Margaret Atwood Quotes

You can never see yourself the way you are to someone else - to a man looking at you, from behind, when you don't know - because in a mirror your own head is always cranked around over your shoulder. A coy, inviting pose. You can hold up another mirror to see the back view, but then what you see is what so many painters have loved to paint - Woman Looking In Mirror, said to be an allegory of vanity. Though it is unlikely to be vanity, but the reverse: a search for flaws. What is it about me? can so easily be construed as What is wrong with me?
Margaret Atwood
You need a certain amount of nerve to be a writer.
Margaret Atwood
Writing is work. It’s also gambling. You don’t get a pension plan. Other people can help you a bit, but ­essentially you’re on your own. ­Nobody is making you do this: you chose it, so don’t whine.
Margaret Atwood
If they want a monster so badly they ought to be provided by one.
Margaret Atwood
Being here with him is safety; it's a cave, where we huddle together while the storm goes on outside. This is a delusion, of course. This room is one of the most dangerous places I could be.
Margaret Atwood
A word after a word after a word is power.
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
Another belief of mine: that everyone else my age is an adult whereas I am merely in disguise.
Margaret Atwood
A voice is a human gift it should be cherished and used to utter as fully human speech as possible. Powerlessness and silence go together.
Margaret Atwood
For years I wanted to be older and now I am.
Margaret Atwood
A word after a word after a word is power.
Margaret Atwood
A voice is a human gift it should be cherished and used to utter as fully human speech as possible. Powerlessness and silence go together.
Margaret Atwood
For years I wanted to be older and now I am.
Margaret Atwood
The answers you get from literature depend upon the questions you pose.
Margaret Atwood
The Eskimos had fifty-two names for snow because it was important to them there ought to be as many for love.
Margaret Atwood
Little girls are cute and small only to adults. To one another they are not cute. They are life-sized.
Margaret Atwood
Sons branch out but one woman leads to another.
Margaret Atwood
A divorce is like an amputation: you survive it but there's less of you.
Margaret Atwood
Time is compressed like the fist I close on my knee ... I hold inside it the clues and solutions and the power for what I must do now.
Margaret Atwood
Fear has a smell as Love does.
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
If the national mental illness of the United States is megalomania that of Canada is paranoid schizophrenia.
Margaret Atwood
The truly fearless think of themselves as normal.
Margaret Atwood
The door of Reverend Verringer’s impressive manse is opened by an elderly female with a face like a pine plank; the Reverend is unmarried, and has need of an irreproachable housekeeper. Simon is ushered into the library. It is so self-consciously the right sort of library that he has an urge to set fire to it.
Margaret Atwood
More powerful than God, more evil than the Devil; the poor have it, the rich lack it, and if you eat it you die?
Margaret Atwood
If he had known unstructured space is a delugeand stocked his log house-boat with all the animals even the wolves, he might have floated. But obstinate hestated, The land is solid and stamped, watching his foot sink down through the stone up to his knee. From "Progressive insanities of a pioneer
Margaret Atwood
Does feminist mean large unpleasant person who'll shout at you or someone who believes women are human beings? To me it's the latter, so I sign up
Margaret Atwood
I sink down into my body as into a swamp, fenland, where only I know the footing….I’m a cloud, congealed around a central object, the shape of a pear, which is hard and more real than I am and glows red within its translucent wrapping. Inside it is a space, huge as the sky at night and dark and curved like that, though black-red rather than black.
Margaret Atwood
God works in mysterious ways his wonders to perform, as Reenie used to say. Could it be that Myra is my designated guardian angel? Or is she instead a foretaste of Purgatory? And how do you tell the difference?
Margaret Atwood
​Now I'm awake to the world. I was asleep before. That's how we let it happen. When they slaughtered Congress, we didn't wake up. When they blamed terrorists and suspended the constitution, we didn't wake up then, either. Nothing changes instantaneously. In a gradually heating bathtub, you'd be boiled to death before you knew it.
Margaret Atwood
Time in dreams is frozen. You can never get away from where you've been.
Margaret Atwood
You think you can get rid of things, and people too--leave them behind. You don't know yet about the habit they have, of coming back.
Margaret Atwood
It isn't running away they're afraid of. We wouldn't get far. It's those other escapes, the ones you can open in yourself, given a cutting edge.
Margaret Atwood
Think of yourselves as pearls. We, sitting in our rows, eyes down, we make her salivate morally. We are hers to define, we must suffer her adjectives. I think about pearls. Pearls are congealed oyster spit.
Margaret Atwood
Pearls are congealed oyster spit.
Margaret Atwood
It was Colonel Parkman who upped stakes, crossed the border, and named our town, thus perversely commemorating a battle in which he'd lost. (Though perhaps that's not so unusual: many people take a curatorial interest in their own scars.) He's shown astride his horse, waving a sword and about to gallop into the nearby petunia bed: a craggy man with seasoned eyes and pointed beard, every sculptor's idea of every cavalry leader. No one knows what Colonel Parkman really looked like, since he left no pictorial evidence of himself and the statue wasn't erected until 1885, but he looks like this now. Such is the tyranny of Art.On the left-hand side of the lawn, also with a petunia bed, is an equally mythic figure: the Weary Soldier, his three top shirt buttons undone, his neck bowed as if for the headman's axe, his uniform rumpled, his helmet askew, leaning on his malfunctioning Ross rifle. Forever young, forever exhausted, he tops the War Memorial, his skin burning green in the sun, pigeon droppings running down his face like tears.
