Margaret Atwood Quotes

466 Sourced Quotes

Wanting to meet an author because you like his work is like wanting to meet a duck because you like pâté.

Margaret Atwood
Love was like a steamroller. There was no avoiding it; it went over you and you came out flat.

Margaret Atwood
Wanting to know an author because you like his work is like wanting to know a duck because you like pâté.

Margaret Atwood
When you hear me singing
you get the rifle down
and the flashlight, aiming for my brain,
but you always miss and when you set out the poison
I piss on it
to warn the others.

Margaret Atwood
Now we come to forgiveness. Don't worry about forgiving me right now. There are more important things. For instance: keep the others safe, if they are safe. Don't let them suffer too much. If they have to die, let it be fast. You might even provide a Heaven for them. We need You for that. Hell we can make for ourselves.

Margaret Atwood
I walk away from him. It's enormously pleasing to me, this walking away. It's like being able to make people appear and vanish, at will.

Margaret Atwood
Repeat reading for me shares a few things with hot-water bottles and thumbsucking: comfort, familiarity, the recurrence of the expected.

Margaret Atwood
You can't help what you feel, but you can help how you behave

Margaret Atwood
In general I might agree with you:
women should not contemplate war,
should not weigh tactics impartially,
or evade the word enemy,
or view both sides and denounce nothing.
Women should march for peace,
or hand out white feathers to arouse bravery,
spit themselves on bayonets
to protect their babies,
whose skulls will be split anyway,
or, having been raped repeatedly,
hang themselves with their own hair.
These are the functions that inspire general comfort.
That, and the knitting of socks for the troops
and a sort of moral cheerleading.
Also: mourning the dead.
Sons, lovers, and so forth.
All the killed children.

Margaret Atwood
I planned my death carefully, unlike my life, which meandered along from one thing to another, despite my feeble attempts to control it.

Margaret Atwood
A lot of people facing fascism didn't become fascists. I don't happen to believe that we are all monsters.

Margaret Atwood
Stupidity is the same as evil if you judge by the results.

Margaret Atwood
He was not condemned to death, freedom awaited
him. What was the temptation, the one that worked?
Perhaps he wanted to live with a woman whose life
he had saved, who had seen down into the earth but
had nevertheless followed him back up to life. It was
his only chance to be a hero, to one person at least,
for if he became the hangman the others would
despise him. He was in prison for wounding another
man, on one finger of the right hand, with a sword.
This too is history.

Margaret Atwood
You want the truth, of course. You want me to put two and two together. But two and two doesn't necessarily get you the truth. Two and two equals a voice outside the window. Two and two equals the wind. The living bird is not its labeled bones.

Margaret Atwood
When women let their hair down, it means either sexiness or craziness or death, the three by Victorian times having become virtually synonymous.

Margaret Atwood
Like many modern poets, I tend to conceal rhymes by placing them in the middle of lines, and to avoid immediate alliteration and assonance in favor of echoes placed later in the poems.

Margaret Atwood
I was sand, I was snow—written on, rewritten, smoothed over.

Margaret Atwood
All fathers except mine are invisible in daytime; daytime is ruled by mothers. But fathers come out at night. Darkness brings home the fathers with their real, unspeakable power. There is more to them than meets the eye.

Margaret Atwood
This is the solstice, the still point of the sun, its cusp and midnight, the year's threshold and unlocking, where the past lets go of and becomes the future; the place of caught breath…

Margaret Atwood
Whatever is silenced will clamor to be heard, though silently.

Margaret Atwood
The young habitually mistake lust for love, they're infested with idealism of all kinds.

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
The answers you get from literature depend upon the questions you pose.

Margaret Atwood
But in the end, back she comes. There's no use resisting. She goes to him for amnesia, for oblivion. She renders herself up, is blotted out; enters the darkness of her own body, forgets her name. Immolation is what she wants, however briefly. To exist without boundaries.

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
A home filled with nothing but yourself. It's heavy, that lightness. It's crushing, that emptiness.

Margaret Atwood
The moment of betrayal is the worst, the moment when you know beyond any doubt that you've been betrayed: that some other human being has wished you that much evil

Margaret Atwood
This has been her problem all her life: picturing other people's responses. She's too good at it. She can picture the response of anyone—other people's reactions, their emotions, their criticisms, their demands—but somehow they don't reciprocate. Maybe they can't. Maybe they lack the gift, if it is one.

Margaret Atwood
Writing of the narrative kind, and perhaps all writing, is motivated deep down, by a fear or and fascination with mortality - by a desire to make the risky trip to the underworld and to bring something or someone back from the dead.

Margaret Atwood
I think the book you always like best is the one you're about to write.

Margaret Atwood