Margaret Atwood Quotes

friendship was always contingent.

For years I wanted to be older, and now I am.

You hear doom and gloom about the Internet ruining young people's command of English - that's nonsense.

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

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

I hate to tell you this, but you will never actually go to a galaxy far, far away and encounter Darth Vader. That's science fiction; it isn't going to happen.

I don't want to look at something that determines me so completely.

There are some virtues to not saying what you think all the time.

Why does the mind do such things? Turn on us, rend us, dig the claws in. If you get hungry enough, they say, you start eating your own heart. Maybe it's much the same.

The beginning of Canadian cultural nationalism was not 'Am I really that oppressed?' but 'Am I really that boring?'

The fact is that blank pages inspire me with terror. What will I put on them? Will it be good enough? Will I have to throw it out?

Fear has a smell, as love does.

I grew up amongst biologists.

Come away with me, he said, we will live on a desert island. I said, I am a desert island. It was not what he had in mind.

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

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

Support your libraries... or else!

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.

You meet the same people on the way down that you meet on the way up, but you're going the other way.

Nothing is more difficult than to understand the dead, I've found; but nothing is more dangerous than to ignore them.

God is not the voice in the whirlwind, God is the whirlwind.

Their mothers had finally caught up to them and been proven right. There were consequences after all but they were the consequences to things you didn't even know you'd done.

Debt is part of the human condition. Civilization is based on exchanges - on gifts, trades, loans - and the revenges and insults that come when they are not paid back.

When things are really dismal, you can laugh, or you can cave in completely.

I would not change [my past work] anymore than I would airbrush a photo of myself.

I did not know how to paint or even what to paint, but I knew I had to begin.

[My favorite word is] and. It is so hopeful.

I write as if I've lived a lot of things I haven't lived.

You need a certain amount of nerve to be a writer, an almost physical nerve, the kind you need to walk a log across a river.

I'm working on my own life story. I don't mean I'm putting it together; no, I'm taking it apart.

Beginnings are sudden, but also insidious. They creep up on you sideways, they keep to the shadows, they lurk unrecognized. Then, later, they spring.

Richard liked to say he picked things up for a song, which was odd, because he never sang. He never even whistled. He was not a musical person.

Waste not want not. I am not being wasted. Why do I want?

Sons branch out, but one woman leads to another.

A ratio of failures is built into the process of writing. The wastebasket has evolved for a reason.

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.

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

He doesn't know which is worse, a past he can't regain or a present that will destroy him if he looks at it too clearly. Then there's the future. Sheer vertigo.

I was sand, I was snow—written on, rewritten, smoothed over.

We understand more than we know.

Time rises and rises, and when it reaches the level of your eyes you drown.

How furious she must be, now that she's been taken at her word.

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

By telling you anything at all I'm at least believing in you, I believe you're there, I believe you into being.

Vanity is becoming a nuisance, I can see why women give it up, eventually. But I'm not ready for that yet.

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.

Show me a character totally without anxieties and I will show you a boring book.

Don't let the bastards grind you down. I repeat this to myself but it conveys nothing. You might as well say, Don't let there be air; or Don't be. I suppose you could say that.

The way love feels is always only approximate. I would like to be without shame. I would like to be shameless. I would like to be ignorant. Then I would not know how ignorant I was.