Margaret Atwood - People Quotes

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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
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
A wave of blood goes up to my head, my stomach shrinks together, as if something dangerous has just missed hitting me. It's as if I've been caught stealing, or telling a lie; or as if I've heard other people talking about me, saying bad things about me, behind my back. There's the same flush of shame, of guilt and terror, and of cold disgust with myself. But I don't know where these feelings have come from, what I've done.

Margaret Atwood
Truly amazing, what people can get used to, as long as there are a few compensations.

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
When you're young, you think everything you do is disposable. You move from now to now, crumpling time up in your hands, tossing it away. You're your own speeding car. You think you can get rid of things, and people too—leave them behind. You don't yet know about the habit they have, of coming back. Time in dreams is frozen. You can never get away from where you've been.

Margaret Atwood
What people want is perfection," said the man. "In themselves." "But they need the steps to it to be pointed out," said the woman. "In a simple order," said the man. "With encouragement," said the woman. "And a positive attitude.

Margaret Atwood
People cry at weddings for the same reason they cry at happy endings: because they so desperately want to believe in something they know is not credible.

Margaret Atwood
We must be a beacon of hope, because if you tell people there's nothing they can do, they will do worse than nothing.

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
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
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
It's a feature of our age that if you write a work of fiction, everyone assumes that the people and events in it are disguised biography — but if you write your biography, it's equally assumed you're lying your head off. This last may be true, at any rate of poets: Plato said that poets should be excluded from the ideal republic because they are such liars. I am a poet, and I affirm that this is true. About no subject are poets tempted to lie so much as about their own lives; I know one of them who has floated at least five versions of his autobiography, none of them true. I of course — being also a novelist — am a much more truthful person than that. But since poets lie, how can you believe me?

Margaret Atwood
People dressed in a certain kind of clothing are never wrong. Also they never fart.

Margaret Atwood
The newspaper journalists like to believe the worst; they can sell more papers that way, as one of them told me himself; for even upstanding and respectable people dearly love to read ill of others.

Margaret Atwood
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
Confess: it's my profession
that alarms you.
This is why few people ask me to dinner,
though Lord knows I don't go out of my way to be scary.

Margaret Atwood
But some people can't tell where it hurts. They can't calm down. They can't ever stop howling.

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
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
I've never understood why people consider youth a time of freedom and joy. It's probably because they have forgotten their own.

Margaret Atwood
I soon had a few thousand people I didn't know sending me messages like OMG! Is it really you? I love it when old ladies blog, one early follower remarked. … and they really shone when, during the Olympics, I said that "Own the podium" was too brash to be Canadian, and suggested "A podium might be nice." Their own variations poured onto a feed tagged #cpodium: "A podium! For me?" "Rent the podium, see if we like it." "Mind if I squeeze by you to get onto that podium?" I was so proud of them! It was like having 33,000 precocious grandchildren!

Margaret Atwood
I can tell you that once upon a time when I was doing public events people would ask me, "What do you think about the arts?, What do you think of the role of women?, What do you think of men?, What do you think of all of these things?", and now they ask one thing, and that one thing is this, "Is there hope?"

Margaret Atwood
There are some women who seem to be born without fear, just as there are people who are born without the ability to feel pain... Providence appears to protect such women, maybe out of astonishment.

Margaret Atwood
Glenn used to say the reason you can't really imagine yourself being dead was that as soon as you say, 'I'll be dead,' you've said the word I, and so you're still alive inside the sentence. And that's how people got the idea of the immortality of the soul - it was a consequence of grammar.

Margaret Atwood
All children "write." (And paint, and sing.) I suppose the real question is why do so many people give it up. Intimidation, I suppose. Fear of not being good. Lack of time.

Margaret Atwood
Things written down can cause a great deal of harm. All too often, people don't consider that.

Margaret Atwood
The trickle-down theory of economics has it that it's good for rich people to get even richer because some of their wealth will trickle own, through their no doubt lavish spending, upon those who stand below them on the economic ladder. Notice that the metaphor is not that of a gushing waterfall but of a leaking tap: even the most optimistic endorsers of this concept do not picture very much real flow, as their language reveals.

Margaret Atwood
People put down Canadian literature and ask us why there isn't a Moby Dick. The reason there isn't a Moby Dick is that if a Canadian did a Moby Dick, it would be done from the point of view of the whale.

Margaret Atwood
I will pass over my flirtation with journalism as a way of making a living, an idea I dropped when I discovered that in the fifties — unlike now — female journalists always ended up writing the obituaries and the ladies' page. But how was I to make a living? There was not a roaring market in poetry, there, then. I thought of running away and being a waitress, which I later tried, but got very tired and thin; there's nothing like clearing away other people's mushed-up dinners to make you lose your appetite

Margaret Atwood