Margaret Atwood Quotes

...He was wrong about the sadness though: far better to have it when you're young. A sad pretty girl inspires the urge to console, unlike a sad old crone.

~ Margaret Atwood

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.

~ Margaret Atwood

It's psychic. It's the age. It's chemical.

~ Margaret Atwood

Sympathy from strangers can be ruinous.

~ Margaret Atwood

They spent the first three years of school getting you to pretend stuff and then the rest of it marking you down if you did the same thing.

~ Margaret Atwood

Ah men,why do you want all this attention?I can write poems for myself, make love to a doorknob if absolutelynecessary. What do you have to offer meI can't find otherwiseexcept humiliation? Which I no longerneed.

~ Margaret Atwood

There were no men in this painting, but it was about men, the kind who caused women to fall. I did not ascribe any intentions to these men. They were like the weather, they didn't have a mind. They merely drenched you or struck you like lightning and moved on, mindless as blizzards. Or they were like rocks, a line of sharp slippery rocks with jagged edges. You could walk with care along between the rocks, picking your steps, and if you slipped you'd fall and cut yourself, but it was no use blaming the rocks.

~ Margaret Atwood

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.

~ Margaret Atwood

After they had skated around the pond several times, my father asked my mother to marry him. I expect he did it awkwardly, but awkwardness in men was a sign of sincerity then.

~ Margaret Atwood

Is there no end to his diguises of benevolence?

~ Margaret Atwood

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.

~ Margaret Atwood

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.

~ Margaret Atwood

Was this a betrayal, or was it an act of courage? Perhaps both. Neither one involves forethought: such things take place in an instant, in an eyeblink. This can only be because they have been rehearsed by us already, over and over, in silence and darkness; in such silence, such darkness, that we are ignorant of them ourselves. Blind but sure-footed, we step forward as if into a remembered dance.

~ Margaret Atwood

When we think of the past it's the beautiful things we pick out. We want to believe it was all like that.

~ Margaret Atwood

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

~ Margaret Atwood

I can't remember what I really felt. Maybe nothing happened, maybe these emotions I remember are not the right emotions.

~ Margaret Atwood

He keeps his voice kindly but remote. A cross between a pedagogue, soothsayer, and a benevolent uncle – that should be his tone.

~ Margaret Atwood

Miranda nods, because she knows that to be true: noble people don't do things for the money, they simply have money, and that's what allows they to be noble. They don't really have to think about it much; they sprout benevolent acts the way trees sprout leaves.

~ Margaret Atwood

Those who live alone slide into the habit of vertical eating: why bother with the niceties when there's no one to share or censure? But laxity in one area may lead to derangement in all.

~ Margaret Atwood

Confronted by too much emptiness, said Adam One, the brain invents. Loneliness creates company as thirst creates water. How many sailors have been wrecked in pursuit of islands that were merely a shimmering?

~ Margaret Atwood

The Loneliness of the Military HistorianConfess: it's my professionthat alarms you.This is why few people ask me to dinner,though Lord knows I don't go out of my way to be scary.I wear dresses of sensible cutand unalarming shades of beige,I smell of lavender and go to the hairdresser's:no prophetess mane of mine,complete with snakes, will frighten the youngsters.If I roll my eyes and mutter,if I clutch at my heart and scream in horrorlike a third-rate actress chewing up a mad scene,I do it in private and nobody seesbut the bathroom mirror.In general I might agree with you:women should not contemplate war,should not weigh tactics impart

~ Margaret Atwood

We were revisionists, what we revised was ourselves.

~ Margaret Atwood

What should I take? Something that will not be missed. In the wood at midnight, a magic flower.

~ Margaret Atwood

But people will do anything rather than admit that their lives have no meaning.

~ Margaret Atwood

I want everything back, the way it was. But there is no point to it, this wanting.

~ Margaret Atwood

The past isn't quaint while you're in it. Only at a safe distance, later, when you can see it as décor, not as the shape your life's been squeezed into.

~ Margaret Atwood

I didn't much like it, this grudge-holding against the past.

~ Margaret Atwood

you can't change the past,Aunt Lou used to say.Oh, but I wanted to;that was the one thing I really wanted to do

~ Margaret Atwood

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.

~ Margaret Atwood

Here the children have a custom. After the celebration of evil they take those vacant heads that shone once with such anguish and glee and throw them over the bridge, watching the smash, orange, as they hit below, We were standing underneath when you told it. People do that with themselves when they are finished, light scooped out. He landed here, you said, marking it with your foot.You wouldn't do it that way, empty, you wouldn't wait, you would jump with the light still in you.

~ Margaret Atwood

Ger says that Kat has a tendency to push things to extremes, to go over the edge, merely from a juvenile desire to shock, which is hardly a substitute for wit. One of these days, he says, she will go way too far. Too far for him, is what he means.

~ Margaret Atwood

You can think clearly only with your clothes on.

~ Margaret Atwood

I wonderif I should let my hair go greyso my advice will be better.

~ Margaret Atwood

I’m not mad because I’m a woman,” I say. “I’m mad because you’re an asshole.

~ Margaret Atwood

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.

~ Margaret Atwood

She’s a lean vixen: I can seethe ribs, the slytrickster’s eyes, filled with longing and desperation, the skinnyfeet, adept at lies.Why encourage the notionof virtuous poverty?It’s only an excusefor zero charity.Hunger corrupts, and absolute hungercorrupts absolutely

~ Margaret Atwood

There's an epigram tacked to my office bulletin board, pinched from a magazine -- Wanting to meet an author because you like his work is like wanting to meet a duck because you like pâté.

~ Margaret Atwood

With the young writers now it’s F and C all day long, which he, personally, finds boring.

~ Margaret Atwood

Writers are much better behaved nowadays, for a couple of reasons. Once upon a time nobody was thinking of a career, unless you lived in New York, so there wasn’t as much pressure to present a respectable exterior. And secondly, there was no social media. So if you were found face down on the floor – people did do that quite a bit; usually men, but not always – or fell through plate glass windows or got into scrapes, it became a rumour, and rumours are hard to pin down.

~ Margaret Atwood

Stupidity is the same as evil if you judge by the results.

~ Margaret Atwood