Top 100 Margaret Atwood Quotes
#1. Show me a character totally without anxieties and I will show you a boring book.
Margaret Atwood
#2. Still at the table, engaged no doubt in some kind of arcane flirtation, she for practise, he in pathetic earnest. Toby
Margaret Atwood
#3. Miranda nods, because she knows that to be true: noble people don't do things for the money, they simply have money, and that's what allows they to be noble. They don't really have to think about it much; they sprout benevolent acts the way trees sprout leaves.
Margaret Atwood
#5. Time is not a line but a dimension, like the dimensions of space. If you can bend space you can bend time also, and if you knew enough and could move faster than light you could travel backward in tie and exist in two places at once.
Margaret Atwood
#7. The leader had a beard and was wearing a caftan that looked as if it had been sewn by elves on hash.
Margaret Atwood
#8. Apart from all this, I do of course have a real life. I sometimes have trouble believing in 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 my age is an adult, whereas I m merely in disguise.
Margaret Atwood
#9. Even an obvious fabrication is some comfort when you have few others.
Margaret Atwood
#10. It was the thumbprints of human imperfection that used to move him, the flaws in the design: the lopsided smile, the wart next to the navel, the mole, the bruise. Was it consolation he'd had in mind, kissing the wound to make it better?
Margaret Atwood
#12. Nothing changes instantaneously: in a gradually heating bathtub you'd be boiled to death before you knew it.
Margaret Atwood
#15. My favorite author's question of all time - because it's so simple to answer ... 'Is your hair really like that, or do you get it done?
Margaret Atwood
#16. Younger people have greatest fears. Why is that? Because they don't know the plot. They don't know their own individual plot ... they don't know what's going to happen to them.
Margaret Atwood
#18. As his editor put it, Yeah, it's a piece of shit, but it's good shit.
Margaret Atwood
#19. I have long since decided if you wait for the perfect time to write, you'll never write. There is no time that isn't flawed somehow.
Margaret Atwood
#20. I forgave her, of course. I always did; I had to, because there were only the two of us. The two of us on our thorn-encircled island, waiting for rescue; and, on the mainland, everyone else.
Margaret Atwood
#21. Marshall McLuhan is absolutely right, we are always looking in the rear view mirror.
Margaret Atwood
#22. The facts of this world seen clearly are seen through tears.
Margaret Atwood
#23. Something could be exchanged, we thought, some deal made, some tradeoff, we still had our bodies.
Margaret Atwood
#24. We thought we were running away from the grownups, and now we are the grownups.
Margaret Atwood
#25. I thought, men who changed their names were likely to be con-men, criminals, undercover agents or magicians, whereas women who changed their names were probably just married.
Margaret Atwood
#26. Another of those things that must be true because everyone else agrees they are, although they don't seem so to me.
Margaret Atwood
#28. Why couldn't the two of them have gone on and on forever? Himself and Constance, sun and moon, each one of them shining, though in different ways. Instead of which he's here, forsaken by her, abandoned. In time, which fails to sustain him. In space, which fails to cradle him.
Margaret Atwood
#29. They didn't realize that her clumsiness was not the ordinary kind, not poor coordination. It was just because she wasn't sure where the edges of her body ended and the rest of the world began.
Margaret Atwood
#30. What he really wanted was revenge. But against whom, and for what? Even if he had the energy for it, even if he could focus and aim, such a thing would be less than useless.
Margaret Atwood
#31. The best way of being kind to bears is not to be very close to them.
Margaret Atwood
#32. But they had a money value: they represented a cash profit to others. They must have sensed that
sensed that they were worth something.
Margaret Atwood
#33. As with all knowledge, once you knew it, you couldn't imagine how it was that you hadn't known it before.
Margaret Atwood
#34. Poetry isn't written from the idea down. It's written from
the phrase, line and stanza up, which is different from
what your teacher taught you to do in school.
Margaret Atwood
#35. But the adjectives change," said Jimmy. "Nothing's worse than last year's adjectives.
Margaret Atwood
#36. Better never means better for everyone ... It always means worse, for some.
Margaret Atwood
#37. I write as if I've lived a lot of things I haven't lived..
