Margaret Atwood Quotes

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Quotes About Margaret Atwood

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Of course you have always been an idealist, and filled with your optimistic dreams; but reality must at some time obtrude, and you are now turned thirty. ~ Margaret Atwood
Margaret Atwood quotes by Margaret Atwood
Time comes in waves here, a sickness, one
day after the other rolling on;
I move up, it's called
awake, then down into the uneasy
nights but never
forward. ~ Margaret Atwood
Margaret Atwood quotes by Margaret Atwood
How did the war creep up? How did it gather itself together? What was it made from? What secrets, lies, betrayals? What loves and hatreds? What sums of money, what metals? ~ Margaret Atwood
Margaret Atwood quotes by Margaret Atwood
She said it was different, because the balance of power was equal between women so sex was an even-steven transaction. I said "even-steven" was a sexist phrase, if she was going to be like that, and anyway that argument was outdated. She said I had trivialized the issue and if I thought it was outdated, I was living with my head in the sand.
(...)
I said there was more than one way of living with your head in the sand and that if Moira thought she could create Utopia by shutting herself up in a women-only enclave she was sadly mistaken. Men were not just going to go away, I said. You couldn't just ignore them . ~ Margaret Atwood
Margaret Atwood quotes by Margaret Atwood
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. ~ Margaret Atwood
Margaret Atwood quotes by Margaret Atwood
But what is a memorial, when you come right down to it, but a commemoration of wounds endured? Endured, and resented. Without memory, there can be no revenge. ~ Margaret Atwood
Margaret Atwood quotes by Margaret Atwood
I didn't want him to become gray and multi-dimensional and complicated like everyone else. Was every Heathcliff a Linton in disguise? ~ Margaret Atwood
Margaret Atwood quotes by Margaret Atwood
That's the girl, as Grandma Win would say. Put one foot on the first stair, then the other one beside it, like when you were three. You need to take care of yourself, because who else will? There. ~ Margaret Atwood
Margaret Atwood quotes by Margaret Atwood
Write down the thoughts and even more, write down a specific line. If you don't, it'll fly away forever. ~ Margaret Atwood
Margaret Atwood quotes by Margaret Atwood
When they're gone out of his head, these words, they'll be gone, everywhere, forever. As if they had never been. ~ Margaret Atwood
Margaret Atwood quotes by Margaret Atwood
If the stock market exists, so must previous lives. ~ Margaret Atwood
Margaret Atwood quotes by Margaret Atwood
I would like to believe this is a story I'm telling. I need to believe it. I must believe it. Those who can believe that such stories are only stories have a better chance. If it's a story I'm telling, then I have control over the ending. Then there will be an ending, to the story, and real life will come after it. I can pick up where I left off. ~ Margaret Atwood
Margaret Atwood quotes by Margaret Atwood
It is not only the body that travels, Adam One used to say, it is also the Soul. And the end of one journey is the beginning of another. ~ Margaret Atwood
Margaret Atwood quotes by Margaret Atwood
Amazing how quickly the past becomes idyllic. ~ Margaret Atwood
