Margaret Atwood Quotes

466 Sourced Quotes

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 would rather dance as a ballerina, though faultily, than as a flawless clown.

Margaret Atwood
I'm not used to girls, or familiar with their customs. I feel awkward around them, I don't know what to say. I know the unspoken rules of boys, but with girls I sense that I am always on the verge of some unforeseen, calamitous blunder.

Margaret Atwood
When you are in the middle of a story it isn't a story at all, but only a confusion; a dark roaring, a blindness, a wreckage of shattered glass and splintered wood; like a house in a whirlwind, or else a boat crushed by the icebergs or swept over the rapids, and all aboard powerless to stop it.

Margaret Atwood
I want everything back, the way it was. But there is no point to it, this wanting.

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
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
A man is just a woman's strategy for making other women.

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
Without the protection of surliness and levity, all children would be crushed by the past—the past of others, loaded onto their shoulders. Selfishness is their saving grace.

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
The genesis of a poem for me is usually a cluster of words. The only good metaphor I can think of is a scientific one: dipping a thread into a supersaturated solution to induce crystal formation. I don't think I solve problems in my poetry; I think I uncover the problems.

Margaret Atwood
Why does the mind do such things? Turn on us, rend us, dig the claws in. If you get hungry enough, they say, you start eating your own heart. Maybe it's much the same.

Margaret Atwood
The world is being run by people my age, men my age, with falling-out hair and health worries, and it frightens me. When the leaders were older than me I could believe in their wisdom, I could believe they had transcended rage and malice and the need to be loved. Now I know better. I look at the faces in newspapers, in magazines, and wonder: what greeds, what furies drive them on?

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
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
"Well, maybe I'm a latent homosexual." He considered that for a moment. "Or maybe I'm a latent heterosexual. Anyway, I'm pretty latent. I don't know why. Of course, I've taken a number of stabs at it, but then I start thinking about the futility of it all and I give up. Maybe it's because you're expected to do something and after a certain point all I want to do is lie there and stare at the ceiling."

Margaret Atwood
Little girls are cute and small only to adults. To one another they are not cute. They are life-sized.

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
When I am lonely for boys it's their bodies I miss. I study their hands lifting the cigarettes in the darkness of the movie theaters, the slope of a shoulder, the angle of a hip. Looking at them sideways, I examine them in different lights. My love for them is visual: that is the part of them I would like to possess. Don't move, I think. Stay like that, let me have that.

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
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
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