Margaret Atwood Quotes

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.

~ Margaret Atwood

We ate the birds. We ate them. We wanted their songs to flow up through our throats and burst out of our mouths, and so we ate them. We wanted their feathers to bud from our flesh. We wanted their wings, we wanted to fly as they did, soar freely among the treetops and the clouds, and so we ate them. We speared them, we clubbed them, we tangled their feet in glue, we netted them, we spitted them, we threw them onto hot coals, and all for love, because we loved them. We wanted to be one with them. We wanted to hatch out of clean, smooth, beautiful eggs, as they did, back when we were young and agile and innocent of cause and effect, we did not want the mess of being born, and so we crammed the birds into our gullets, feathers and all, but it was no use, we couldn’t sing, not effortlessly as they do, we can’t fly, not without smoke and metal, and as for the eggs we don’t stand a chance. We’re mired in gravity, we’re earthbound. We’re ankle-deep in blood, and all because we ate the birds, we ate them a long time ago, when we still had the power to say no.

~ Margaret Atwood

In my dreams of this city I am always lost.

~ Margaret Atwood

from under the ground, from under the waters,they clutch at us, they clutch at us,we won’t let go.

~ Margaret Atwood

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.

~ Margaret Atwood

The sun is free, it is still there to be enjoyed.

~ Margaret Atwood

I know why there is no glass, in front of the watercolor picture of blue irises, and why the window opens only partly and why the glass in it is shatter-proof. 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

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

~ Margaret Atwood

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.

~ Margaret Atwood

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

~ Margaret Atwood

Here's a health to our Captain, so gallant and freeWhether stuck on a rock or asleep 'neath a treeOr rolled in the arms of some nymph of the seaWhich is where we would all like to be, man!

~ Margaret Atwood

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

~ Margaret Atwood

Forgiving men is so much easier than forgiving women.

~ Margaret Atwood

I have periods now, like normal girls; I too am among the knowing, I too can sit out volleyball games and go to the nurse's for aspirin and waddle along the halls with a pad like a flattened rabbit tail wadded between my legs, sopping with liver-colored blood.

~ Margaret Atwood

I am tempted to think that to be despised by her sex is a very great compliment to a woman.

~ Margaret Atwood

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?

~ Margaret Atwood

My self is a thing that I must now compose...as one composes a speech. What I must present is a 'made' thing. Not something born.

~ Margaret Atwood

To have them putting him on, trying him on, trying him out while he himself puts them on like a sock over a foot onto the stub of himself--his extra sensitive thumb, his tentacle, his delicate, stalked slug's eye which extrudes, expands, winces and shrivels back into himself when touched wrongly, grows big again. Bulging a little at the tip, traveling forward as if along a leaf into them, avid for vision. To achieve vision in this way; this journey into a darkness that is composed of women--a woman--who can see in darkness while he himself strains blindly forward.

~ Margaret Atwood

Our big mistake was teaching them to read. We won't do that again.

~ Margaret Atwood

There is never only one, of anyone

~ Margaret Atwood

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...

~ Margaret Atwood

Like preachers, I sell vision,like perfume ads, desireor its facsimile. Like jokesor war, it’s all in the timing.I sell men back their worse suspicions:that everything’s for sale

~ Margaret Atwood

You can't lead if no one will follow.

~ Margaret Atwood

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

~ Margaret Atwood

If writing novels - and reading them - have any redeeming social value, it's probably that they force you to imagine what it's like to be somebody else. Which increasingly is something we all need to know.

~ Margaret Atwood

What did they want from it? Lechery, smut, confirmation of their worst suspicions. But perhaps some of them wanted, despite themselves, to be seduced. 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.

~ Margaret Atwood

You learn to write by reading and writing, writing and reading. As a craft it's acquired through the apprentice system, but you choose your own teachers. Sometimes they're alive, sometimes dead.As a vocation, it involves the laying on of hands. You receive your vocation and in your turn you must pass it on. Perhaps you will do this only through your work, perhaps in other ways. Either way, you're part of a community, the community of writers, the community of storytellers that stretches back through time to the beginning of human society.As for the particular society to which you yourself belong -- sometimes you'll feel you're speaking for it, sometimes -- when it's taken an unjust form -- against it, or for that other community, the community of the oppressed, the exploited, the voiceless. Either way, the pressures on you will be intense; in other countries, perhaps fatal. But even here, speak 'for women,' or for any other group that is feeling the boot, and there will be many at hand, both for and against, to tell you to shut up, or to say what they want you to say, or to say it a different way. Or to save them. The billboard awaits you, but if you succumb to its temptations you'll end up two-dimensional.Tell what is yours to tell. Let others tell what is theirs.

~ Margaret Atwood

I wasn't discriminating in my reading, and I'm still not. I read then primarily to be entertained, as I do now. And I'm not saying that apologetically: I feel that if you remove the initial gut response from reading — the delight or excitement or simply the enjoyment of being told a story — and try to concentrate on the meaning or the shape of the message first, you might as well give up, it's too much like all work and no play.

~ Margaret Atwood

We want to get there faster. Get where? Wherever we are not. But a human soul can only go as fast as a man can walk, they used to say. In that case, where are all the souls? Left behind. They wander here and there, slowly, dim lights flickering in the marshes at night, looking for us. But they're not nearly fast enough, not for us, we're way ahead of them, they'll never catch up. That's why we can go so fast: our souls don't weigh us down.

~ Margaret Atwood

As all historians know, the past is a great darkness, and filled with echoes. Voices may reach us from it; but what they say to us is imbued with the obscurity of the matrix out of which they come; and try as we may, we cannot always decipher them precisely in the clearer light of our day.

~ Margaret Atwood

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

~ Margaret Atwood

Of course there are mothers,squeezing their breastsdry, pawning their bodies,shedding teeth for their children,or that’s our fond belief.But remember - Hanseland Gretel were dumped in the forestbecause their parents were starving.

~ 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. Nobody in any other game would be crazy enough to hire me. I wouldn't even make a good ditch-digger, I'd start tearing apart the sewer-system, trying to pick-axe and unearth all those chthonic symbols - pipes, valves, cloacal conduits... No, no. I'll have to be a slave in the paper-mines for all time.

~ Margaret Atwood

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

~ Margaret Atwood

Nature is to zoos as God is to churches.

~ Margaret Atwood

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...

~ Margaret Atwood

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.

~ Margaret Atwood

...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]

~ Margaret Atwood

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

~ Margaret Atwood

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.

~ Margaret Atwood