Margaret Atwood Quotes

466 Sourced Quotes

Then sail, my fine lady, on the billowing wave - The water below is as dark as the grave, And maybe you'll sink in your little blue boat - It's hope, and hope only, that keeps us afloat

Margaret Atwood
Moira was like an elevator with open sides. She made us dizzy.

Margaret Atwood
He had that faint sick look in his eyes, as if he wanted to give her something, charity for instance.

Margaret Atwood
Adam named the living animals, MaddAddam names the dead ones.

Margaret Atwood
Time is not a line but a dimension, like the dimensions of space. If you can bend space you can bend time also, and if you knew enough and could move faster than light you could travel backwards in time and exist in two places at once.

Margaret Atwood
Truly amazing, what people can get used to, as long as there are a few compensations.

Margaret Atwood
More and more I feel like a letter—deposited here, collected there. But a letter addressed to no one.

Margaret Atwood
We love each other, that's true whatever it means, but we aren't good at it; for some it's a talent, for others only an addiction.

Margaret Atwood
Love blurs your vision; but after it recedes, you can see more clearly than ever. It's like the tide going out, revealing whatever's been thrown away and sunk: broken bottles, old gloves, rusting pop cans, nibbled fishbodies, bones. This is the kind of thing you see if you sit in the darkness with open eyes, not knowing the future. The ruin you've made.

Margaret Atwood
I don't want to look at something that determines me so completely.

Margaret Atwood
Laughter may instruct but it may also conceal, defending the joker against anger and retaliation: a game is only a game.

Margaret Atwood
A wave of blood goes up to my head, my stomach shrinks together, as if something dangerous has just missed hitting me. It's as if I've been caught stealing, or telling a lie; or as if I've heard other people talking about me, saying bad things about me, behind my back. There's the same flush of shame, of guilt and terror, and of cold disgust with myself. But I don't know where these feelings have come from, what I've done.

Margaret Atwood
I was born in the Ottawa General Hospital right after the Gray Cup Football Game in 1939. Six months later, I was backpacked into the Quebec bush. I grew up in and out of the bush, in and out of Ottawa, Sault Ste. Marie and Toronto.

Margaret Atwood
The fact is there are no stories I can tell my friends
that will make them feel better. History cannot be
erased, although we can soothe ourselves by
speculating about it.

Margaret Atwood
The goals of the feminist movement have not been achieved, and those who claim we're living in a post-feminist era are either sadly mistaken or tired of thinking about the whole subject.

Margaret Atwood
Most mothers worry when their daughters reach adolescence but I was the opposite. I relaxed, I sighed with relief. Little girls are cute and small only to adults. To one another they are not cute. They are life sized.

Margaret Atwood
Tell, rather than write, because I have nothing to write with and writing is in any case forbidden. But if it's a story, even in my head, I must be telling it to someone. You don't tell a story only to yourself. There's always someone else.
Even when there is no one.

Margaret Atwood
Imagine a famine. Now imagine a piece of bread. Both of these things are real but you happen to be in the same room with only one of them. Put yourself into a different room, that's what the mind is for.

Margaret Atwood
Jimmy had been full of himself back then, thinks Snowman with indulgence and a little envy. He'd been unhappy too, of course. It went without saying, his unhappiness. He'd put a lot of energy into it.

Margaret Atwood
Once a month I wake in the night, slippery with terror. I'm afraid, not because there's someone in the room, in the dark, in the bed, but because there isn't. I'm afraid of the emptiness, which lies beside me like a corpse.

Margaret Atwood
Karen wasn't hard, she was soft, too soft. A soft touch. Her hair was soft, her smile was soft, her voice was soft. She was so soft there was no resistance. Hard things sank into her, they went right through her, and if she made a real effort, out the other side. Then she didn't have to see them or hear them, or even touch them.

Margaret Atwood
You can't keep a cool head when you're drowning in love. You just trash around a lot and scream, and wear yourself out.

Margaret Atwood
I was unfair to him, of course, but where would I have been without unfairness? In thrall, in harness. Young women need unfairness, it's one of their few defenses. They need their callousness, they need their ignorance. They walk in the dark, along the edges of high cliffs, humming to themselves, thinking themselves invulnerable.

Margaret Atwood
Hatred would have been easier. With hatred, I would have known what to do. Hatred is clear, metallic, one-handed, unwavering; unlike love.

Margaret Atwood
Time is compressed like the fist I close on my knee... I hold inside it the clues and solutions and the power for what I must do now.

Margaret Atwood
I feel like cotton candy: sugar and air. Squeeze me and I'd turn into a small sickly damp wad of weeping pinky-red.

Margaret Atwood
You need a certain amount of nerve to be a writer, an almost physical nerve, the kind you need to walk a log across a river.

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

Margaret Atwood