Margaret Atwood Quotes

466 Sourced Quotes

The best way of being kind to bears is not to be very close to them.

Margaret Atwood
And sometimes it happened, for a time. That kind of love comes and goes and is hard to remember afterwards, like pain. You would look at the man one day and you would think, I loved you, and the tense would be past, and you would be filled with a sense of wonder, because it was such an amazing and precarious and dumb thing to have done; and you would know too why your friends have been evasive about it, at the time.

Margaret Atwood
Anaesthesia, that's one technique: if it hurts, invent a different pain.

Margaret Atwood
Why can't I believe? she asked the darkness. Behind her eyelids she saw an animal. It was golden colour, with gentle green eyes and canine teeth, and curly wool instead of fur. It opened its mouth, but it did not speak. Instead, it yawned.It gazed at her. She gazed at it. "You are the effect of a carefully calibrated blend of plant toxins," she told it.Then she fell asleep.

Margaret Atwood
Where there's a doctor it's always a bad sign. Even when they are not doing the killing themselves it means a death is close, and in that way they are like ravens or crows.

Margaret Atwood
Falling in love, although it resulted in altered body chemistry and was therefore real, was a hormonally induced delusional state, according to him. In addition it was humiliating, because it put you at a disadvantage, it gave the love object too much power. As for sex per se, it lacked both challenge and novelty, and was on the whole a deeply imperfect solution to the problem of intergenerational genetic transfer.

Margaret Atwood
If a stranger taps you on the ass and says, "How's the little lady today!" you will probably cringe. But if he's an American, he's only being friendly.

Margaret Atwood
Although from you I far must roam, do not be broken hearted. We two, who in the souls are one, are never truly parted.

Margaret Atwood
I'm interested in the Gothic novel because it's very much a woman's form. Why is there such a wide readership for books that essentially say, 'Your husband is trying to kill you'?

Margaret Atwood
There are some women who seem to be born without fear, just as there are people who are born without the ability to feel pain... Providence appears to protect such women, maybe out of astonishment.

Margaret Atwood
The Human moral keyboard is limited... there's nothing you can play on it that hasn't been played before. And, my dear Friends, I am sorry to say this, but it has its lower notes.

Margaret Atwood
As with all knowledge, once you knew it, you couldn't imagine how it was that you hadn't known it before.

Margaret Atwood
The heart with letters on it shining like a light bulb through the trim hole painted in the chest, art history.

Margaret Atwood
In the desert there is no sign that says, Thou shalt not eat stones.

Margaret Atwood
Here and there are worms, evidence of the fertility of the soil, caught by the sun, half dead; flexible and pink, like lips.

Margaret Atwood
All writers feel struck by the limitations of language.

Margaret Atwood