Margaret Atwood
#38. Our curiosity is supposed to have limits, though these have never been defined exactly.
Margaret Atwood
#39. Anyway, maybe there weren't any solutions. Human society, corpses and rubble. It never learned, it made the same cretinous mistakes over and over, trading short-term gain for long-term pain.
Margaret Atwood
#40. Writing of the narrative kind, and perhaps all writing, is motivated deep down, by a fear or and fascination with mortality - by a desire to make the risky trip to the underworld and to bring something or someone back from the dead.
Margaret Atwood
#41. Glenn used to say the reason you can't really imagine yourself being dead was that as soon as you say, 'I'll be dead,' you've said the word I, and so you're still alive inside the sentence. And that's how people got the idea of the immortality of the soul - it was a consequence of grammar.
Margaret Atwood
#42. Powerful but insecure men don't take well to rejection. Rage could result.
Margaret Atwood
#43. Having long ago whispered I want to die, I now realize that this wish will indeed be fulfilled, and sooner rather than later. No matter that I've changed my mind about it.
Margaret Atwood
#44. I am not running for mayor yet. But if it comes to be true that people cannot voice an opinion unless they have been elected, then we are no longer in a democracy,
Margaret Atwood
#45. In the burned house I am eating breakfast.
You understand? There is no house, there is no breakfast,
yet here I am
Margaret Atwood
#46. But if you happen to be a man, sometime in the future, and you've made it this far, please remember: you will never be subjected to the temptation of feeling you must forgive, a man, as a woman.
Margaret Atwood
#47. But it seems she'd wanted children after all, because when she was told she'd been accidentally sterilized she could feel all the light leaking out of her.
Margaret Atwood
#48. What could she have been thinking about? Not much, I guess; not back then, not at the time. She was thinking about how not to think. The times were abnormal. She
Margaret Atwood
#49. Beginnings are sudden, but also insidious. They creep up on you sideways, they keep to the shadows, they lurk unrecognized. Then, later, they spring.
Margaret Atwood
#50. That's the girl, as Grandma Win would say. Put one foot on the first stair, then the other one beside it, like when you were three. You need to take care of yourself, because who else will? There.
Margaret Atwood
#51. I remember Queen Victoria's advice to her daughter. Close your eyes and think of England.
Margaret Atwood
#53. The way love feels is always only approximate. I would like to be without shame. I would like to be shameless. I would like to be ignorant. Then I would not know how ignorant I was.
Margaret Atwood
#54. Like when you misplace your scooter keys or your phone and then they turn up and you get a rush of luckiness, as if the stars or fate or something has singled you out for a win.
Margaret Atwood
#56. I could end this with a moral,
as if this were a fable about animals,
though no fables are really about animals.
Margaret Atwood
#57. But I had the taste of rabbit in my mouth. It felt like I'd eaten a nosebleed. That
Margaret Atwood
#59. As with so much else, she was convinced that an exception would be made in her case.
Margaret Atwood
#60. I want everything back, the way it was. But there is no point to it, this wanting.
Margaret Atwood
#61. I lie on the floor, washed by nothing and hanging on. I cry at night. I am afraid of hearing voices, or a voice. I have come to the edge, of the land. I could get pushed over.
Margaret Atwood
#62. Perhaps he was merely being friendly. Perhaps he saw the look on my face and mistook it for something else. Really what I wanted was the cigarette.
Margaret Atwood
#63. The past is so much safer, because whatever's in it has already happened. It can't be changed; so, in a way, there's nothing to dread.
Margaret Atwood
#64. The doctor tapped my ribs and eavesdropped on my heart.
Margaret Atwood
#65. It's strange to remember how we used to think, as if everything were available to us, as if there were no contingencies, no boundaries; as if we were free to shape and reshape forever the everexpanding perimeters of our lives.
Margaret Atwood
#66. For the children with their greedy little mouths represent the future, which like time itself will devour all now alive.