Margaret Atwood
[T]he mothers who had sold their children felt empty and sad. They felt as if this act, done freely by themselves (no one had forced them, no one had threatened them) had not been performed willingly. They felt cheated as well, as if the price had been too low. Why hadn't they demanded more? And yet, the mothers told themselves, they'd had no choice.
Margaret Atwood
What thumbsuckers we all are...when it comes to mothers.
Margaret Atwood
Have I been conditioned to believe that if I am not solicitous, if I am not forthcoming, if I am not a never-ending cornicopia of entertaining delights, they will take their collections of milk-bottle tops and their mangy one-eared teddy bears and go away into the woods by themselves to play snipers? Probably. What my mother things was merely cute may have been lethal.
Margaret Atwood
What a moron I was to think you were sweet and innocent, when it turns out you were actually college-educated the whole time!
Margaret Atwood
Two-thirty comes during Testifying. It's Janine, telling about how she was gang-raped at fourteen and had an abortion.But whose fault was it? Aunt Helena says, holding up one plump finger. Her fault, her fault, her fault. We chant in unison. Who led them on? She did. She did. She did. Why did God allow such a terrible thing to happen? Teach her a lesson. Teach her a lesson. Teach her a lesson.
Margaret Atwood
He’s a young man, my own age or a little older, which is young for a man although not for a woman, as at my age a woman is an old maid but a man is not an old bachelor until he’s fifty, and even then there’s still hope for the ladies, as Mary Whitney used to say.
Margaret Atwood
Girl Without HandsWalking through the ruinson your way to workthat do not look like ruinswith the sunlight pouring overthe seen worldlike hail or meltedsilver, that brightand magnificent, each leafand stone quickened and specific in it,and you can't hold it,you can't hold any of it. Distance surrounds you,marked out by the ends of your armswhen they are stretched to their fullest.You can go no farther than this,you think, walking forward,pushing the distance in front of youlike a metal cart on wheelswith its barriers and horizontals.Appearance melts away from you,the offices and pyramidson the horizon shimmer and cease.No one can enter that circleyou have made, that clean circleof dead space you have madeand stay inside,mourning because it is clean.Then there's the girl, in the white dress,meaning purity, or the failureto be any colour. She has no hands, it's true.The scream that happened to the airwhen they were taken offsurrounds her now like an aureoleof hot sand, of no sound.Everything has bled out of her.Only a girl like thiscan know what's happened to you.If she were here she wouldreach out her arms towardsyou now, and touch youwith her absent handsand you would feel nothing, but you would betouched all the same.
Margaret Atwood
It can't last forever. Others have thought such things, in bad times before this, and they were always right, they did get out one way or another, and it didn't last forever. Although for them it may have lasted all the forever they had.
Margaret Atwood
It can’t last forever. Others have thought suchthings, in bad times before this, and they were always right, they did get out one way or another, and it didn’tlast forever. Although for them it may have lasted all the forever they had.
Margaret Atwood
Science fiction, to me, has not only things that wouldn't happen, but other planets.
Margaret Atwood
She would roll up her sleeves and dispense with sentimentality, and do whatever blood-soaked, bad-smelling thing had to be done. She would become adept with axes.
Margaret Atwood
What else can I do? Once you've gone this far you aren't fit for anything else. Something happens to your mind. You're overqualified, overspecialized, and everybody knows it.
Margaret Atwood
Alcohol's a depressant, it will let me down later.
Margaret Atwood
A Tennyson garden, heavy with scent, languid; the return of the word swoon.
Margaret Atwood
Also I could hear Amanda’s voice: Why are you being so weak? Love’s never a fair trade. So Jimmy’s tired of you, so what, there’s guys all over the place like germs, and you can pick them like flowers and toss them away when they’re wilted. But you have to act like you’re having a spectacular time and every day’s a party.
Margaret Atwood
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.
Margaret Atwood
It isn't the sort of thing you ask questions about, because the answers are not usually answers you want to know.
Margaret Atwood
Creating some god for one's inspirations was always a good way to avoid accusations of pride should the scheme succeed, as well as the blame if did not.
Margaret Atwood
How furious she must be, now that she's been taken at her word.
Margaret Atwood
Time rises and rises, and when it reaches the level of your eyes you drown.
Margaret Atwood
The internet is 95 percent porn and spam
Margaret Atwood
Some people write letters, in the library.
Margaret Atwood
So by the time the morning came, Odysseus and I were indeed friends, as Odysseus had promised we would be. Or let me put it another way: I myself had developed friendly feelings towards him - more than that, loving and passionate ones - and he behaved as if he reciprocated them. Which is not quite the same thing.
Margaret Atwood
I've forgotten about these things all winter, but here they are again, and when I see them I remember them, I know them, I greet them as if they are home.
Margaret Atwood