Top 100 Atwood Quotes
#1. when I was still imaginary for him. Before we were married and I solidified.
Margaret Atwood
#2. A man has integrity if his interest in the good of the service is at all times greater than his personal pride, and when he holds himself to the same line of duty when unobserved as he would follow if his superiors were present
Samuel Lyman Atwood Marshall
#3. Show me a character totally without anxieties and I will show you a boring book.
Margaret Atwood
#4. It's fun conjuring what people will be wearing in the future. We exist in this world today, and yet there are people walking around who still look like they're in the '60s.
Colleen Atwood
#5. Science and fiction both begin with similar questions: What if? Why? How does it all work? But they focus on different areas of life on earth.
Margaret Atwood
#6. Maybe I don't really want to know what's going on. Maybe I'd rather not know. Maybe I couldn't bear to know. The Fall was a fall from innocence to knowledge.
Margaret Atwood
#7. Truly amazing, what people can get used to, as long as there are a few compensations.
Margaret Atwood
#8. This world is not enough, but it will have to do. You can either hold on or let go.
Margaret Atwood
#9. she was beginning to emerge from the initial sex-induced coma created by him through
Margaret Atwood
#10. He just tarted up his misdemeanours and made them look respectable,
Margaret Atwood
#11. Red all over the cupboard, mirth rhymes with birth, oh to die of laughter.
Margaret Atwood
#12. What confronts us, now the excitement's over, is our own failure.
Margaret Atwood
#13. Screw poetry, it's you I want, your taste, rain on you, mouth on your skin.
Margaret Atwood
#14. Every night when I go to bed I think, In the morning I will wake up in my own house and things will be back the way they were.
It hasn't happened this morning, either.
Margaret Atwood
#15. There's a moon now, almost full. Good luck for owls; bad luck for rabbits, who often choose to cavort riskily but sexily in the moonlight, their brains buzzing with pheromones.
Margaret Atwood
#16. Some cleric putting a match to her. /Neither of them looks happy about it. /Once lit, she'll burn like a book, /like a book that was ever finished, /like a locked-up library.
Margaret Atwood
#17. God is not the voice in the whirlwind, God is the whirlwind.
Margaret Atwood
#18. Powerful men don't take well to rejection. Rage could result. There
Margaret Atwood
#19. I've been prepared for almost anything; except absence, except silence.
Margaret Atwood
#20. I really don't over-theorize about design. I'd rather feel it than talk it to death. A lot happens as you unroll the design.
Colleen Atwood
#21. You may not be able to alter reality, but you can alter your attitude towards it, and this, paradoxically, alters reality. Try it and see.
Margaret Atwood
#22. You could tell a lot about a person from their fridge magnets, not that he'd thought much about them at the time.
Margaret Atwood
#23. Everyone thinks writers must know more about the inside of the human head, but that's wrong. They know less, that's why they write. Trying to find out what everyone else takes for granted.
Margaret Atwood
#25. The girls in the stories make such fools of themselves. They are so weak. They fall helplessly in love with the wrong men, they give in, they are jilted. Then they cry.
Margaret Atwood
#26. 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
#27. Romance takes place in the middle distance. Romance is looking in at yourself through a window clouded with dew. Romance means leaving things out: where life grunts and shuffles, romance only sighs.
Margaret Atwood
#28. A wall that cannot be defended is no sooner built than ended.
Margaret Atwood
#29. So now that we don't have different clothes," I say, "you merely have different women," This is irony, but he doesn't acknowledge it.
Margaret Atwood
#30. To live in prison is to live without mirrors. To live without mirrors is to live without the self. She is living selflessly, she finds a hole in the stone wall and on the other side of the wall, a voice. The voice comes through darkness and has no face. This voice becomes her mirror.
Margaret Atwood
#31. Men are sex machines, said Aunt Lydia, and not much more. They only want one thing. You must learn to manipulate them, for your own good.
Margaret Atwood
#32. The alcohol smell is on my fingers, cold and remote, piercing like a steel pin going in. It smells like white enamel basins. When I look up at the stars in the nighttime, cold and white and sharp, I think they must smell like that.
Margaret Atwood
#33. It was like being in an elevator cut loose at the top. Falling, falling, and not knowing when you will hit.
Margaret Atwood
#34. Would I laugh?"
"Matter of fact, you would," says Zeb. "Heart like shale. What you need is a good fracking.
Margaret Atwood
#35. Some people mistakenly think nature is very nice and benevolent and never betrays.
Margaret Atwood
#36. My audience is God,
because who the hell else could understand me?