Margaret Atwood quotes by Margaret Atwood
I know that carrot is not the right word. I've
seen dragonflies and beetles, flying around, stuck together, one on the back of the other; I know it's
called mating. I know about ovipositors, for laying eggs, on leaves, on caterpillars, on the surface of the
water; they're right out on the page, clearly labeled, on the diagrams of insects my father corrects at
home. I know about queen ants, and about the female praying mantises eating the males. None of this is
much help. I think of Mr. and Mrs. Smeath, stark-naked, with Mr. Smeath stuck to the back of Mrs.
Smeath. Such an image, even without the addition of flight, will not do. ~ Margaret Atwood
Margaret Atwood quotes by Margaret Atwood
You fit into me like a hook into an eye a fish hook an open eye ~ Margaret Atwood
Margaret Atwood quotes by Margaret Atwood
Powerful but insecure men don't take well to rejection. Rage could result. ~ Margaret Atwood
Margaret Atwood quotes by Margaret Atwood
Every utopia - let's just stick with the literary ones - faces the same problem: What do you do with the people who don't fit in? ~ Margaret Atwood
Margaret Atwood quotes by Margaret Atwood
That was when they suspended the Constitution. They said it would be temporary. There wasn't even any rioting in the streets. People stayed home at night, watching television, looking for some direction. There wasn't even an enemy you could put your finger on. ~ Margaret Atwood
Margaret Atwood quotes by Margaret Atwood
Oh, torture. Is this purgatory, and if it is, why is it so much like the first grade? ~ Margaret Atwood
Margaret Atwood quotes by Margaret Atwood
The written word is so much like evidence - like something that can be used against you later. ~ Margaret Atwood
Margaret Atwood quotes by Margaret Atwood
Stan got the message. He allowed the chicken assignations. What did that make him? A chicken pimp. Better than dead. ~ Margaret Atwood
Margaret Atwood quotes by Margaret Atwood
The young habitually mistake lust for love, they're infested with idealism of all kinds. ~ Margaret Atwood
Margaret Atwood quotes by Margaret Atwood
You can examine the whole 19th century from the point of view of who would have maxed out their credit cards. Emma Bovary would have maxed hers out. No question. Mr. Scrooge would not have. He would have snipped his up. ~ Margaret Atwood
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Women collect grievances, hold grudges and change shape. They pass hard, legitimate judgments, unlike the purblind guesses of men, fogged with romanticism and ignorance and bias and wish. Women know too much, they can neither be deceived nor trusted. I can understand why men are afraid of them, as they are frequently accused of being. ~ Margaret Atwood
Margaret Atwood quotes by Margaret Atwood
Most of us will. We'll choose knowledge no matter what, we'll maim ourselves in the process, we'll stick our hands into the flames for it if necessary. Curiosity is not our only motive: love or grief or despair or hatred is what drives us on. We'll spy relentlessly on the dead: we'll open their letters, we'll read their journals, we'll go through their trash, hoping for a hint, a final word, an explanation, from those who have deserted us--who've left us holding the bag, which is often a good deal emptier than we'd supposed.

