top of page
"Maybe none of this is about control. Maybe it really isn't about who can own whom, who can do what to whom and get away with it, even as far as death. Maybe it isn't about who can sit and who has to kneel or stand or lie down, legs spread open. Maybe it's about who can do what to whom and be forgiven for it. Never tell me it amounts to the same thing."
Standard
Customized
Exlpore more Abuse quotes

"The problem with depicting abusers as full-time monsters is that when a person is actually experiencing abuse in their own life, they'll think 'oh but he's the sweetest guy most of the time so he can't be an abuser ' or 'but he's not ALWAYS horrible, he's usually amazing, so he's not an abuser', and they'll make the mistake of thinking they mustn't really be being abused when they actually are."

"I heard the various terms of abuse at school and probably indulged them in the way you do as a kid."

"Substance abuse is a disease which doesn't go away overnight. I'm working hard to overcome it. I did fail my recent drug test. I'm prepared to face the consequences."

"Any informed borrower is simply less vulnerable to fraud and abuse."

"The military is trying very hard right now to put a better face on Guantanamo, and I think they actually have tried to rid some of the extreme versions of abuse that we have read about."

"Rape, mutilation, abuse, and theft are the natural outcome of a world in which force rules, in which human beings are objects."

"We must ensure that while eliminating child labor in the export industry, we are also eliminating their labour from the informal sector, which is more invisible to public scrutiny - and thus leaves the children more open to abuse and exploitation."

"The abuse of detainees in U.S. custody has severely undermined our Nation's position in the world."

"Better a thousandfold abuse of free speech than denial of free speech."
Explore more quotes by Margaret Atwood

"Heroes need monsters to establish their heroic credentials. You need something scary to overcome."

"No mother is ever, completely, a child's idea of what a mother should be, and I suppose it works the other way around as well. But despite everything, we didn't do too badly by one another, we did as well as most."

"Night falls. Or has fallen. Why is it that night falls, instead of rising, like the dawn? Yet if you look east, at sunset, you can see night rising, not falling; darkness lifting into the sky, up from the horizon, like a black sun behind cloud cover. Like smoke from an unseen fire, a line of fire just below the horizon, brushfire or a burning city. Maybe night falls because it's heavy, a thick curtain pulled up over the eyes. Wool blanket."

"I hope that people will finally come to realize that there is only one 'race' - the human race - and that we are all members of it."

"She would roll up her sleeves and dispense with sentimentality, and do whatever blood-soaked, bad-smelling thing had to be done. She would become adept with axes."

"Little girls are cute and small only to adults. To one another they are not cute. They are life-sized."

"They spent the first three years of school getting you to pretend stuff and then the rest of it marking you down if you did the same thing."

"Walking was not fast enough so we ran. Running was not fast enough, so we galloped. Galloping was not fast enough, so we sailed. Sailing was not fast enough, so we rolled merrily along on long metal tracks. Long metal tracks were not fast enough, so we drove. Driving was not fast enough, so we flew.Flying isn't fast enough, not fast enough for us. We want to get there faster. Get where? Wherever we are not. But a human soul can go only as fast as a man can walk, they used to say. In that case, where are all the souls? Left behind. They wander here and there, slowly, dim lights flickering in the marshes at night, looking for us. But they're not nearly fast enough, not for us, we're way ahead of them, they'll never catch up. That's why we can go so fast: our souls don't weigh us down."
bottom of page