Margaret Atwood
#37. Every novel is-at the beginning-the same opening of a door onto a completely unknown space.
Margaret Atwood
#38. Being edited is like falling face down into a threshing machine.
Margaret Atwood
#39. It was love, after all,
that rubbed the skins from their gray cheeks,
crippled their fingers,
snarled their hair, brown or dull gold.
Hate would merely have smashed them.
Margaret Atwood
#40. She had no images of this love. She could offer no anecdotes. It was a belief rather than a memory.
Margaret Atwood
#41. But a chair, sunlight, flowers: these are not to be dismissed. I am alive, I live, I breathe, I put my hand out, unfolded, into the sunlight. Where I am is not a prison but a privilege, as Aunt Lydia said, who was in love with either/or.
Margaret Atwood
#42. Why are you so interested in amoebas?"
"Oh, they're immortal," he said, "and sort of shapeless and flexible. Being a
person is getting too complicated.
Margaret Atwood
#43. But I'm ravenous for news, any kind of news; even if it's false news, it must mean something. We
Margaret Atwood
#44. The stories the children whispered to one another - while they sat weaving their endless carpets, while they could still see - was about this possible future life. It was a saying among them that only the blind are free.
Margaret Atwood
#45. She looks like a very young old person, or a very old young person; but then, she's looked that way ever since she was two.
Margaret Atwood
#46. One of the challenges with period costumes is, on a technical level, making the scale of different periods work on contemporary bodies. We're much bigger than what people were in older times.
Colleen Atwood
#47. This form of love is like the pain
of childbirth: so intense
it's hard to remember afterwards,
Margaret Atwood
#48. He had the freedom of a nobody, with a blank future unrolling before him on which anything at all might be written.
Margaret Atwood
#49. What was the rationale for all this pillaging? Souvenirs. These people needed something to remember themselves by. An odd thing, souvenir-hunting: now becomes then even while it is still now. You don't really believe you're there, and so you nick the proof, or something you mistake for it.
Margaret Atwood
#50. My hands are out of practice, my eyes disused. Most of what I do is drawing, because the preparation of the surface, the laborious underpainting and detailed concentration ... are too much for me. I have lost confidence: perhaps all I will ever be is what I am now.
Margaret Atwood
#51. Am I shallow? she asks the mirror. Yes, I am shallow. The sun shines on the ripples where it's shallow. Deep is too dark.
Margaret Atwood
#52. If she'd foreseen that Alphinland was going to last so long and be so successful, she would have planned it better. It would have had a shape, a more defined structure; it would have had boundaries. As it is, it's grown like urban sprawl. Not
Margaret Atwood
#53. The hearts gone bubonic with jealousy and greed, glinting through the vests and sweaters of anyone at all.
Margaret Atwood
#54. Murderess is a strong word to have attached to you. It has a smell to it, that word - musky and oppressive, like dead flowers in a vase. Sometimes at night I whisper it over to myself: Murderess, Murderess. It rustles, like a taffeta skirt across the floor.
Margaret Atwood
#55. I don't want a man around, what use are they except for ten seconds' worth of half babies
Margaret Atwood
#56. Fatigue is here, in my body, in my legs and eyes. That is what gets you in the end. Faith is only a word, embroidered.
Margaret Atwood
#57. I became a poet at the age of sixteen. I did not intend to do it. It was not my fault.
Margaret Atwood
#58. Time is going faster and faster; the days of the week whisk by like panties.
Margaret Atwood
#59. It has taken so little time to change our minds, about things like this. Then
Margaret Atwood
#60. Some bioengineering is good, especially if it results in plants that are more drought-resistant or perennial food crops.
Margaret Atwood
#61. The true story is vicious and multiple and untrue after all. Why do you need it? Don't ever ask for the true story.
Margaret Atwood
#62. No male writer is likely to be asked to sit on a panel addressing itself to the special problems of a male writer.
Margaret Atwood
#63. Suddenly revenge is so close he can actually taste it. It tastes like steak, rare.
Margaret Atwood
#64. Jon smashes things, and glues the shards into place in the pattern of breakage. I can see the appeal.
Margaret Atwood
#66. I meet a lot of readers who first encountered my work in school. And I can only assume there is another group who would run away very fast if they saw me coming, for exactly the same reason. Reading is individual, and not all tastes are alike.
Margaret Atwood
#67. It was true, I took too much for granted; I trusted fate, back then.
Margaret Atwood
#69. Because citizens were always a bit like inmates and inmates were always a bit like citizens, so Consilience and Positron have only made it official.
