Top 100 Atwood's Quotes
#1. 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
#2. 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
#3. 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
#4. What confronts us, now the excitement's over, is our own failure.
Margaret Atwood
#5. Screw poetry, it's you I want, your taste, rain on you, mouth on your skin.
Margaret Atwood
#6. 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
#7. 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
#8. But I'm ravenous for news, any kind of news; even if it's false news, it must mean something. We
Margaret Atwood
#9. 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
#10. This form of love is like the pain
of childbirth: so intense
it's hard to remember afterwards,
Margaret Atwood
#11. 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
#12. 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
#13. 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
#14. 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
#15. 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
#16. Oh God. It's no joke. Oh God oh God. How can I keep on living?
Margaret Atwood
#17. 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
#18. 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
#19. 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
#20. I wish I'd realized that when someone else's hurting, that hurt's real - whether I understand it or not.
Leah Atwood
#21. Though it's hard to concentrate on the idea of a future. She's too immersed in the present:
Margaret Atwood
#22. Attack, voracious
eating, and flight:
it's a sound routine
for staying alive on edges.
Margaret Atwood
#23. If you can call it talking, these clipped whispers, projected through the funnels of our white wings. It's more like a telegram, a verbal semaphore. Amputated speech.
Margaret Atwood
#25. That was all quite long ago. I see it in retrospect, indulgently, from the point I've reached now. But how else could I see it. We can't really travel to the past, no matter how we try. if we do, it's as tourists.
Margaret Atwood
#26. I walk away from him. It's enormously pleasing to me, this walking away. It's like being able to make people appear and vanish, at will.
Margaret Atwood
#27. The problem with meditating is I generally go to sleep, and that's because I'm doing it wrong.
Margaret Atwood
#28. Maybe the kid gravitated to Zeb for the same reason children like dinosaurs: when feeling abandoned in a world of forces beyond your control, it's comforting to have a huge, scaly beast who is your friend.
Margaret Atwood
#29. Back at home they drew the curtains and read, with disapproval, with relish, with avidity and glee - even the ones who'd never thought of opening a novel before. There's nothing like a shovelful of dirt to encourage literacy.
Margaret Atwood
#30. I used to jog but it's bad for the knees. Too much beta carotene turns you orange, too much calcium gives you kidney stones. Health kills.
Margaret Atwood
#31. at this distance
you're a mirage, a glossy image
fixed in the posture
of the last time I saw you.
Turn you over, there's a place
for the address. Wish you were
here.
Margaret Atwood
#32. Their faces were the way women's faces are when they've been talking about you behind your back and they think you've heard: embarrassed, but also a little defiant, as if it were their right.
Margaret Atwood
#33. I would pore for hours over the stalls of worn necklaces, sets of gilt spoons, sugar tongs in the shape of hen's feet or midget hands, clocks that didn't work, flowered china, spotty mirrors and ponderous furniture, the flotsam left by those receding centuries in which, more and more, I was living.
Margaret Atwood
#34. Then sail, my fine lady, on the billowing wave -
The water below is as dark as the grave,
And maybe you'll sink in your little blue boat -
It's hope, and hope only, that keeps us afloat
Margaret Atwood
#35. It hasn't escaped me that the object that keeps me alive is the same one that will kill me. In this way it's like love, or a certain kind of it.
Margaret Atwood
#36. 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
#37. Writing ... is an act of faith: I believe it's also an act of hope, the hope that things can get better than they are.
Margaret Atwood
#38. In their dreams they touch, they intertwine, it's more like a collision, and that is the end of flying. They fall to earth, fouled parachutists, botched and cindery angels, love streaming out behind them like torn silk. Enemy groundfire comes up to meet them.
Margaret Atwood
#39. Via the conduit of a wild dog pack, she has now made the ultimate Gift to her fellow Creatures, and has become part of God's great dance of proteins.
Margaret Atwood
#40. Now that she's the carrier of life, she is closer to death, and needs special security.
Margaret Atwood
#41. I've never understood why people consider youth a time of freedom and joy. It's probably because they have forgotten their own.
Margaret Atwood
#42. It was as if they could read each other's minds. No, not minds: each other's mindlessness.
Margaret Atwood
#43. The darkness is really out there. It's not something that's in my head, just. It's in my work because it's in the world.
