Margaret Atwood Quotes

466 Sourced Quotes

From the kitchen she hears laughter; and the clatter of dishes. Charis is setting out the food, Roz is telling a story. That's what they will do, increasingly in their lives: tell stories.

Margaret Atwood
When we think of the past it's the beautiful things we pick out. We want to believe it was all like that.

Margaret Atwood
More powerful than God, more evil than the Devil; the poor have it, the rich lack it, and if you eat it you die?

Margaret Atwood
I am the horizon
you ride towards, the thing you can never lasso I am also what surrounds you:
my brain
scattered with your
tincans, bones, empty shells,
the litter of your invasions. I am the space you desecrate
as you pass through.

Margaret Atwood
I think the book you always like best is the one you're about to write.

Margaret Atwood
I wait. I compose myself. My self is a thing I must now compose, as one composes a speech. What I must present is a made thing, not something born.

Margaret Atwood
A home filled with nothing but yourself. It's heavy, that lightness. It's crushing, that emptiness.

Margaret Atwood
Writing of the narrative kind, and perhaps all writing, is motivated deep down, by a fear or and fascination with mortality - by a desire to make the risky trip to the underworld and to bring something or someone back from the dead.

Margaret Atwood
This has been her problem all her life: picturing other people's responses. She's too good at it. She can picture the response of anyone—other people's reactions, their emotions, their criticisms, their demands—but somehow they don't reciprocate. Maybe they can't. Maybe they lack the gift, if it is one.

Margaret Atwood
The moment of betrayal is the worst, the moment when you know beyond any doubt that you've been betrayed: that some other human being has wished you that much evil

Margaret Atwood
I believe in the resistance as I believe there can be no light without shadow; or rather, no shadow unless there is also light.

Margaret Atwood
There's something final about saying you were married once. It's like saying you were dead once. It shuts them up.

Margaret Atwood
In restaurants we argue
over which of us will pay for your funeral though the real question is
whether or not I will make you immortal.

Margaret Atwood
She would have been wearing: a shirtwaist with a small rounded collar, in a sober colour — navy blue or steel grey or hospital-corridor green. Penitential colours — less like something she'd chosen to put on than like something she'd been locked up in.

Margaret Atwood
No matter how much you've been warned, Death always comes without knocking. Why now? is the cry. Why so soon? It's the cry of a child being called home at dusk, it's the universal protest against Time.

Margaret Atwood
"You shouldn't do that," said Laura. "You could set yourself on fire."

Margaret Atwood
It's a feature of our age that if you write a work of fiction, everyone assumes that the people and events in it are disguised biography — but if you write your biography, it's equally assumed you're lying your head off. This last may be true, at any rate of poets: Plato said that poets should be excluded from the ideal republic because they are such liars. I am a poet, and I affirm that this is true. About no subject are poets tempted to lie so much as about their own lives; I know one of them who has floated at least five versions of his autobiography, none of them true. I of course — being also a novelist — am a much more truthful person than that. But since poets lie, how can you believe me?

Margaret Atwood
There is something powerful in the whispering of obscenities, about those in power. There's something delightful about it, something naughty, secretive, forbidden, thrilling. It's like a spell, of sorts. It deflates them, reduces them to the common denominator where they can be dealt.

Margaret Atwood
I would like to be the air that inhabits you for a moment only. I would like to be that unnoticed & that necessary.

Margaret Atwood
It's a critical fallacy of our times... that a writer should 'grow,' 'change,' or 'develop.' This fallacy causes us to expect from children or radishes: 'grow,' or there's something wrong with you. But writers are not radishes. If you look at what most writers actually do, it resembles a theme with variations more than it does the popular notion of growth.

Margaret Atwood
Things might have been different if she hadn't been able to drift; if she'd had to concentrate on her next meal, instead of dwelling on all the injuries she felt we'd done her. An unearned income encourages self-pity in those already prone to it.

Margaret Atwood
His mouth is on me, his hands, I can't wait and he's moving, already, love, it's been so long, I'm alive in my skin, again, arms around him, falling and water softly everywhere, never-ending.

Margaret Atwood
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
All Creatures know that some must die That all the rest may take and eat; Sooner or later, all transform Their blood to wine, their flesh to meat. But Man alone seeks Vengefulness, And writes his abstract Laws on stone; For this false Justice he has made, He tortures limb and crushes bone. Is this the image of a god? My tooth for yours, your eye for mine? Oh, if Revenge did move the stars Instead of Love, they would not shine.

Margaret Atwood
A hot wind was blowing around my head, the strands of my hair lifting and swirling in it, like ink spilled in water.

Margaret Atwood
A voice is a gift; it should be cherished and used, to utter fully human speech if possible. Powerlessness and silence go together.

Margaret Atwood
If the national mental illness of the United States is megalomania, that of Canada is paranoid schizophrenia.

Margaret Atwood
Beginnings are sudden, but also insidious. They creep up on you sideways, they keep to the shadows, they lurk unrecognized. Then, later, they spring.

Margaret Atwood
I feel despised there, for having so little money; also for once having had so much. I never actually had it, of course. Father had it, and then Richard. But money was imputed to me, the same way crimes are imputed to those who've simply been present at them.

Margaret Atwood
I grew up in the north woods of Canada. You had to know certain things about survival. Wilderness survival courses weren't very formalized when I was growing up, but I was taught certain things about what to do if I got lost in the woods.

Margaret Atwood