Margaret Atwood Quotes

Biography

Type: Novelist, Poet, Businesswoman, Environmental activist

Born: November 18, 1939, Ottawa, Ontario, Canada

Died:

Margaret Atwood is a Canadian award-winning writer best known for her poetry, short-stories and novels such as "The Circle Game", "The Handmaid’s Tale", "Snowbird" and "The Tent".

Margaret Atwood Quotes

I would like to be the air that inhabits you for a moment only. I would
I would like to be the air that inhabits you for a moment only. I would like to be that unnoticed and that necessary.

A truth should exist, it should not be used like this. If I love you is
A truth should exist,
it should not be used
like this. If I love you

is that a fact or a weapon?

How could I be sleeping with this particular man.... Surely only true love could justify my
How could I be sleeping with this particular man.... Surely only true love could justify my lack of taste.

The only way you can write the truth is to assume that what you set down will never be read. Not by any other person, and not even by yourself at some later date. Otherwise you begin excusing yourself. You must see the writing as emerging like a long scroll of ink from the index finger of your right hand; you must see your left hand erasing it.

They didn't realize that her clumsiness was not the ordinary kind, not poor coordination. It was just because she wasn't sure where the edges of her body ended and the rest of the world began.

A word after a word after a word is power.. Margaret Atwood
A word after a word after a word is power.

Perhaps I write for no one. Perhaps for the same person children are writing for when they scrawl their names in the snow.

Good writing takes place at intersections, at what you might call knots, at places where the
Good writing takes place at intersections, at what you might call knots, at places where the society is snarled or knotted up.

Everyone thinks writers must know more about the inside of the human head, but that's wrong.
Everyone thinks writers must know more about the inside of the human head, but that's wrong. They know less, that's why they write. Trying to find out what everyone else takes for granted.

Publishing a book is like stuffing a note into a bottle and hurling it into the sea. Some bottles drown, some come safe to land, where the notes are read and then possibly cherished, or else misinterpreted, or else understood all too well by those who hate the message. You never know who your readers might be.

For me the experience of writing is really an experience of losing control.… I think it’s very much like dreaming or like surfing. You go out there and wait for a wave, and when it comes it takes you somewhere and you don’t know where it’ll go.

Where do the words go when we have said them?. Margaret Atwood
Where do the words go
when we have said them?

Reading and writing, like everything else, improve with practice. And, of course, if there are no young readers and writers, there will shortly be no older ones. Literacy will be dead, and democracy - which many believe goes hand in hand with it - will be dead as well.

Perhaps its not the world that is soundless but we who are deaf.. Margaret Atwood
Perhaps its not the world that is soundless but we who are deaf.

All stories are about wolves. All worth repeating, that is. Anything else is sentimental drivel.. Margaret
All stories are about wolves. All worth repeating, that is. Anything else is sentimental drivel.

Writing poetry is a state of free float. Margaret Atwood
Writing poetry is a state of free float

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

speech to him was a task, a battle, words mustered behind his beard and issued one
speech to him was a task, a battle, words mustered behind his beard and issued one at a time, heavy and square like tanks.

But she went to tell the bees. She felt like an idiot doing it, but she'd promised. She remembered that it wasn't enough just to think at them: you had to say the words out loud. Bees were the messengers between this world and the other worlds, Pilar had said. Between the living and the dead. They carried the Word made air.

You couldn’t leave words lying around where our enemies might find them.. Margaret Atwood
You couldn’t leave words lying around where our enemies might find them.

The whole world is now one vast uncontrollable experiment - the way it always was, Crake would have said - and the doctrine of unintended consequences is in full spate.

Hatred would have been easier. With hatred, I would have known what to do. Hatred is clear, metallic, one-handed, unwavering; unlike love.

The Eskimo has fifty-names for snow because it is important to them; there ought to be
The Eskimo has fifty-names for snow because it is important to them; there ought to be as many for love.

If I love you, is that a fact or a weapon?. Margaret Atwood
If I love you, is that a fact or a weapon?

