Margaret Atwood Quotes

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

Time has not stood still. It has washed over me, washed me away, as if I'm nothing more than a woman of sand, left by a careless child too near the water.

As all historians know, the past is a great darkness, and filled with echoes.

I wish you good writing and good luck. Even if you've already done the good writing, you'll still need the good luck. It's a shark-filled lagoon out there. Cross your fingers and watch your back.

You might 'write from the heart,' but you'd better polish with your brain.

And she finds it difficult to believe—that a person would love her even when she isn't trying. Trying to figure out what other people need, trying to be worthy.

If you get hungry enough, they say, you start eating your own heart.

Nevertheless, blood is thicker than water, as anyone knows who has tasted both.

There's nothing like a shovel full of dirt to encourage literacy.

I want, I don’t want. How can one live with such a heart?

If you're put on a pedestal, you're supposed to behave yourself like a pedestal type of person. Pedestals actually have a limited circumference. Not much room to move around.

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

Every aspect of human technology has a dark side, including the bow and arrow.

If I were going to convert to any religion I would probably choose Catholicism because it at least has female saints and the Virgin Mary.

The truly fearless think of themselves as normal.

You can think clearly only with your clothes on.

Heroes need monsters to establish their heroic credentials. You need something scary to overcome.

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

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

Screw poetry, it’s you I want, your taste, rain on you, mouth on your skin.

Like many modern poets, I tend to conceal rhymes by placing them in the middle of lines, and to avoid immediate alliteration and assonance in favor of echoes placed later in the poems.

I don't find the idea of sewing degrading. A thing is degrading when you are forced to do it, through economic reasons or through slavery or some other form of compulsion.

Don't be married to a line or verse if it can't rhyme, fit the meter, or doesn't fit the outline.

Our biggest technology that we ever, ever invented was articulated language with built-out grammar. It is that that allows us to imagine things far in the future and things way back in the past.

We are a society dying, said Aunt Lydia, of too much choice.

There's blood, a taste I remember. It tastes of orange popsicles, penny gumballs, red licorice, gnawed hair, dirty ice.

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

We thought we were running away from the grownups, and now we are the grownups.

Social media is called social media for a reason. It lends itself to sharing rather than horn-tooting.

I've learned quite a lot, over the years, by avoiding what I was supposed to be learning.

You can wet the rim of a glass and run your finger around the rim and it will make a sound. This is what I feel like: this sound of glass. I feel like the word shatter. I want to be with someone.

You need a certain amount of nerve to be a writer.

I am certain that a Sewing Machine would relieve as much human suffering as a hundred Lunatic Asylums, and possibly a good deal more.

Madness is only an amplification of what you already are.

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

The young habitually mistake lust for love, they're infested with idealism of all kinds.

Why is it we want so badly to memorialize ourselves? Even while we're still alive. We wish to assert our existence, like dogs peeing on fire hydrants.

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.

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

Never pray for justice, because you might get some.

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.

What am I living for and what am I dying for are the same question.

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.

Ordinary, said Aunt Lydia, is what you are used to. This may not seem ordinary to you now, but after a time it will. It will become ordinary.

Anyway, maybe there weren't any solutions. Human society, corpses and rubble. It never learned, it made the same cretinous mistakes over and over, trading short-term gain for long-term pain.

The darkness is really out there. It's not something that's in my head, just. It's in my work because it's in the world.

As an artist your first loyalty is to your art. Unless this is the case, you're going to be a second-rate artist.

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

Marshall McLuhan is absolutely right, we are always looking in the rear view mirror.

I would rather dance as a ballerina, though faultily, than as a flawless clown.