Margaret Atwood Quotes

466 Sourced Quotes

What people want is perfection," said the man. "In themselves." "But they need the steps to it to be pointed out," said the woman. "In a simple order," said the man. "With encouragement," said the woman. "And a positive attitude.

Margaret Atwood
If he wants to be an asshole, it's a free country. Millions before him have made the same life choice.

Margaret Atwood
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
When they're gone out of his head, these words, they'll be gone, everywhere, forever. As if they had never been.

Margaret Atwood
When you're young, you think everything you do is disposable. You move from now to now, crumpling time up in your hands, tossing it away. You're your own speeding car. You think you can get rid of things, and people too—leave them behind. You don't yet know about the habit they have, of coming back. Time in dreams is frozen. You can never get away from where you've been.

Margaret Atwood
Is anything wrong, dear? the old joke went. No, why? You moved. Just don't move.

Margaret Atwood
Nevertheless, blood is thicker than water, as anyone knows who has tasted both.

Margaret Atwood
So this was the rest of his life. It felt like a party to which he'd been invited, but at an address he couldn't actually locate. Someone must be having fun at it, this life of his; only, right at the moment, it wasn't him.

Margaret Atwood
Immortality,' said Crake, ' is a concept. If you take 'mortality' as being, not death, but the foreknowledge of it and the fear of it, then 'immortality' is the absence of such fear. Babies are immortal. Edit out the fear, and you'll be...

Margaret Atwood
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
It's doors I'm afraid of because I can't see through them, its the door opening by itself in the wind I'm afraid of.

Margaret Atwood
My mother's two categories: nice men did things for you, bad men did things to you.

Margaret Atwood
He stops, looks up at this window, and I can see the white oblong of his face. We look at each other. I have no rose to toss, he has no lute. But it's the same kind of hunger.

Margaret Atwood
I did not know that the rules about these things were different if you were female. I did not know that "poetess" was an insult, and that I myself would some day be called one. I did not know that to be told I had transcended my gender would be considered a compliment. I didn't know — yet — that black was compulsory. All of that was in the future. When I was sixteen, it was simple. Poetry existed; therefore it could be written; and nobody had told me — yet — the many, many reasons why it could not be written by me.

Margaret Atwood
In the evenings there's been thunder, a distant bumping and stumbling, like God on a sullen binge.

Margaret Atwood
Instead I will say, "Take me to your trees. Take me to your breakfasts, your sunsets, your bad dreams, your shoes, your nouns. Take me to your fingers; take me to your deaths." These are worth it. These are what I have come for.

Margaret Atwood
Soon it will be daybreak. Soon the day will break. I can't stop it from breaking in the same way it always does, and then from lying there broken; always the same day, which comes around again like clockwork. It begins with the day before the day before, and then the day before, and then it's the day itself. A Saturday. The breaking day. The day the butcher comes.

Margaret Atwood
Was this a betrayal, or was it an act of courage? Perhaps both. Neither one involves forethought: such things take place in an instant, in an eyeblink. This can only be because they have been rehearsed by us already, over and over, in silence and darkness; in such silence, such darkness, that we are ignorant of them ourselves. Blind but sure-footed, we step forward as if into a remembered dance.

Margaret Atwood
We were the people who were not in the papers. We lived in the blank white spaces at the edges of print. It gave us more freedom. We lived in the gaps between the stories.

Margaret Atwood
Now I can see how that can happen. You can fall in love with anybody—a fool, a criminal, a nothing. There are no good rules.

Margaret Atwood
Everyone thinks writers must know more about the inside of the human head, but that is wrong. They know less, that's why they write. Trying to find out what everyone else takes for granted.

Margaret Atwood
Because I am a mother, I am capable of being shocked: as I never was when I was not one.

Margaret Atwood
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
Moira was like an elevator with open sides. She made us dizzy.

Margaret Atwood
He had that faint sick look in his eyes, as if he wanted to give her something, charity for instance.

Margaret Atwood
Adam named the living animals, MaddAddam names the dead ones.

Margaret Atwood
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 backwards in time and exist in two places at once.

Margaret Atwood
Truly amazing, what people can get used to, as long as there are a few compensations.

Margaret Atwood
More and more I feel like a letter—deposited here, collected there. But a letter addressed to no one.

Margaret Atwood
We love each other, that's true whatever it means, but we aren't good at it; for some it's a talent, for others only an addiction.

Margaret Atwood