Margaret Atwood
#44. God is love,' they once said, but we reversed that, and love, like heaven, was always just around the corner. The more difficult it was to love the particular man beside us, the more we believed in Love, abstract and total. We were waiting, always, for the incarnation. That word, made flesh.
Margaret Atwood
#46. But in the end, back she comes. There's no use resisting. She goes to him for amnesia, for oblivion. She renders herself up, is blotted out; enters the darkness of her own body, forgets her name. Immolation is what she wants, however briefly. To exist without boundaries.
Margaret Atwood
#47. Hope throws a smokescreen. Smoke gets in your eyes and so no one is prepared for it, but suddenly it;s there, like an out-of-control bonfire - like murder, only multiplied. It's in full spate.
Margaret Atwood
#48. A lie, that we come from water.
The truth is we were born
from stones, dragons, the sea's
teeth,
Margaret Atwood
#49. This is the solstice, the still point
of the sun, its cusp and midnight,
the year's threshold
and unlocking, where the past
lets go of and becomes the future;
the place of caught breath ...
Margaret Atwood
#50. I no longer feel I'll be dead by thirty; now it's sixty. I suppose these deadlines we set for ourselves are really a way of saying we appreciate time, and want to use all of it. I'm still
writing, I'm still writing poetry, I still can't explain why, and I'm still running out of time.
Margaret Atwood
#51. She knows she's deceiving herself about that, but she prefers to deceive herself. She desperately needs to believe such pure joy is still possible.
Margaret Atwood
#52. There were still newspapers, then. We used to read them in bed. It's French, he said. From m'aidez. Help Me.
Margaret Atwood
#53. But there's something missing in them, even the nice ones. It's like they're permanently absent-minded, like that can't quite remember who they are.
Margaret Atwood
#54. There's only that one picture of me, standing in front of the motel door with 9 on it, long ago, a month ago. Already that child seems much younger, poorer, farther away, a shrunken, ignorant version of myself.
Margaret Atwood
#55. Every child should have love, every person should have it. She herself would rather have had her mother's love - the love she still continued to believe in, the love that had followed her through the jungle in the form of a bird so she would not be too frightened or lonely.
Margaret Atwood
#56. For every age there is a popular idea about what madness is, what causes it, and how a mad person should look and behave; and it's usually these popular ideas, rather than those of medical professionals, that turn up in songs and stories and plays and books.
Margaret Atwood
#58. There's something to be said for hunger: at least it lets you know you're still alive.
Margaret Atwood
#59. There's only so long you can feel sorry for a person before you come to feel that their affliction is an act of malice committed by them against you.
Margaret Atwood
#60. Within one's own family, money is not the measure of things, unless the person is an absolute Scrooge. Only the most extreme kind of monster would put a price on everything.
Margaret Atwood
#61. There is a silence. But sometimes it's as dangerous not to speak. "Yes,
Margaret Atwood
#62. If he wants to be an asshole, it's a free country. Millions before him have made the same life choice.
Margaret Atwood
#63. She's not extravagant or greedy, she tells herself: all she ever wanted was to be protected by layer upon layer of kind, soft, insulating money, so that nobody and nothing could get close enough to harm her.
Margaret Atwood
#64. There's nothing like drawing a thing to make you really see it.
Margaret Atwood
#65. The thing about delirium is you think it's great, but it actually isn't.
Margaret Atwood
#66. So much for endings. Beginnings are always more fun. True connoisseurs, however, are known to favor the stretch in between, since it's the hardest to do anything with. That's about all that can be said for plots, which anyway are just one thing after another, a what and a what and a what.
Margaret Atwood
#67. When any civilization is dust and ashes," he said, "art is all that's left over. Images, words, music. Imaginative structures. Meaning - human meaning, that is - is defined by them. You have to admit that.
Margaret Atwood
#68. There are tenses that define us now: past tense, back then; future tense, not yet. We live in the small window between them, the space we've only recently come to think as still, and really it's no smaller than anyone else's window.
Margaret Atwood
#69. It's kind of shocking to hear Toby called a babe; sort of like calling God a studmuffin.
