Margaret Atwood Quotes

466 Sourced Quotes

Canadians are fond of a good disaster, especially if it has ice, water, or snow in it. You thought the national flag was about a leaf, didn't you? Look harder. It's where someone got axed in the snow.

Margaret Atwood
A movie about the past is not the same as the past.

Margaret Atwood
Where to start is the problem, because nothing begins when it begins and nothing's over when it's over, and everything needs a preface: a preface, a postscript, a chart of simultaneous events.

Margaret Atwood
Solid flesh can never live up to the bright shadow cast by its absence.

Margaret Atwood
The newspaper journalists like to believe the worst; they can sell more papers that way, as one of them told me himself; for even upstanding and respectable people dearly love to read ill of others.

Margaret Atwood
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
For the children with their greedy little mouths represent the future, which like time itself will devour all now alive.

Margaret Atwood
Striptease has become less interesting since they did away with the costumes. It's become Newtonian. The movement of bodies through space, period. It can get boring.

Margaret Atwood
When I am writing fiction, I believe I am much better organized, more methodical—one has to be when writing a novel. Writing poetry is a state of free float.

Margaret Atwood
Love relationships between men and women do involve power structures because men in this society have different kinds of, and more, power than women do. The problem for a woman in a relationship is how to maintain her integrity, her own personal power while also in a relationship with a man.

Margaret Atwood
I don't look over my past work very much. I would not change it anymore than I would airbrush a photo of myself.

Margaret Atwood
The unique thing about writers is that they write. Therefore they are pickier about words, at least on paper.

Margaret Atwood
In Finnish they have no he or she words. If you're writing a novel in Finnish, you have to make gender very obvious early on, either by naming the character or by describing a sex-specific activity.

Margaret Atwood
All children "write." (And paint, and sing.) I suppose the real question is why do so many people give it up. Intimidation, I suppose. Fear of not being good. Lack of time.

Margaret Atwood
Modesty is invisibility... Never forget it. To be seen - to be seen - is to be... penetrated. What you must be girls, is impenetrable.

Margaret Atwood
When I am writing fiction, I believe I am much better organized, more methodical - one has to be when writing a novel. Writing poetry is a state of free float.

Margaret Atwood
We pulled the seeds out and scattered them on their flossy parachutes, leaving only the leathery brownish yellow tongue, soft as the inside of an elbow.

Margaret Atwood
I look up at the ceiling, tracing the foliage of the wreath. Today it makes me think of a hat, the large-brimmed hats women used to wear at some period during the old days: hats like enormous halos, festooned with fruit and flowers, and the feathers of exotic birds; hats like an idea of paradise, floating just above the head, a thought solidified.

Margaret Atwood
It's a lifelong failing: she has never been prepared. But how can you have a sense of wonder if you're prepared for everything? Prepared for the sunset. Prepared for the moonrise. Prepared for the ice storm. What a flat existence that would be.

Margaret Atwood
Human reason is a pin dancing on the head of an angel, so small is it in comparison to the Divine vastness that encircles us.

Margaret Atwood
The story as told in The Odyssey doesn't hold water. There are too many inconsistencies.

Margaret Atwood
But most hearts say, I want, I want, I want, I want. My heart is more duplicitous, though no twin as I once thought. It says, I want, I don't want, I want, and then a pause. It forces me to listen...

Margaret Atwood
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
It isn't chic for women to be drunk. Men drunks are more excusable, more easily absolved, but why? It must be thought they have better reasons.

Margaret Atwood
God gave unto the Animals A wisdom past our power to see: Each knows innately how to live, Which we must learn laboriously.

Margaret Atwood
I define science fiction as fiction in which things happen that are not possible today - that depend, for instance, on advanced space travel, time travel, the discovery of green monsters on other planets or galaxies, or that contain various technologies we have not yet developed.

Margaret Atwood
And yes, I know it's you; and that is what we will come to, sooner or later, when it's even darker than it is now, when the snow is colder, when it's darkest and coldest and candles are no longer any use to us and the visibility is zero: yes. It's still you. It's still you.

Margaret Atwood
I tried for the longest time to find out what deconstructionism was. Nobody was able to explain it to me clearly. The best answer I got was from a writer, who said, 'Honey, it's bad news for you and me.

Margaret Atwood
Winning intoxicates you, and numbs you to the sufferings of others.

Margaret Atwood
History, as I recall, was never this winsome, and especially not this clean, but the real thing would never sell: most people prefer a past in which nothing smells.

Margaret Atwood