Margaret Atwood quotes: wise famous quotes, sayings and quotations by Margaret Atwood

Margaret Atwood Famous Quotes & Sayings

Discover top inspirational quotes from Margaret Atwood on Wise Famous Quotes.

But I began then to think of time as having a shape, something you could see, like a series of liquid transparencies, one laid on top of another.

War is what happens when language fails.

Things that are falling apart encourage me: whatever else, I'm in better shape than they are.

I have failed once again to fulfill the expectations of others, which have become my own.

they sleep, they can be startled, even there in the soothing of the heart, like waves on the shore around them. A

She is dying because she said.
She is dying for the sake of the word.
It is her body, silent
and fingerless, writing this poem.

Nor did I make any distinctions between great literature and any other kind. I just liked reading.

I read for pleasure and that is the moment I learn the most.

She had her reasons. Not that they were the same as anybody else's reasons.

We would like to hear the story of Fuck," says Abraham Lincoln politely.

We have learned to see the world in gasps.

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

He put his arms around me. We were both feeling miserable. How were we to know we were happy, even then? Because we at least had that: arms, around.

At the very least we want a witness. We can't stand the idea of our own voices falling silent finally, like a radio running down.

It's like the Vatican's porn collection," Zeb told her. "Safe in our hands.

Publishers are in business to make money, and if your books do well they don't care if you are male, female, or an elephant.

Extreme good, extreme evil: the abilities required are similar.

He's coming to hate the gratitude of women. It is like being fawned on by rabbits, or like being covered with syrup: you can't get it off.

she was beginning to emerge from the initial sex-induced coma created by him through

His view of the world featured swift disasters set against a background of lurking doom, my cooking did nothing to contradict it.

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

Unlike some other religions, we have never felt it served a higher purpose to lie to children about geology.

He was the kind of boy for whom cleverness was female.

I am too old to have ever been very worried about what "genre" any given book of mine might be. I read everything. I am easily amused.

Am I shallow? she asks the mirror. Yes, I am shallow. The sun shines on the ripples where it's shallow. Deep is too dark.

I'm not interested in cutting the feet off my characters or stretching them to make them fit my certain political view.

As a species we're doomed by hope, then?

His father was self-made, but his mother was constructed by others, and such edifices are notoriously fragile.

Left lipstick imprints the shape of grateful, rubbery sighs ...

Bad hearts have their uses; even I can see that.

I used to jog but it's bad for the knees. Too much beta carotene turns you orange, too much calcium gives you kidney stones. Health kills.

Why do men feel threatened by women?

China does not exist. Nevertheless, she longs to be there.

A divorce is like an amputation, you survive but there's less of you.

not hard-wired to individuate other people in numbers above two hundred, the size of the primal tribe,

He needed to exist only in the present, without guilt, without expectation.

There is good and mediocre writing within every genre.

To fix and make plausible, the nebulous emotions of my costumed heroins, like diamonds on a sea of dough.

Time is going faster and faster; the days of the week whisk by like panties.

I grew sodden with light; my skin on the inside glowed a dull red.

Love is giving, marriage is buying and selling. You can't put love into a contract.

We battled in secret, undeclared, and after a while I no longer fought back because I never won. The only defense was flight, invisibility.

Now that she's the carrier of life, she is closer to death, and needs special security.

But I'm ravenous for news, any kind of news; even if it's false news, it must mean something. We

Nobody dies from the lack of sex. It's lack of love we die from.

WOMEN'S PRAYVAGANZA TODAY. The banner covers the building's former name, some dead president they shot. Below

When they're gone out of his head, these words, they'll be gone, everywhere, forever. As if they had never been.

I could do a good imitation of a competent young woman.

I am nervous about dogmas of any kind, whether they be religious, political, or anti-religious. Too many heads have rolled because of them.

The fact is that I hate this city. I've hated it so long I can hardly remember feeling any other way about it.

