Hairball Margaret Atwood Quotes

I myself have 12 hats, and each one represents a different personality. Why just be yourself? ~ Margaret Atwood

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

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

We shouldn't be saying 'Save the planet'; we should be saying: 'Save viable conditions in which people can live.' That's what we're dealing with here. ~ Margaret Atwood

Because you may think a bed is a peaceful thing, Sir, and to you it may mean rest and comfort and a good night's sleep. But it isn't so for everyone; and there are many dangerous things that may take place in a bed. ~ Margaret Atwood

What is it about winter that causes people to drive as if their hands are feet? ~ Margaret Atwood

We are for breeding purposes: we aren't concubines, geisha girls, courtesans. On the contrary: everything possible has been done to remove us from that category. There is supposed to be nothing entertaining about us, no room is to be permitted for the flowering of secret lusts; no special favors are to be wheedled, by them or us, there are to be no toeholds for love. We are two-legged wombs, that's all: sacred vessels, ambulatory chalices. So ~ Margaret Atwood

Science never makes things that do not have to do with what we feel, by which I mean what we want and what we fear. ~ Margaret Atwood

A wave of blood goes up to my head, my stomach shrinks together, as if something dangerous has just missed hitting me. It's as if I've been caught stealing, or telling a lie; or as if I've heard other people talking about me, saying bad things about me, behind my back. There's the same flush of shame, of guilt and terror, and of cold disgust with myself. But I don't know where these feelings have come from, what I've done. ~ Margaret Atwood

Who is to say that prayers have any effect? On the other hand, who is to say they don't? I picture the gods, diddling around on Olympus, wallowing in the nectar and ambrosia and the aroma of burning bones and fat, mischievous as a pack of ten-year-olds with a sick cat to play with and a lot of time on their hands. 'Which prayer shall we answer today?' they ask one another. 'Let's cast the dice! Hope for this one, despair for that one, and while we're at it, let's destroy the life of that woman over there by having sex with her in the form of a crayfish!' I think they pull a lot of their pranks because they're bored. ~ Margaret Atwood

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

I've always wanted to know what it was like to fuck a cult figure,' the Royal Porcupine said reflectively. He was lying on his mattress, watching me as I scrubbed the dog blood off my belly with a corner of his shirt, dipped in the toilet. He didn't have a sink. 'Well, ~ Margaret Atwood

I don't feel pleased with myself while recording this cruelty, even though it was only a cruelty to a doll. It's a vengeful side of my nature that I am sorry to say I have failed to subdue entirely. But in an account such as this, it is better to be scrupulous about your faults, as about all your other actions. Otherwise no one will understand why you made the decisions that you made. ~ Margaret Atwood

I particularly like Twitter, because it's short and can be very funny and informative. It's a little bit like having your own radio program. ~ Margaret Atwood

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. ~ Margaret Atwood

Your baby can double as a lawn mower. ~ Margaret Atwood

To take that risk, to offer life and remain alive, open yourself like this and become whole. ~ Margaret Atwood

I stand holding the apple in both hands. It feels precious, like a heavy treasure. I lift it up and smell it. It has such an odour of outdoors on it I want to cry. ~ Margaret Atwood

Things that are falling apart encourage me: whatever else, I'm in better shape than they are. ~ Margaret Atwood

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

She's against it on principle, and life isn't run on principles but by adjustments ~ Margaret Atwood

This form of love is like the pain
of childbirth: so intense
it's hard to remember afterwards, ~ Margaret Atwood

You don't believe the sky is falling until a chunk of it falls on you. ~ Margaret Atwood

Our big mistake was teaching them to read. We won't make that mistake again. ~ Margaret Atwood

As we know from the oral tradition, every time the spirit moves it takes a different shape. ~ Margaret Atwood

Literature is not only a mirror; it is a map, a geography of the mind. ~ Margaret Atwood

Amazing how quickly the past becomes idyllic. ~ Margaret Atwood

To live in prison is to live without mirrors. To live without mirrors is to live without the self. She is living selflessly, she finds a hole in the stone wall and on the other side of the wall, a voice. The voice comes through darkness and has no face. This voice becomes her mirror. ~ Margaret Atwood

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. ~ Margaret Atwood

Those in pain have no time for the pain they cause. ~ Margaret Atwood

Thus the time passed. Toby stopped counting it. In any case, time is not a thing that passes, said Pilar: it's a sea on which you float. ~ Margaret Atwood

The poems that used to entrance me in the days of Miss Violence now struck me as overdone and sickly. Alas, burthen, thine, cometh, aweary - the archaic language of unrequited love. I was irritated with such words, which rendered the unhappy lovers - I could now see - faintly ridiculous, like poor moping Miss Violence herself. Soft-edged, blurry, soggy, like a bun fallen into the water. Nothing you'd want to touch, ~ Margaret Atwood

I want to be held and told my name. I want to be valued, in ways that I am not; I want to be more than valuable. I repeat my former name; remind myself of what I once could do, how others saw me. I want to steal something. ~ Margaret Atwood

You create your own world by your inner attitude, the Gardeners used to say. ~ Margaret Atwood

She was not stunned, the way I was. In some strange way she was gleeful, as if this was what she had been expecting for some time and now she'd been proven right. ~ Margaret Atwood

Which of us can resist the temptation of being thought indispensable? ~ Margaret Atwood

Tell me, Elly Kleinman, why do men feel threatened by women? ~ Margaret Atwood

The driver is going over it with a chamois, lovingly. This at least hasn't changed, the way men caress good cars. He's ~ Margaret Atwood

Lambhood and tigerishness may be found in either gender, and in the same individual at different times. ~ Margaret Atwood

There is a Do this or a Do that with God, but not any Because. ~ Margaret Atwood

Fuck, thinks Stan. She knows about the chickens. ~ Margaret Atwood

But I envy the Commander's Wife her knitting. It's good to have small goals that can be easily attained. ~ Margaret Atwood

She began to fret about God's exact location. It was the Sunday-school teacher's fault: God is everywhere, she'd said, and Laura wanted to know: was God in the sun, was God in the moon, was God in the kitchen, the bathroom, was he under the bed? ... Laura didn't want God popping our at her unexpectedly ... Probably God was in the boom closet. It seemed the most likely place. He was lurking in there like some eccentric and possibly dangerous uncle, but she couldn't be certain whether he was there at any given moment because she was afraid to open the door. "god is in your heart", said the Sunday-school teacher, and that was even worse. If in the broom closet, something might have been possible, such as locking the door. ~ Margaret Atwood

Men, for some mysterious reason, find life more difficult than women do. (My mother believes this, despite the female bodies, trapped, diseased, disappearing, or abandoned, thayt litter her stories.) Men must be allowed to play in the sandbox of their choice, as happily as they can, without disturbance; otherwise they get cranky and won't eat their dinners. There are all kinds of things men aren't equipped to understand, so why expect it of them? Not everyone shares this belief about men; nevertheless, it has it's uses. ~ Margaret Atwood