Margaret Atwood Quotes

466 Sourced Quotes

You can't help what you feel, but you can help how you behave

Margaret Atwood
In general I might agree with you:
women should not contemplate war,
should not weigh tactics impartially,
or evade the word enemy,
or view both sides and denounce nothing.
Women should march for peace,
or hand out white feathers to arouse bravery,
spit themselves on bayonets
to protect their babies,
whose skulls will be split anyway,
or, having been raped repeatedly,
hang themselves with their own hair.
These are the functions that inspire general comfort.
That, and the knitting of socks for the troops
and a sort of moral cheerleading.
Also: mourning the dead.
Sons, lovers, and so forth.
All the killed children.

Margaret Atwood
I planned my death carefully, unlike my life, which meandered along from one thing to another, despite my feeble attempts to control it.

Margaret Atwood
A lot of people facing fascism didn't become fascists. I don't happen to believe that we are all monsters.

Margaret Atwood
Stupidity is the same as evil if you judge by the results.

Margaret Atwood
He was not condemned to death, freedom awaited
him. What was the temptation, the one that worked?
Perhaps he wanted to live with a woman whose life
he had saved, who had seen down into the earth but
had nevertheless followed him back up to life. It was
his only chance to be a hero, to one person at least,
for if he became the hangman the others would
despise him. He was in prison for wounding another
man, on one finger of the right hand, with a sword.
This too is history.

Margaret Atwood
You want the truth, of course. You want me to put two and two together. But two and two doesn't necessarily get you the truth. Two and two equals a voice outside the window. Two and two equals the wind. The living bird is not its labeled bones.

Margaret Atwood
When women let their hair down, it means either sexiness or craziness or death, the three by Victorian times having become virtually synonymous.

Margaret Atwood
Like many modern poets, I tend to conceal rhymes by placing them in the middle of lines, and to avoid immediate alliteration and assonance in favor of echoes placed later in the poems.

Margaret Atwood
I was sand, I was snow—written on, rewritten, smoothed over.

Margaret Atwood
All fathers except mine are invisible in daytime; daytime is ruled by mothers. But fathers come out at night. Darkness brings home the fathers with their real, unspeakable power. There is more to them than meets the eye.

Margaret Atwood
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
Whatever is silenced will clamor to be heard, though silently.

Margaret Atwood
The young habitually mistake lust for love, they're infested with idealism of all kinds.

Margaret Atwood
The fact is that blank pages inspire me with terror. What will I put on them? Will it be good enough?

Margaret Atwood
The answers you get from literature depend upon the questions you pose.

Margaret Atwood
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
The genesis of a poem for me is usually a cluster of words. The only good metaphor I can think of is a scientific one: dipping a thread into a supersaturated solution to induce crystal formation. I don't think I solve problems in my poetry; I think I uncover the problems.

Margaret Atwood
All stories are about wolves. All worth repeating, that is. Anything else is sentimental drivel. …Think about it. There's escaping from the wolves, fighting the wolves, capturing the wolves, taming the wolves. Being thrown to the wolves, or throwing others to the wolves so the wolves will eat them instead of you. Running with the wolf pack. Turning into a wolf. Best of all, turning into the head wolf. No other decent stories exist.

Margaret Atwood
But my dreaming self refuses to be consoled. It continues to wander, aimless, homeless, alone. It cannot be convinced of its safety by any evidence drawn from my waking life.

Margaret Atwood
Publishers are in business to make money, and if your books do well they don't care whether you are male, female, or an elephant.

Margaret Atwood
Our heaven is their hell, said God. I like a balanced universe.

Margaret Atwood
I see that there will be no end to imperfection, or to doing things the wrong way. Even if you grow up, no matter how hard you scrub, whatever you do, there will always be some other stain or spot on your face or stupid act, somebody frowning.

Margaret Atwood
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
I'm a refugee from the past, and like other refugees I go over the customs and habits of being I've left or been forced to leave behind me, and it all seems just as quaint, from here, and I am just as obsessive about it.

Margaret Atwood
Blessed are they that mourn, for they shall be comforted.
Nobody said when.

Margaret Atwood
Powerlessness and silence go together. We... should use our privileged positions not as a shelter from the world's reality, but as a platform from which to speak. A voice is a gift. It should be cherished and used.

Margaret Atwood
I want everything back, the way it was. But there is no point to it, this wanting.

Margaret Atwood
And each of his voices left his body in a different colored soul and floated up towards the sun still singing.

Margaret Atwood
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