Margaret Atwood
#67. this history will soon be swept away by the Waterless Flood. Nothing will remain of the Exfernal World but decaying wood and rusting metal implements; and
Margaret Atwood
#68. When I'm by myself I revert to the times when I would forget about eating, stay up all night working, go until I felt an odd sensation I'd identify after some thought as hunger. Then I'd go through the refrigerator like a vacuum cleaner, sucking in whatever there was. Leftovers.
Margaret Atwood
#69. The moon is a stone and the sky is full of deadly hardware, but oh God, how beautiful anyway.
Margaret Atwood
#70. For every year of peace there have been four hundred years of war.
Margaret Atwood
#71. A place with no handholds,no landmarks,no past at all:That would have been too much like dying
Margaret Atwood
#73. All observations of life are harsh, because life is. I lament that fact, but I cannot change it.
Margaret Atwood
#74. We get along by a symbiotic adjustment of habits and with a minimum of that pale-mauve hostility you often find among women.
Margaret Atwood
#75. All I can hope for is a reconstruction: the way love feels is always only approximate.
Margaret Atwood
#76. Take me to your trees. Take me to your breakfasts, your sunsets, your bad dreams, your shoes, your nouns. Take me to your fingers.
Margaret Atwood
#77. Though as he'd say, what is 'belief' but a willingness to suspend the negatives?
Margaret Atwood
#78. The genres, it is thought, have other designs on us. They want to entertain, as opposed to rubbing our noses in the daily grit produced by the daily grind. Unhappily for realistic novelists, the larger reading public likes being entertained.
Margaret Atwood
#81. ...that's what Hiltler exemplified: not the triumph of evil but the failure of reason.
Margaret Atwood
#82. People dressed in a certain kind of clothing are never wrong. Also they never fart.
Margaret Atwood
#83. Confronted by too much emptiness, said Adam One, the brain invents. Loneliness creates company as thirst creates water. How many sailors have been wrecked in pursuit of islands that were merely a shimmering?
Margaret Atwood
#85. She longs for tonight, she longs to skip the day that's just begun and plunge headlong into the night as if into a pool; a pool with the moon reflected in it. She longs to swim in liquid moonlight.
Margaret Atwood
#86. The young habitually mistake lust for love, they're infested with idealism of all kinds.
Margaret Atwood
#88. The crimes of others are a secret language among us. Through them we show ourselves what we might be capable of, after all.
Margaret Atwood
#89. But we own nothing they want, so we don't qualify as terrorists.
Margaret Atwood
#90. it, something naughty, secretive, forbidden, thrilling. It's like a spell, of sorts. It deflates them, reduces them to the common denominator where they can be dealt with.
Margaret Atwood
#91. You can wipe your feet on me, twist my motives around all you like, you can dump millstones on my head and drown me in the river, but you can't get me out of the story. I'm the plot, babe, and don't ever forget it.
Margaret Atwood
#92. Your friend is intellectually honourable," Jimmy's mother would say. "He doesn't lie to himself.
Margaret Atwood
#93. He wouldn't have much of a life out there, picking through garbage dumps and fighting off scavengers, but at least he'd be in charge of himself again.
Margaret Atwood
#94. That was when they suspended the Constitution. They said it would be temporary. There wasn't even any rioting in the streets. People stayed home at night, watching television, looking for some direction. There wasn't even an enemy you could put your finger on.
Margaret Atwood
#95. Laura was flint in a nest of thistledown.
I say flint, not stone: a flint has a heart of fire.
Margaret Atwood
#96. Things musicals taught me: All your problems will go away if you sing about it.
Margaret Atwood
#97. Possibly, then, writing has to do with darkness, and a desire or perhaps a compulsion to enter it, and, with luck, to illuminate it, and to bring something back out to the light.
Margaret Atwood
#98. It would be nice to believe that love should be dished out in a fair way so that everyone got some. But that wasn't how it was going to be for me.
Margaret Atwood
#99. Her face might be kindly if she would smile. But the frown isn't personal: it's the red dress she disapproves of, and what it stands for. She thinks I may be catching, like a disease or any form of bad luck.
Margaret Atwood
#100. But unshed tears can turn rancid. So can memory. So can biting your tongue. My bad nights were beginning. I couldn't sleep.
Margaret Atwood
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