Margaret Atwood - Life Quotes

21 Sourced Quotes

View all Margaret Atwood Quotes
I'm a novelist, and idle speculation is what novelists do. How odd to spend one's life trying to pretend that non-existent people are real: though no odder, I suppose, than what government bureaucrats do, which is trying to pretend that real people are non-existent.

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
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
But my dreaming self refuses to be consoled. It continues to wander, aimless, homeless, alone. It cannot be convinced of its safety by any evidence drawn from my waking life.

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
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
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
So this was the rest of his life. It felt like a party to which he'd been invited, but at an address he couldn't actually locate. Someone must be having fun at it, this life of his; only, right at the moment, it wasn't him.

Margaret Atwood
If he wants to be an asshole, it's a free country. Millions before him have made the same life choice.

Margaret Atwood
We are silent, considering shortfalls. There's not much time left, for us to become what we once intended. Jon had potential, but it's not a word that can be used comfortably any more. Potential has a shelf-life.

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

Margaret Atwood
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
I am afraid of falling into hopeless despair, over my wasted life, and I am still not sure how it happened.

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
Anything that suffers and dies instead of us is Christ; if they didn't kill birds and fish they would have killed us. The animals die that we may live, they are substitute people, hunters in the fall killing the deer, that is Christ also. And we eat them, out of cans or otherwise; we are eaters of death, dead Christ-flesh resurrecting inside us, granting us life. Canned Spam, canned Jesus, even the plants must be Christ.

Margaret Atwood
The prospect of his future life stretched before him like a sentence; not a prison sentence but a long-winded sentence with a lot of unnecessary subordinate clauses, as he was soon in the habit of quipping during Happy Hour pickup time at the local campus bars and pubs. He couldn't say he was looking forward to it, this rest-of-his-life.

Margaret Atwood
I would like to believe this is a story I'm telling. I need to believe it. I must believe it. Those who can believe that such stories are only stories have a better chance. If it's a story I'm telling, then I have control over the ending. Then there will be an ending, to the story, and real life will come after it. I can pick up where I left off.

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

Margaret Atwood
To take that risk, to offer life and remain alive, open yourself like this and become whole.

Margaret Atwood
Her mother was no longer there. Susanna did not think of it as a death, but as a fading away, like a pattern on washed cloth. It was the continuation of something that had been happening all her life anyway.

Margaret Atwood
I'm working on my own life story. I don't mean I'm putting it together; no, I'm taking it apart.

Margaret Atwood