This is how the girl who couldn't speak and the man who couldn't see fell in
This is how the girl who couldn't speak and the man who couldn't see fell in love.

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

A home filled with nothing but yourself. It's heavy, that lightness. It's crushing, that emptiness.. Margaret
A home filled with nothing but yourself. It's heavy, that lightness. It's crushing, that emptiness.

Potential has a shelf life.. Margaret Atwood
Potential has a shelf life.

Time folds you in its arms and gives you one last kiss, and then it flattens you out and folds you up and tucks you away until it's time for you to become someone else's past time, and then time folds again.

Don't let the bastards grind you down.. Margaret Atwood
Don't let the bastards grind you down.

So much for endings. Beginnings are always more fun. True connoisseurs, however, are known to favor the stretch in between, since it's the hardest to do anything with. That's about all that can be said for plots, which anyway are just one thing after another, a what and a what and a what.

The truth is seldom welcome, especially at dinner.. Margaret Atwood
The truth is seldom welcome, especially at dinner.

It must have been then that I began to lose faith in reasonable argument as the
It must have been then that I began to lose faith in reasonable argument as the sole measure of truth.

[H]aving a money value was no substitute for love.

A Paradox, the doughnut hole. Empty space, once, but now they've learned to market even that. A minus quantity; nothing, rendered edible. I wondered if they might be used-metaphorically, of course-to demonstrate the existence of God. Does naming a sphere of nothingness transmute it into being?

Setting fire to the roofs, getting away with the loot, suiting herself. She studied modern philosophy, read Sartre on the side, smoked Gitanes, and cultivated a look of bored contempt. But inwardly, she was seething with unfocused excitement, and looking for someone to worship.

We understand more than we know.. Margaret Atwood
We understand more than we know.

We shouldn't have been so scornful; we should have had compassion. But compassion takes work, and
We shouldn't have been so scornful; we should have had compassion. But compassion takes work, and we were young.

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

There I am, in the Grade Six class picture, smiling broadly. Happy as a clam, is what my mother says for happy. I am happy as a clam: hardshelled, firmly closed.

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.

Neither of us says the word love, not once. It would be tempting fate; it would be romance, bad luck.

I was taking something away from her, although she didn't know it. I was filching. Never mind that it was something she apparently didn't want or had no use for, had rejected even; still, it was hers, and if I took it away, this mysterious "it" I couldn't quite define.

I planned my death carefully, unlike my life, which meandered along from one thing to another, despite my feeble attempts to control it.

One of the gravestones in the cemetery near the earliest church has an anchor on it and an hourglass, and the words In Hope.

In Hope. Why did they put that above a dead person? Was it the corpse hoping, or those still alive?

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.

If you really want to stay the same age you are now forever and ever, she'd be thinking, try jumping off the roof: death's a sure-fire method for stopping time.

The reason they invented coffins, to lock the dead in, preserve them, they put makeup on them; they didn't want them spreading or changing into anything else. The stone with the name and date was on them to weight them down.

Via the conduit of a wild dog pack, she has now made the ultimate Gift to her fellow Creatures, and has become part of God's great dance of proteins.

There were a lot of gods. Gods always come in handy, they justify almost anything.

Our heaven is their hell, said God. I like a balanced universe.

You might even provide a Heaven for them. We need You for that. Hell we can make for ourselves.

We yearned for the future. How did we learn it, that talent for insatiability?

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

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

You could call it hope. That, or desperation.

But we're doomed without hope, as well, said Jimmy.

Only as individuals, said Crake cheerfully.

You fit into me
like a hook into an eye

a fish hook
an open eye

with shrunken fingers
we ate our oranges and bread,
shivering in the parked car;

though we know we had never
been there before,
we knew we had been there before.

If you knew what was going to happen, if you knew everything that was going to happen next - if you knew in advance the consequences of your own actions - you'd be doomed. You'd be ruined as God. You'd be a stone. You'd never eat or drink or laugh or get out of bed in the morning. You'd never love anyone, ever again. You'd never dare to.

