [Fiction. From chapter titled “The Feast of Serprent Wisdom: Year Eighteen. Of the Importance of Instinctive Knowing. Spoken by Adam One.”]:

“No Human can truly know the full mind of God. The Human reason is a pin dancing on the head of an angel, so small is it in comparison to the Divine vastness that encircles us.” (p. 234)

Source note: The Year of the Flood is book two of Atwood’s The MaddAddam Trilogy.

Source: Editor’s copy – The Year of the Flood (2009) International Standard Book Number (ISBN) 978-0-307-39798-0

Extended excerpt:

“If the national mental illness of the United States is megalomania,” Atwood concluded in 1970, “that of Canada is paranoid schizophrenia. Mrs. Moodie is divided down the middle: she praises the Canadian landscape but accuses it of destroying her; she dislikes the people already in Canada but finds in people her only refuge from the land itself; she preaches progress and the march of civilization while brooding elegiacally upon the destruction of the wilderness.” (“Afterward”)

Source: Library – The Journals of Susanna Moodie (1970) Online Computer Library Center (OCLC) 670088769

Extended excerpt  [Interview, Atwood responding to the idea that she is a ‘national treasure’]:

”I think more terror is struck by the word ‘icon,’ she says. “All these things set a standard of behaviour that you don’t necessarily wish to live up to. If you’re put on a pedestal you’re supposed to behave yourself like a pedestal type of person. Pedestals actually have a limited circumference. Not much room to move around.”

Source link: “Margaret Atwood: Interview” (18 August 2013) online via The Telegraph: http://www.telegraph.co.uk/culture/books/10246937/Margaret-Atwood-interview.html

Extended excerpt [Fiction]:

“We are silent, considering shortfalls. There’s not much time left, for us to become what we once intended. Jon had potential, but it’s not a word that can be used comfortably any more. Potential has a shelf-life.” (p. 279)

Source: Library – Cat’s Eye (1988|1989 Doubleday ed.) International Standard Book Number (ISBN) 0-385-26007-5

Extended excerpt  [Interview with fellow author Joyce Carol Oates. Oates & Atwood were discussing Atwood’s experience as a Canadian student at Harvard University in Boston, Massachusetts. The excerpt here is part of Atwood’s response to the question “Why had you gone to Harvard in the first place?”]:

Margaret Atwood: “Quite a few of the well-known professors at Harvard were closet Canadians. They’d learned by experience that Americans found a revelation of one’s Canadian-ness, dropped, for instance, into the middle of a sherry party, about as interesting as the announcement that one had had mashed potatoes for lunch. The beginning of Canadian cultural nationalism was not ‘Am I really that oppressed?’ but ‘Am I really that boring?” You see, we had never been taught much about our own history or culture – but that’s another whole story.” (p. 78)

Source: Editor’s copy – Margaret Atwood: Conversations (1990) International Standard Book Number (ISBN) 0-86538-074-0

Extended excerpt [Fiction]:

“Thus the time passed. Toby stopped counting it. In any case, time is not a thing that passes, said Pilar: it’s a sea on which you float.” (p. 101)

Source note: The Year of the Flood is book two of Atwood’s The MaddAddam Trilogy.

Source: Editor’s copy – The Year of the Flood (2009) International Standard Book Number (ISBN) 978-0-307-39798-0

Extended excerpt [Fiction]:

“The personal is not political, thinks Tony: the personal is military. War is what happens when language fails.” (p. 39)

Source: Library – The Robber Bride (1993) International Standard Book Number (ISBN) 0385260083

Extended excerpt [Essay. Italics original to cited text.]:

“After 10 years of the Women’s Movement we like to think that some of the old stereotypes are fading, but 10 years is not a very long time in the history of the world, and I can tell you from experience that the old familiar images, the old icons, have merely gone underground, and not far at that. We still think of a powerful man as a born leader and a powerful woman as an anomaly, a potentially dangerous anomaly; there is something subversive about such women, even when they take care to be good role models. They cannot have come by their power naturally, it is felt. They must have got it from somewhere.” (p. 5, column 2)

Source link: “Witches: the strong neck of a favorite ancestor” (September 1980) Radcliffe Quarterly; via Harvard University Library: https://iiif.lib.harvard.edu/manifests/view/drs:427992484$1i

Extended excerpt [Atwood on the concepts of utopia, dystopia, and her book The Handmaid’s Tale]:

“Also, the most potent forms of dictatorship have always been those that have imposed tyranny in the name of religion; and even folk such as the French Revolutionaries and Hitler have striven to give a religious force and sanction to their ideas. What is needed for really good tyranny is an unquestionable idea or authority. Political disagreement is political disagreement. But political disagreement with a theocracy is heresy, and a good deal of gloating self-righteousness can be brought to bear on the extermination of heretics, as history has demonstrated, through the Crusades, the forcible conversions to Islam, the Spanish Inquisition, the burnings at the stake under the English queen Bloody Mary, and so on through the years.” (p. 97)

Source note: You can view a video of Atwood talking about her book Writing with Intent: Essays, Reviews, Personal Prose (the 2005 American version of Moving Targets) via C-SPAN: “Writing with Intent” (21 April 2005) Video – 40:11: https://www.c-span.org/video/?186435-1/writing-intent

Source: Library – Moving Targets: Writing with Intent (2004|2005 Anansi Press) International Standard Book Number (ISBN) 0-88784-735-8