Margaret Atwood Quotes

466 Sourced Quotes

I'll make you mine, lovers said in old books. They never said, I'll make you me.

Margaret Atwood
So that's what art is, for the artist, said Crake. An empty drainpipe. An amplifier. A stab at getting laid.

Margaret Atwood
Vanity is becoming a nuisance, I can see why women give it up, eventually. But I'm not ready for that yet.

Margaret Atwood
A Paradox, the doughnut hole. Empty space, once, but now they've learned to market even that. A minus quantity; nothing, rendered edible. I wondered if they might be used-metaphorically, of course-to demonstrate the existence of God. Does naming a sphere of nothingness transmute it into being?

Margaret Atwood
How shrunk, how dwindled, in our times Creation's mighty seed - For Man has broke the Fellowship With murder, lust, and greed.

Margaret Atwood
As all historians know, the past is a great darkness, and filled with echoes. Voices may reach us from it; but what they say to us is imbued with the obscurity of the matrix out of which they come; and, try as we may, we cannot always decipher them precisely in the clearer light of our own day.

Margaret Atwood
We tend to think of Freud as a great innovator, but the truth is that he himself rested, like a ship on an iceberg, on a huge body of theory and knowledge which had accumulated before his time. Even the famous Unconscious had made its appearance at least seven decades earlier. As for such supposedly modern phenomena as multiple personalities, the vogue for them began in the first half of the nineteenth century; and the first case in which the perpetrator of a murder pleaded amnesia, and got off, was in the eighteen eighties.

Margaret Atwood
Amazing how the heart clutches at anything familiar, whimpering Mine! Mine!

Margaret Atwood
The truly fearless think of themselves as normal.

Margaret Atwood
No mother is ever, completely, a child's idea of what a mother should be, and I suppose it works the other way around as well. But despite everything, we didn't do too badly by one another, we did as well as most.

Margaret Atwood
The Eskimo has fifty-two names for snow because it is important to them; there ought to be as many for love.

Margaret Atwood
Perhaps I write for no one. Perhaps for the same person children are writing for when they scrawl their names in the snow.

Margaret Atwood
Like all twenty-one-year-old poets, I thought I would be dead by thirty, and Sylvia Plath had not set a helpful example. For a while there, you were made to feel that, if a poet and female, you could not really be serious about it unless you'd made a least one suicide attempt. So I felt I was running out of time.

Margaret Atwood
In order to avoid her death, her particular death, with
wrung neck and swollen tongue, she must marry the
hangman.

Margaret Atwood
This is what I miss, Cordelia: not something that's gone, but something that will never happen. Two old women giggling over their tea.

Margaret Atwood
After I wrote Handmaid's Tale, people came up to me and asked why weren't there any protests. And I said, You don't understand totalitarianism. A real totalitarianism doesn't fool around with protests in the streets.

Margaret Atwood
Sanity is a valuable possession; I hoard it the way people once hoarded money. I save it, so I will have enough, when the time comes.

Margaret Atwood
A war is a huge fire; the ashes from it drift far, and settle slowly.

Margaret Atwood
Americans don't usually have to think about Canadian-American relations, or, as they would put it, American-Canadian relations. Why think about something which you believe affects you so little? We, on the other hand, have to think about you whether we like it or not.

Margaret Atwood
What fabrications they are, mothers. Scarecrows, wax dolls for us to stick pins into, crude diagrams.

Margaret Atwood
Children were vehicles for passing things along. These things could be kingdoms, rich wedding gifts, stories, grudges, blood feuds. Through children, alliances were forged; through children, wrongs were avenged. To have a child was to set loose a force in the world.

Margaret Atwood
Touch comes before sight, before speech. It is the first language and the last, and it always tells the truth.

Margaret Atwood
Why are we designed to see the world as supremely beautiful just as we're about to be snuffed? Do rabbits feel the same as the fox teeth bite down on their necks? Is it mercy?

Margaret Atwood
When a man is attacked in print, it's usually for saying what he says; when a woman is attacked in print, it's often for being who she is.

Margaret Atwood
Jimmy found himself wishing to make a dent in Crake, get a reaction; it was one of his weaknesses, to care what other people thought of him.

Margaret Atwood
The facts of this world seen clearly are seen through tears.

Margaret Atwood
I'm not senile," I snapped. "If I burn the house down it will be on purpose.

Margaret Atwood
She had no images of this love. She could offer no anecdotes. It was a belief rather than a memory.

Margaret Atwood
You wonder about her crime. She was condemned
to death for stealing clothes from her employer, from
the wife of her employer. She wished to make herself
more beautiful. This desire in servants was not legal.

Margaret Atwood
I didn't want him to become gray and multi-dimensional and complicated like everyone else. Was every Heathcliff a Linton in disguise?

Margaret Atwood