Margaret Atwood Quotes

466 Sourced Quotes

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
Happiness is a garden walled with glass: there's no way in or out. In Paradise there are no stories, because there are no journeys. It's loss and regret and misery and yearning that drive the story forward, along its twisted road.

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

Margaret Atwood
All observations of life are harsh, because life is. I lament that fact, but I cannot change it.

Margaret Atwood
Can I be blamed for wanting a real body, to put my arms around? Without it I too am disembodied. I can listen to my own heartbeat against the bedsprings...but there's something dead about it, something deserted.

Margaret Atwood
He considers me also a little fragile because artistic. I need to be cared for, like a potted plant.

Margaret Atwood
It's only afterwards that it becomes anything like a story at all. When you're telling it, to yourself or to someone else.

Margaret Atwood
It must be said at the outset that the field of mental illness has always been debatable ground. Who is sane, who isn't, and who is qualified to judge? Standards have fluctuated wildly, and abuses have been numerous. In the last century, in the United States, a wife could be committed to an asylum on the say-so of her husband and two easily-paid-off doctors alone, and there are cases on record of wives who were "put away" for holding theological opinions that differed from those of the husband, or for refusing to have as much sex as he would like.

Margaret Atwood
The true story is vicious and multiple and untrue after all. Why do you need it? Don't ever ask for the true story.

Margaret Atwood