Maybe I don't really want to know what's going on. Maybe I'd rather not know. Maybe I couldn't bear to know. The Fall was a fall from innocence to knowledge.

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

So we couldn't mingle with them, but we could eavesdrop. We got our knowledge that way-we caught it like germs.

Ignoring isn’t the same as ignorance, you have to work at it.

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.

God is a cluster of neurons.

Fatigue is here, in my body, in my legs and eyes. That is what gets you in the end. Faith is only a word, embroidered.

By telling you anything at all I'm at least believing in you, I believe you're there, I believe you into being. Because I'm telling you this story I will your existence. I tell, therefore you are.

Perhaps they were looking for passion; perhaps they delved into this book as into a mysterious parcel - a gift box at the bottom of which, hidden in layers of rustling tissue paper, lay something they'd always longed for but couldn't ever grasp.

These things sneak up on him for no reason, these flashes of irrational happiness. It's probably a vitamin deficiency.

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.

Her metaphors for her children included barnacles encrusting a ship and limpets clinging to a rock.

Here's a health to our Captain, so gallant and free
Whether stuck on a rock or asleep 'neath a tree
Or rolled in the arms of some nymph of the sea
Which is where we would all like to be, man!

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.

I already told you,” said Adam. “There is no need to swear.”
“Sorry, it just fucking slipped out,” said Zeb.

He has to find more and better ways of occupying his time. His time, what a bankrupt idea, as if he's been given a box of time belonging to him alone, stuffed to the brim with hours and minutes that he can spend like money. Trouble is, the box has holes in it and the time is running out, no matter what he does with it.

Time is not a line but a dimension, like the dimensions of space. If you can bend space you can bend time also, and if you knew enough and could move faster than light you could travel backward in tie and exist in two places at once.

Time: old cold time, old sorrow, settling down in layers like silt in a pond.

Change can be accommodated by any system depending on its rate, Crake used to say. Touch your head to a wall, nothing happens, but if the same head hits the wall at ninety miles an hour, it's red paint. We're in a speed tunnel, Jimmy. When the water's moving faster than the boat, you can't control a thing.

Time in dreams is frozen. You can never get away from where you've been.

I and the girl in the picture have ceased to be the same person. I am her outcome, the result of the life she once lived headlong; whereas she, if she can be said to exist at all, is composed only of what I remember. I have the better view - I can see her clearly, most of the time. But even if she knew enough to look, she can't see me at all.

There are tenses that define us now: past tense, back then; future tense, not yet. We live in the small window between them, the space we've only recently come to think as still, and really its no smaller than anyone else's window.

Every month there is a moon, gigantic, round, heavy, an omen. IT transits, pauses, continues on and passes out of sight, and I see despair coming towards me like famine. To feel that empty, again, again. I listen to my heart, wave upon wave, salty and red, continuing on and on, marking time.

I lie on the floor, washed by nothing and hanging on. I cry at night. I am afraid of hearing voices, or a voice. I have come to the edge, of the land. I could get pushed over.

Modesty is invisibility...Never forget it. To be seen - to be seen - is to be...penetrated. What you must be girls, is impenetrable.

We have learned to see the world in gasps.

Every budding dictatorship begins by muzzling the artists, because they're a mouthy lot and they don't line up and salute very easily.

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

The answers you get from literature depend on the questions you pose.

Gavin has tried quoting Yeats to the effect that women must labour to be beautiful, but Reynolds-who used to be a passionate Yeats fan-is now of the opinion that Yeats is entitled to his point of view, but that was then and social attitudes were different then, and in actual fact Yeats is dead.

The beauty is an illusion, and also a warning: there's a dark side to beauty, as with poisonous butterflies.

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.

Sex is like a drink, it's bad to start brooding about it too early in the day.

Even sex was no longer what it had once been, though he was still as addicted to it as ever. He felt jerked around by his own dick, as if the rest of him was merely an inconsequential knob that happened to be attached to one end of it. Maybe the thing would be happier if left to roam around on its own.