Margaret Atwood
#70. 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
#71. 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
#72. Who should turn up but that long-lost schmuck of a Billy, and what did Charis do but rent him the other half of her duplex? It's enough to make you tear your hair out by its tiny grey roots,
Margaret Atwood
#73. It's the unbroken calm, both within and without, that is getting to her. Real events happen to people, she thinks, why not me? And then there's her conviction that they are happening, all around her, but that they're being kept from her.
Margaret Atwood
#74. 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
#75. As his editor put it, Yeah, it's a piece of shit, but it's good shit.
Margaret Atwood
#76. I reproached them all for not having told me of my son's departure, and for not stopping him, until that interfering old biddy Eurycleia confessed that she alone had aided and abetted him.
Margaret Atwood
#77. It's possible to go so far in, so far down and back, they could never get you out.
Margaret Atwood
#78. Roamin' here, roamin' there, roamin' in my underwear, I got a sweetie covered in hair, She's all pussy everywhere
Margaret Atwood
#79. As for futuristic costumes, I loved doing 'Gattaca' because I'm a minimalist at heart, and it's a very minimal film. Plus, with Uma Thurman, Ethan Hawke and Jude Law, how could you go wrong?
Colleen Atwood
#80. But I envy the Commander's Wife her knitting. It's good to have small goals that can be easily attained.
Margaret Atwood
#81. Everything in this town is retro, which accounts for the large supply of black vintage items in Accessories. 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. She
Margaret Atwood
#82. Because you may think a bed is a peaceful thing, Sir, and to you it may mean rest and comfort and a good night's sleep. But it isn't so for everyone; and there are many dangerous things that may take place in a bed.
Margaret Atwood
#83. The thing that's great about being a costume designer is you never know what's going to be next; you never what world you are going to enter.
Colleen Atwood
#84. Being an expert isn't telling other people what you know. It's understanding what questions to ask, and flexibly applying your knowledge to the specific situation at hand. Being an expert means providing sensible, highly contextual direction.
Jeff Atwood
#85. The tension between her lack of control and her attempt to suppress it is horrible. It's like a fart in church.
Margaret Atwood
#86. For me the experience of writing is really an experience of losing control. ... I think it's very much like dreaming or like surfing. You go out there and wait for a wave, and when it comes it takes you somewhere and you don't know where it'll go.
Margaret Atwood
#87. Should is a futile word. It's about what didn't happen. It belongs in a parallel universe. It belongs in another dimension of space.
Margaret Atwood
#88. During the conflict that was placed before them, they not only gained the gratitude of many in their own generation but they proved, for the first time on a global scale, the enormous value of a woman's contribution, paving the way for future generations of women to do the same.
Kathryn J. Atwood
#89. We dangle by a flimsy thread,
Our little lives are grains of sand:
The Cosmos is a tiny sphere
Held in the hollow of God's hand.
Give up your anger and your spite,
And imitate the Deer, the Tree;
In sweet Forgiveness find your joy,
For it alone can set you free.
Margaret Atwood
#90. The thing to remember is that there is nothing new about the society depicted in The Handmaid's Tale except the time and place. All of the things I have written about have been done before, more than once.
Margaret Atwood
#91. 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
#92. It's always encouraging to be told that it is intellectually acceptable to read the sorts of things that you like to read anyway.
Margaret Atwood
#93. Costume, hair and makeup can tell you instantly, or at least give you a larger perception of who a character is. It's the first impression that you have of the character before they open their mouth, so it really does establish who they are.
Colleen Atwood
#94. We are containers, it's only the insides of our bodies that are important.
Margaret Atwood
#95. Where there's a doctor it's always a bad sign. Even when they are not doing the killing themselves it means a death is close, and in that way they are like ravens or crows.
Margaret Atwood
#96. I have no image of myself in the hole; only a black square filled with nothing, a square like a door. Perhaps the square is empty; perhaps it's only a marker, a time marker that separates the time before it from the time after. The point at which I lost power.
Margaret Atwood
#97. If I'm doing something contemporary, for sure I'm very aware of what's going on. Personally, I like fashion trends, but when I'm doing a movie, it doesn't affect what I do particularly at all. I don't relate to it in that way.
Colleen Atwood
#98. It's old light, and there's not much of it. But it is enough to see by.
Margaret Atwood
#100. But who can remember pain, once it's over? All that remains of it is a shadow, not in the mind even, in the flesh. Pain marks you, but too deep to see. Out of sight, out of mind.
Margaret Atwood
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