Top 100 Atwood Quotes
#1. If you look at my personal library, you will notice that it ranges from Henry James to Steig Larsson, from Margaret Atwood to Max Hastings. There's Jane Austen and Tom Perrotta and volumes of letters from Civil War privates. It's pretty eclectic.
Chris Bohjalian
#2. I like science fiction. Arthur C. Clarke, Philip K. Dick and Vonnegut, and I really like Margaret Atwood, 'The Handmaid's Tale.' And you know, so much of science fiction has to do with predicting what's to come, so I think that's really interesting.
Conor Oberst
#3. All of these guys have got someone to go home to after the fight. They've got their baby, I've got mine: Jamie Atwood. That's who I love. He's the one I go home to at night, and who patches me up after I get beaten down.
Maris Black
#4. When novelist Margaret Atwood asked women what they feared most from men, they said: 'We're afraid they'll kill us.' When men were asked the same question about women, they said: 'we're afraid they'll laugh at us.
Naomi Wolf
#5. Over many years bin Laden cited dozens of concocted reasons about why he attacked the United States; the only valid one was that he attacked America because he thought - to paraphrase Margaret Atwood - with good reason, he could get away with it.
Victor Davis Hanson
#6. I like a lot of Margaret Atwood, I like much of Alice Munro. Again, if you were to ask me about male writers, there's often a novel I admire, but not all of their works.
Ann Beattie
#7. Johann Wolfgang von Goethe - Whatever you can do or dream you can, begin it. Boldness has genius, power and magic in it.
Margaret Atwood - In the end, we'll all become stories.
Puja Borker
#8. Time is just 'one damn thing after another ', Margaret Atwood says. That sounds like conventional narrative plot. And at the end of our allotted time, we'll end up in one of those, a conventional plot I mean, unless we stipulate otherwise in our wills.
Ali Smith
#9. Peggy Atwood, Alice Munro, Hugh Hood, Michael Ondaatje - these are all old friends from my early 20s.
Clark Blaise
#10. Rebels defy the rules of society, risking everything to retain their humanity. If the world Atwood depicts is chilling, if 'God is losing,' the only hope for optimism is a vision that includes the inevitability of human struggle against the prevailing order.
Joyce Johnson
#11. Margaret Atwood was the author who took me out of children's literature and guided me towards adult literature.
Eleanor Catton
#12. I think women do write politically all the time. Margaret Atwood does; Doris Lessing does.
Lorrie Moore
#13. Margaret Atwood, J.G. Ballard, Ray Bradbury, Jim Crace, Arthur C. Clarke, Russell Hoban, Anna Kavan, Doris Lessing, Cormac McCarthy, Walter M. Miller, Tim O'Brien, Will Self and Marcel Theroux,
Bill Bryson
#14. No, Margaret Atwood writes literature, whereas I write fiction. I'm from the American Midwest, so literature is beyond my abilities.
Stella Atrium
#15. California seemed to me to be all about secrets and the need for safety. And this leads to this thematic messiness I'm still trying to figure out what to do with. I mean, when it comes to the themes, this is nothing like an Atwood novel.
Edan Lepucki
#16. My English teachers gave me a copy of Atwood's 'The Handmaid's Tale' when I left high school, which has always been very special to me - it was the novel that introduced me to dystopian fiction. I'm also influenced by Edgar Allan Poe, Dickens, John Wyndham and Middle English dream-visions.
Samantha Shannon
#17. Who was it recently invented some machine that will enable her to sign a book from 5,000 miles away? Margaret Atwood. Get off your arse, love, and sign it in person. Publishers and circumstance made you a bestselling author. Give a little back.
Nicholas Royle
#18. My books are often shelved around those of Chinua Achebe and Margaret Atwood, or Chimamanda Adichie and Monica Ali. All of this depends, of course, on the bookstore and how conversant the shelf stocker is with the alphabet.
Chris Abani
#19. My desk was a present from Margaret Atwood.
After Zen and the Art of Uterus Maintenance
sold its first million, she said I needed a place
to write, other than the local bus-shelter.
Nuala Ni Chonchuir
#20. Some things are not meant to be, Leighton Atwood had said the night before. But if they were not meant to be, then why did the forces of destiny keep bringing them together?
Sherry Thomas
#21. I don't think it's any fun, even if you are one of the most respected authors in the world like Margaret Atwood, to keep being nominated and not win.