A bachelor, a studio, those were the names for that kind of apartment. Separate entrance it would say in the ads, and that meant you could have sex, unobserved.

Nobody wanted to be sexless, but nobody wanted to be nothing but sex.

Not that it isn't great to see you. But it's not so great for you. What'd you do wrong? Laugh at his dick?

Condoms seemed to her inherently wicked. But they were also inherently funny. They were like rubber gloves with only one finger, and every time she saw one she had to be severe with herself or she’d get the giggles, a terrifying thought because the man might think you were laughing at him, at his dick, at its size, and that would be fatal.

In the spring, at the end of the day, you should smell like dirt.

Nature is to zoos as God is to churches.

Nature is an expert in cost-benefit analysis,' she says. 'Although she does her accounting a little differently. As for debts, she always collects in the long run...

As Charles Darwin said,'The economy shown by Nature in her resources is striking,'' says the Spirit. 'All wealth comes from Nature. Without it, there wouldn't be any economics. The primary wealth is food, not money. Therefore anything that concerns the handling of the land also concerns me.

...the values ascribed to the Indian will depend on what the white writer feels about Nature, and America has always had mixed feelings about that. At one end of the spectrum is Thoreau, wishing to immerse himself in swamps for the positive vibrations; at the other end is Benjamin Franklin, who didn't like Nature. [p.91]

I am alive, I live, I breathe, I put my hand out, unfolded, into the sunlight.

The best way of being kind to bears is not to be very close to them.

Expand your world. (Stories about wizards and spells) are very frequently about power relationships...

The heart with letters on it shining like a light bulb through the trim hole painted in the chest, art history.

Farewells can be shattering, but returns are surely worse. Solid flesh can never live up to the bright shadow cast by its absence. Time and distance blur the edges; then suddenly the beloved has arrived, and it's noon with its merciless light, and every spot and pore and wrinkle and bristle stands clear.

The possibility of injury or death was a strong attraction: as the online world became more and more pre-edited and slicked up, and as even its so-called reality sites raised questions about authenticity in the minds of the viewers, the rough, unpolished physical world was taking on a mystic allure.

War is what happens when language fails.

It wasn't so easy though, ending the war. A war is a huge fire; the ashes from it drift far, and settle slowly.

از نقطه نظر اقتصادی جنگ یک آتش معجزه آسا بود؛ یک حریق عظیم کیمیا گرانه که دود بلنده شده از %

Why is war so much like a practical joke? she thinks. Hiding behind bushes, leaping out, with not much difference between Boo! and Bang! except the blood.

When any civilization is dust and ashes," he said, "art is all that's left over. Images, words, music. Imaginative structures. Meaning - human meaning, that is - is defined by them. You have to admit that.

What were prizes but one more level of control imposed on Art by the establishment?

But remember that forgiveness, too, is a power. To beg for it is a power, and to withhold or bestow it is a power, perhaps the greatest.

As we know from the study of history, no new system can impose itself upon a previous one without incorporating many of the elements to be found in the latter...

History is a construct...Any point of entry is possible and all choices are arbitrary. Still there are definitive moments...We can look at these events and say that after them things were never the same again.

Longed for him. Got him. Shit.

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

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

But who can remember pain, once it’s over? All that remains of it is a shadow, not in the mind even, in the flesh. Pain marks you, but too deep to see. Out of sight, out of mind.

Strange how we decorate pain.
These ribbons, for instance,
and the small hard teardrops of blood.
Who are they for?
Do we think the dead care?

They will not let you have peace, they don't want you to have anything they don't have themselves.

In the old days, trouble was kept in the family, which is still the best place for it, not that there's ever a best place for trouble. Why stir everything up again after that many years, with all concerned tucked, like tired children, so neatly into their graves?

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.

How easy it is to invent a humanity, for anyone at all.

To understand Homo sapiens’ primary wish list, go back to mythology. We endowed the gods with the abilities we wished we had ourselves: immortality and eternal youth, flight, resplendent beauty, total power, climate control, ultimate weapons, delicious banquets minus the cooking and washing up - and artificial creatures at our beck and call.