When demons are required someone will always be found to supply the part, and whether you step forward or are pushed is all the same in the end.

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

We immortals aren't misers - we don't hoard! Such things are pointless.

Hatred and viciousness are addictive. You can get high on them.

Life is warped. I'm just in sync.

An odd thing souvenir-hunting: now becomes then even while it is still now.

I always thought eating was a ridiculous activity anyway. I'd get out of it myself if I could, though you've got to do it to stay alive, they tell me.

wondering if Chuck had a soul, and if it was still hovering over his body like a feeble smell.

If the national mental illness of the United States is megalomania, that of Canada is paranoid schizophrenia.

Even an obvious fabrication is some comfort when you have few others.

In the burned house I am eating breakfast.
You understand? There is no house, there is no breakfast,
yet here I am

But maybe, underneath, she loves him too much. Maybe it's her excessive love that pushes him away.

Some of our earliest writing, in cuneiform, was about who owes what.

It was like being in an elevator cut loose at the top. Falling, falling, and not knowing when you will hit.

Winning intoxicates you, and numbs you to the sufferings of others.

I expect he did it awkwardly, but awkwardness in men was a sign of sincerity then.

What you don't know won't hurt you.

Women can't hold property anymore, she said. It's a new law.

We get along by a symbiotic adjustment of habits and with a minimum of that pale-mauve hostility you often find among women.

For drinking Life there are two cups: The No Cup is bitter, the Yes Cup is yummy
Now, which one would you rather have in your tummy?

What fiendishness went on in kitchens across the country, in the name of providing food!

I particularly like Twitter, because it's short and can be very funny and informative. It's a little bit like having your own radio program.

Perhaps he was merely being friendly. Perhaps he saw the look on my face and mistook it for something else. Really what I wanted was the cigarette.

My red skirt is hitched up to my waist, though no higher. Below it the Commander is fucking. What he is fucking is the lower part of my body.

(...) cause after a request like that there's always a next time, wether you say yes or no.

The Serpent is wise in that it lives in immediacy, without the need for the elaborate intellectual frameworks Humankind is

I'm not going to have a husband anyway," said Laura. "I'm going to live by myself in the garage.

Every novel is-at the beginning-the same opening of a door onto a completely unknown space.

A plane of cheekbone,

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

Once they tried to save something, others or their own souls.

A scar is like writing on your body. It tells about something that once happened to you, such as a cut on your skin where blood came out. What

I hear where you're coming from, as if the voice itself were a traveler, arriving from a distant place. Which it would be, which it is.

When I finally went to school I had to adjust to other girls and learn their fiendish ways. Having learnt them, I turned them on all and sundry.

It was only a dream. It was only a larval poem. -

The use of "religion" as an excuse to repress the freedom of expression and to deny human rights is not confined to any country or time.

I have long since decided if you wait for the perfect time to write, you'll never write. There is no time that isn't flawed somehow.

Knowing was a temptation. What you don't know won't tempt you.

You're to love as a cock-teaser is to fucking.

My transition from not being a writer to being one was instantaneous, like the change from docile bank clerk to fanged monster in "B" movies.

For present purposes he's shortened the name. He's only Snowman. He's kept the abominable to himself, his own secret hair shirt.

Besides, who would think of marrying a mothball? A question my mother put to me often, later, in other forms.

Religious people of any serious kind made her nervous: they were like men in raincoats who might or might not be flashers.

Just remember this, when the scream at last has ended and you've turned on the lights: by the rules of the game, I must always lie.

whatever else women want to see, it's not themselves; not in their worst light anyway.

Buttered, I lie on my single bed, flat, like a piece of toast. I

I want to be valued, in ways that I am not; I want to be more than valuable.

There's always a black market, there's always something that can be exchanged.

Better not to invent her in her absence. Better to wait until she's actually here. Then he can make her up as she goes along.

Backward glances are not encouraged.