Kazuo Ishiguro
#22. The messiness [in my books] is nothing like an Atwood novel. For me, the deeper subjects are secrets versus intimacy, and how both beget safety but also threaten it. And there is a lot for me about loss, too.
Edan Lepucki
#23. when I was still imaginary for him. Before we were married and I solidified.
Margaret Atwood
#24. 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
#25. Show me a character totally without anxieties and I will show you a boring book.
Margaret Atwood
#26. 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
#27. 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
#28. 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
#29. Truly amazing, what people can get used to, as long as there are a few compensations.
Margaret Atwood
#30. This world is not enough, but it will have to do. You can either hold on or let go.
Margaret Atwood
#31. she was beginning to emerge from the initial sex-induced coma created by him through
Margaret Atwood
#32. He just tarted up his misdemeanours and made them look respectable,
Margaret Atwood
#33. Red all over the cupboard, mirth rhymes with birth, oh to die of laughter.
Margaret Atwood
#34. What confronts us, now the excitement's over, is our own failure.
Margaret Atwood
#35. Screw poetry, it's you I want, your taste, rain on you, mouth on your skin.
Margaret Atwood
#36. 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
#37. 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
#38. 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
#39. God is not the voice in the whirlwind, God is the whirlwind.
Margaret Atwood
#40. Powerful men don't take well to rejection. Rage could result. There
Margaret Atwood
#41. I've been prepared for almost anything; except absence, except silence.
Margaret Atwood
#42. 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
#43. 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
#44. 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
#45. 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
#47. 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
#48. 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
#49. 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
#50. A wall that cannot be defended is no sooner built than ended.
Margaret Atwood
#51. 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
#52. 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
#53. 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
#54. 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
#55. It was like being in an elevator cut loose at the top. Falling, falling, and not knowing when you will hit.
Margaret Atwood
#56. Would I laugh?"
"Matter of fact, you would," says Zeb. "Heart like shale. What you need is a good fracking.
Margaret Atwood
#57. Some people mistakenly think nature is very nice and benevolent and never betrays.
Margaret Atwood
#58. My audience is God,
because who the hell else could understand me?
Margaret Atwood
#59. Every novel is-at the beginning-the same opening of a door onto a completely unknown space.
Margaret Atwood
#60. Being edited is like falling face down into a threshing machine.
Margaret Atwood
#61. 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
#62. She had no images of this love. She could offer no anecdotes. It was a belief rather than a memory.
Margaret Atwood
#63. 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
#64. 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
#65. But I'm ravenous for news, any kind of news; even if it's false news, it must mean something. We
Margaret Atwood
#66. 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
#67. 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
#68. 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
#69. This form of love is like the pain
of childbirth: so intense
it's hard to remember afterwards,
Margaret Atwood
#70. He had the freedom of a nobody, with a blank future unrolling before him on which anything at all might be written.
Margaret Atwood
#71. 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
#72. 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
#73. 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
#74. 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
#75. The hearts gone bubonic with jealousy and greed, glinting through the vests and sweaters of anyone at all.
Margaret Atwood
#76. 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
#77. I don't want a man around, what use are they except for ten seconds' worth of half babies
Margaret Atwood
#78. 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
#79. I became a poet at the age of sixteen. I did not intend to do it. It was not my fault.
Margaret Atwood
#80. Time is going faster and faster; the days of the week whisk by like panties.
Margaret Atwood
#81. It has taken so little time to change our minds, about things like this. Then
Margaret Atwood
#82. Some bioengineering is good, especially if it results in plants that are more drought-resistant or perennial food crops.
Margaret Atwood
#83. 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
#84. 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
#85. Suddenly revenge is so close he can actually taste it. It tastes like steak, rare.
Margaret Atwood
#86. Jon smashes things, and glues the shards into place in the pattern of breakage. I can see the appeal.
Margaret Atwood
#88. 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
#89. It was true, I took too much for granted; I trusted fate, back then.
Margaret Atwood
#91. 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
#92. Oppression involves a failure of the imagination: the failure to imagine the full humanity of other human beings.
Margaret Atwood
#93. 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
#94. 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
#95. Jimmy suspected him of wanting to make Grandmaster, not because it meant anything but just because it was there.
Margaret Atwood
#96. Still at the table, engaged no doubt in some kind of arcane flirtation, she for practise, he in pathetic earnest. Toby
Margaret Atwood
#97. Heaven, for the Presbyterians, must resemble a banking establishment, with each soul tagged and docketed, and placed in the appropriate pigeonhole.
Margaret Atwood
#98. 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
#99. 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
#100. 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