Margaret Atwood
#70. Oppression involves a failure of the imagination: the failure to imagine the full humanity of other human beings.
Margaret Atwood
#71. Nevertheless Moira was our fantasy. We hugged her to us, she was with us in secret, a giggle; she was lava beneath the crust of daily life. In
Margaret Atwood
#72. The society in 'The Handmaid's Tale' is a throwback to the early Puritans whom I studied extensively at Harvard under Perry Miller, to whom the book is dedicated.
Margaret Atwood
#73. Jimmy suspected him of wanting to make Grandmaster, not because it meant anything but just because it was there.
Margaret Atwood
#74. Still at the table, engaged no doubt in some kind of arcane flirtation, she for practise, he in pathetic earnest. Toby
Margaret Atwood
#75. Heaven, for the Presbyterians, must resemble a banking establishment, with each soul tagged and docketed, and placed in the appropriate pigeonhole.
Margaret Atwood
#76. He feels like saying that of course there's lint on Mr. Wiggly, or dust at any rate, or maybe rust; what does she expect, because as she is well aware Mr. Wiggly has been on the shelf for some time.
Margaret Atwood
#77. Don't let the bastards grind you down. I repeat this to myself but it conveys nothing. You might as well say, Don't let there be air; or, Don't be.
Margaret Atwood
#78. I am nervous about dogmas of any kind, whether they be religious, political, or anti-religious. Too many heads have rolled because of them.
Margaret Atwood
#79. Religious people of any serious kind made her nervous: they were like men in raincoats who might or might not be flashers.
Margaret Atwood
#80. They say:
Speak for us (to whom?)
Some say: Avenge us (on whom?)
Some say: Take our place.
Some say: Witness
Others say (and these are women)
Be happy for us.
Margaret Atwood
#82. Setting fire to the roofs, getting away with the loot, suiting herself. She studied modern philosophy, read Sartre on the side, smoked Gitanes, and cultivated a look of bored contempt. But inwardly, she was seething with unfocused excitement, and looking for someone to worship.
Margaret Atwood
#83. As I'm standing up I hear the black van. I hear it before I see it; blended with the twilight, it appears out of its own sound like a solidification, a clotting of the night.
Margaret Atwood
#84. It's probably a form of childish curiosity that keeps me going as a fiction writer. I ... want to open everybody's bureau drawers and see what they keep in there. I'm nosy.
Margaret Atwood
#85. As the architects of Gilead knew, to institute an effective totalitarian system or indeed any system at all you must offer some benefits and freedoms, at least to a privileged few, in return for those you remove.
Margaret Atwood
#86. He doesn't know what is worse, a past he can't regain or a present that will destroy him it he looks at it too clearly.
Margaret Atwood
#87. Oh God. It's no joke. Oh God oh God. How can I keep on living?
Margaret Atwood
#88. The lock splits. The iron gate swings open. She emerges, raises her arms towards the suddenly chilled moon. The world changes.
Margaret Atwood
#90. I myself have 12 hats, and each one represents a different personality. Why just be yourself?
Margaret Atwood
#91. Today on the way home, it snows. Big, soft caressing flakes fall onto our skin like cold moths; the air fills with feathers.
Margaret Atwood
#92. I'm not interested in cutting the feet off my characters or stretching them to make them fit my certain political view.
Margaret Atwood
#94. She breathes in the cold air; pellets of blown ice whip against her face. The wind's getting up, as the TV said it would. Nonetheless there's something brisk about being out in the storm, something energizing: it whisks away the cobwebs, it makes you inhale. The
Margaret Atwood
#95. Below me, in the foundations of the house, I could hear the clothes I'd buried there growing themselves a body.
Margaret Atwood
#96. also may be untrue. One of the gravestones in the cemetery near the earliest church has an anchor on it and an hourglass, and the words In Hope. In Hope. Why did they put that above a dead person? Was it the corpse hoping, or those still alive? Does Luke hope?
Margaret Atwood
#97. He's heard Unitarianism called a featherbed for falling Christians, but his mother doesn't seem like a woman who has fallen anywhere. (Where is the featherbed for falling Unitarians, he wonders? Such as himself.) [From "Life Before Man," 1979)
Margaret Atwood
#98. He would have died soon, but more painfully. Anyway, it was Urban Bloodshed Limitation. First rule: limit bloodshed by making sure that none of your own gets spilled.
Margaret Atwood
#99. He'd developed a strangely tender feeling towards such words, as if they were children abandoned in the woods and it was his duty to rescue them.
Margaret Atwood
#100. The myth that everyone once read great literature is just a myth.
Margaret Atwood