Humanity is so adaptable [...] Truly amazing, what people can get used to, as long as there are a few compensations.

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.

In my dreams of this city I am always lost.

You shouldn't do that," said Laura. "You could set yourself on fire.

Every war is the war for whoever's lived through it.

We were the people who were not in the papers. We lived in the blank white spaces at the edges of print. It gave us more freedom.
We lived in the gaps between the stories.

There is more than one kind of freedom," said Aunt Lydia. "Freedom to and freedom from. In the days of anarchy, it was freedom to. Now you are being given freedom from. Don't underrate it.

There is never only one, of anyone

This is what I miss, Cordelia: not something that’s gone, but something that will never happen. Two old women giggling over their tea.

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.

But it seems she’d wanted children after all, because when she was told she’d been accidentally sterilized she could feel all the light leaking out of her.

There is something powerful in the whispering of obscenities, about those in power. There's something delightful about it, something naughty, secretive, forbidden, thrilling. It's like a spell, of sorts. It deflates them, reduces them to the common denominator where they can be dealt.

A voice is a human gift; it should be cherished and used, to utter fully human speech as possible. Powerlessness and silence go together.

They were new money, without a doubt: so new it shrieked. Their clothes looked as it they'd covered themselves in glue, then rolled around in hundred-dollar bills.

I feel despised there, for having so little money; also for once having had so much. I never actually had it, of course. Father had it, and then Richard. But money was imputed to me, the same way crimes are imputed to those who've simply been present at them.

So when time had begun to run out on Adelia with no really acceptable husband in sight, she'd married money - crude money, button money. She was expected to refine this money, like oil.

Money does talk, but it has a limited vocabulary.

An unearned income encourages self-pity in those already prone to it.

You need to give money when someone gives you a knife. So the bad luck won't cut you. I wouldn't like it for you to be cut by the bad luck, Jimmy.

The sitting room is subdued, symmetrical; it's one of the shapes money takes when it freezes. Money has trickled through this room for years and years, as if through an underground cavern, crusting and hardening like stalactites into these forms.

Who cares, who cares. The perennial adolescent riposte. I cared, of course. I cared what people thought. I always did care. Unlike Laura, I have never had the courage of my convictions.

What would that be like - to long, to yearn for someone who is right there before your eyes, day in and day out?

They are boiling with the pressured energy of explosive forces confined in a small space, and with the fervor of all religious movements in their early, purist stages. It is not enough to give lip service and to believe in equal pay: there has to be a conversion, from the heart. Or so they imply.

Forgiving men is so much easier than forgiving women.

He's lost something, some illusion I used to think was necessary to him. He's come to realize he too is human. Or is this a performance, for my benefit, to show me he's up-to-date? Maybe men shouldn't have been told about their own humanity. It's only made them uncomfortable. It's only made them trickier, slier, more evasive, harder to read.

According to Tobias, women hang around longer because they’re less capable of indignation and better at being humiliated, for what is old age but one long string of indignities? What person of integrity would put up with it?

I wasn't even sure I wanted a man in my life again; by that time I'd exhausted the notion that the answer to a man is another man, and I was out of breath.

It isn't chic for women to be drunk. Men drunks are more excusable, more easily absolved, but why? It must be thought they have better reasons.

What fabrications they are, mothers. Scarecrows, wax dolls for us to stick pins into, crude diagrams. We deny them an existence of their own, we make them up to suit ourselves - our own hungers, our own wishes, our own deficiencies.

He feels the need to hear a human voice - a fully human voice like his own. Sometimes he laughs like a hyena or roars like a lion - his idea of a hyena his idea of a lion.

I don't want to see anyone. I lie in the bedroom with the curtains drawn and nothingness washing over me like a sluggish wave. Whatever is happening to me is my own fault. I have done something wrong, something so huge I can't even see it, something that's drowning me. I am inadequate and stupid, without worth. I might as well be dead.

Share Page

Margaret Atwood Wiki

Margaret Atwood At Amazon