Margaret Atwood Quotes

466 Sourced Quotes

She wasn't ready to settle down, she told her friends. That was one way of putting it. Another was would have been that she had not found anyone to settle down with. There had been several men in her life, but they hadn't been convincing. They'd been somewhat like her table - quickly acquired, brightened up a little, but temporary. The time for that kind of thing was running out, however. She was tired of renting.

Margaret Atwood
Ten days after the war ended, my sister Laura drove a car off a bridge. The bridge was being repaired: she went right through the Danger sign. The car fell a hundred feet into the ravine, smashing through the treetops feathery with new leaves, then burst into flames and rolled down into the shallow creek at the bottom. Chunks of the bridge fell on top of it. Nothing much was left but charred smithereens.

Margaret Atwood
This is the middle of my life, I think of it as a place, like the middle of a river, the middle of a bridge, halfway across, halfway over. I'm supposed to have accumulated things by now: possessions, responsibilities, achievements, experience and wisdom. I'm supposed to be a person of substance.

Margaret Atwood
The fact is that blank pages inspire me with terror. What will I put on them? Will it be good enough?

Margaret Atwood
I am not a saint or a cripple, I am not a wound; now I will see whether I am a coward.

Margaret Atwood
Romance takes place in the middle distance. Romance is looking in at yourself through a window clouded with dew. Romance means leaving things out: where life grunts and shuffles, romance only sighs.

Margaret Atwood
You fit into me like a hook into an eye a fish hook an open eye

Margaret Atwood
Show me a character totally without anxieties and I will show you a boring book.

Margaret Atwood
The policemen's faces glisten too, they're holding themselves back, they love this, it's a ceremony, they're implementing a policy.

Margaret Atwood
You refuse to own yourself, you permit others to do it for you

Margaret Atwood
There's blood, a taste I remember. It tastes of orange popsicles, penny gumballs, red licorice, gnawed hair, dirty ice.

Margaret Atwood
Fatigue is here, in my body, in my legs and eyes. That is what gets you in the end. Faith is only a word, embroidered.

Margaret Atwood
The sitting room is subdued, symmetrical; it's one of the shapes money takes when it freezes.

Margaret Atwood
In the interests of research
I have walked on many battlefields
that once were liquid with pulped
men's bodies and spangled with exploded
shells and splayed bone.
All of them have been green again
by the time I got there.
Each has inspired a few good quotes in its day.
Sad marble angels brood like hens
over the grassy nests where nothing hatches.

Margaret Atwood
Despite their cool poses they wear their cravings on the outside, like the suckers on a squid. They want it all.

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
Toast was a pointless invention from the Dark Ages. Toast was an implement of torture that caused all those subjected to it to regurgitate in verbal form the sins and crimes of their past lives. Toast was a ritual item devoured by fetishists in the belief that it would enhance their kinetic and sexual powers. Toast cannot be explained by any rational means. Toast is me. I am toast.

Margaret Atwood
We still think of a powerful man as a born leader and a powerful woman as an anomaly.

Margaret Atwood
I don't think of poetry as a 'rational' activity but as an aural one. My poems usually begin with words or phrases which appeal more because of their sound than their meaning, and the movement and phrasing of a poem are very important to me.

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