Margaret Atwood Quotes

466 Sourced Quotes

Better not to invent her in her absence. Better to wait until she's actually here. Then he can make her up as she goes along.

Margaret Atwood
A divorce is like an amputation; you survive, but there's less of you.

Margaret Atwood
Maybe sadness was a kind of hunger, she thought. Maybe the two went together.

Margaret Atwood
He spoke of 'going in' the way she'd heard old veterans in TV documentaries speak of assaults on enemy territory.... Except that what he would be going into was her body.

Margaret Atwood
How could I be sleeping with this particular man?... Surely only true love could justify my lack of taste.

Margaret Atwood
Gardening is not a rational act. In the spring, at the end of the day, you should smell like dirt.

Margaret Atwood
There's blood, a taste I remember. It tastes of orange popsicles, penny gumballs, red licorice, gnawed hair, dirty ice.

Margaret Atwood
One and one and one and one doesn't equal four. Each one remains unique, there is no way of joining them together. They cannot be exchanged, one for the other. They cannot replace each other.

Margaret Atwood
When I am lonely for boys it's their bodies I miss. I study their hands lifting the cigarettes in the darkness of the movie theaters, the slope of a shoulder, the angle of a hip. Looking at them sideways, I examine them in different lights. My love for them is visual: that is the part of them I would like to possess. Don't move, I think. Stay like that, let me have that.

Margaret Atwood
For years I wanted to be older, and now I am.

Margaret Atwood
Craziness was considered funny, like all other things that were in reality frightening and profoundly shameful.

Margaret Atwood
I didn't want him to become gray and multi-dimensional and complicated like everyone else. Was every Heathcliff a Linton in disguise?

Margaret Atwood
You wonder about her crime. She was condemned
to death for stealing clothes from her employer, from
the wife of her employer. She wished to make herself
more beautiful. This desire in servants was not legal.

Margaret Atwood
He has been trying to sing Love into existence again And he has failed

Margaret Atwood
We are silent, considering shortfalls. There's not much time left, for us to become what we once intended. Jon had potential, but it's not a word that can be used comfortably any more. Potential has a shelf-life.

Margaret Atwood
We must be a beacon of hope, because if you tell people there's nothing they can do, they will do worse than nothing.

Margaret Atwood
You can mean more than one. You can mean thousands. I'm not in any immediate danger, I'll say to you. I'll pretend you can hear me. But it's no good, because I know you can't.

Margaret Atwood
What is the real breath of a man — the breathing out or the breathing in?

Margaret Atwood
A lot of poets published their own work then; unlike novels, poetry was short, and therefore cheap to do. We had to print each poem separately, and then disassemble it, as there were not enough a's for the whole book; the cover was done with a lino-block. We printed 250 copies, and sold them through bookstores, for 50 cents each. They now go in the rare book trade for eighteen hundred dollars a pop. Wish I'd kept some.

Margaret Atwood
Richard liked to say he picked things up for a song, which was odd, because he never sang. He never even whistled. He was not a musical person.

Margaret Atwood
At the very least we want a witness. We can't stand the idea of our own voices falling silent finally, like a radio running down.

Margaret Atwood
Ordinary, said Aunt Lydia, is what you are used to. This may not seem ordinary to you now, but after a time it will. It will become ordinary.

Margaret Atwood
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
There is so much silence between the words,
you say. You say, The sensed absence
of God and the sensed presence
amount to much the same thing,
only in reverse.
You say, I have too much white clothing.
You start to hum.
Several hundred years ago
this could have been mysticism
or heresy. It isn't now.
Outside there are sirens.
Someone's been run over.
The century grinds on.

Margaret Atwood
She knows the rituals, she knows how we're supposed to be behaving...But I think these things are impenetrable and fraudulent, and I can't do them without feeling I'm acting.

Margaret Atwood
The best way of keeping a secret is to pretend there isn't one.

Margaret Atwood
People cry at weddings for the same reason they cry at happy endings: because they so desperately want to believe in something they know is not credible.

Margaret Atwood
The fabric of democracy is always fragile everywhere because it depends on the will of citizens to protect it, and when they become scared, when it becomes dangerous for them to defend it, it can go very quickly.

Margaret Atwood
I am not a saint or a cripple, I am not a wound; now I will see whether I am a coward.

Margaret Atwood
I sink down into my body as into a swamp, fenland, where only I know the footing…. I'm a cloud, congealed around a central object, the shape of a pear, which is hard and more real than I am and glows red within its translucent wrapping. Inside it is a space, huge as the sky at night and dark and curved like that, though black-red rather than black.

Margaret Atwood