But what about those who plant such clues, for us to stumble on? Why do they bother? Egotism? Pity? Revenge? A simple claim to existence, like scribbling your initials on a washroom wall? The combination of presence and anonymity--confession without penance, truth without consequences--it has its attractions. Getting the blood off your hands, one way or another.

Those who leave such evidence can scarcely complain if strangers come along afterwards and poke their noses into every single thing that would once have been none of their business. And not only strangers: lovers, friends, relations. We're voyeurs, all of us. Why should we assume that anything in the past is ours for the taking, simply because we've found it? We're all grave robbers, once we open the doors locked by others.

But only locked. The rooms and their contents have been left intact. If those leaving them had wanted oblivion, there was always fire. ~ Margaret Atwood
Margaret Atwood quotes by Margaret Atwood
Time folds you in its arms and gives you one last kiss, and then it flattens you out and folds you up and tucks you away until it's time for you to become someone else's past time, and then time folds again. ~ Margaret Atwood
Margaret Atwood quotes by Margaret Atwood
And then I thought: 'It's for a warning,'" she continues. "You may think a bed is a peaceful thing, sir. For you it may mean rest, and comfort, and a good night's sleep. But it isn't so for everyone. There are many dangerous things that may take place in a bed. It's where we are born, that's our first peril in life. It's where women give birth, which is often their last. And it's where the act takes place between men and women sir, which I will not mention to you, but I suppose you know what it is. Some call it love, others despair, merely an indignity they must suffer through. And finally beds are what we sleep in, and where we dream, and often where we die. ~ Margaret Atwood
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She who pays the undertaker calls the tune. ~ Margaret Atwood
Margaret Atwood quotes by Margaret Atwood
Falling in love, we said; I fell for him. We were falling women. We believed in it, this downward motion: so lovely, like flying, and yet at the same time so dire, so extreme, so unlikely. God is love, they once said, but we reversed that, and love, like heaven, was always just around the corner. The more difficult it was to love the particular man beside us, the more we believed in Love, abstract and total. We were waiting, always, for the incarnation. That word, made flesh.
And sometimes it happened, for a time. That kind of love comes and goes and is hard to remember afterwards, like pain. You would look at the man one day and you would think, I loved you, and the tense would be past, and you would be filled with a sense of wonder, because it was such an amazing and precarious and dumb thing to have done; and you would know too why your friends had been evasive about it, at the time.
There is a good deal of comfort, now, in remembering this. ~ Margaret Atwood
Margaret Atwood quotes by Margaret Atwood
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. ~ Margaret Atwood
Margaret Atwood quotes by Margaret Atwood
The ochre-yellow linoleum floor hasn't been scrubbed for some time; splotches of dirt bloom on it like grey pressed flowers. ~ Margaret Atwood
Margaret Atwood quotes by Margaret Atwood
You say, Do you / love me, do you love me / I answer you: / I stretch your arms out / one to either side, / your head slumps forward. ~ Margaret Atwood
Margaret Atwood quotes by Margaret Atwood
Another friend of mine used to maintain that airplanes stayed up in the air only because people believed - against reason - that they could fly: without that collective delusion sustaining them, they would instantly plummet to earth. ~ Margaret Atwood
Margaret Atwood quotes by Margaret Atwood
The reason they invented coffins, to lock the dead in, preserve them, they put makeup on them; they didn't want them spreading or changing into anything else. The stone with the name and date was on them to weight them down. ~ Margaret Atwood
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She can outstare anyone, and I am almost as good. We're impervious, we scintillate, we are thirteen. We wear long wool coats with tie belts, the collars turned up to look like those of movie stars, and rubber boots with the tops folded down and men's work socks inside. In our pockets are stuffed the kerchiefs our mothers make us wear but that we take off as soon as we're out of their sight. We scorn head coverings. Our mouths are tough, crayon-red, shiny as nails. We think we are friends. ~ Margaret Atwood
Margaret Atwood quotes by Margaret Atwood
A few brown leaves are stuck to the outside of the glass like leather tongues. ~ Margaret Atwood
Margaret Atwood quotes by Margaret Atwood
It's worse than I thought it would be, and also better.
Some days I think I'm crazy to have done this; other times that it's the sanest move I've made in years. ~ Margaret Atwood
Margaret Atwood quotes by Margaret Atwood
Within one's own family, money is not the measure of things, unless the person is an absolute Scrooge. Only the most extreme kind of monster would put a price on everything. ~ Margaret Atwood
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The world is full of weapons if you're looking for them. ~ Margaret Atwood
Margaret Atwood quotes by Margaret Atwood
He feels the need to hear a human voice - a fully human voice like his own. Sometimes he laughs like a hyena or roars like a lion - his idea of a hyena his idea of a lion. ~ Margaret Atwood
Margaret Atwood quotes by Margaret Atwood
While I read, the Commander sits and watches me doing it, without speaking but also without taking his eyes off me. This watching is a curiously sexual act, and I feel undressed while he does it. ~ Margaret Atwood
Margaret Atwood quotes by Margaret Atwood
The answer can only be that God has given Adam free will, and therefore Adam may do things that God Himself cannot anticipate in advance. ~ Margaret Atwood
Margaret Atwood quotes by Margaret Atwood
Their youngness is terrifying. How could I have put myself into the hands of such inexperience? ~ Margaret Atwood
Margaret Atwood quotes by Margaret Atwood
They blink and reality shivers. ~ Margaret Atwood
Margaret Atwood quotes by Margaret Atwood
What could she have been thinking about? Not much, I guess; not back then, not at the time. She was thinking about how not to think. The times were abnormal. She ~ Margaret Atwood
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I can tell you're admiring my febrility. I know it's appealing, I practice at it; every woman loves an invalid. But be careful. You might do something destructive: hunger is more basic than love. Florence Nightingale was a cannibal you know. ~ Margaret Atwood
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This bug is something new though. We've got the bioprint. ~ Margaret Atwood
Margaret Atwood quotes by Margaret Atwood
There is something powerful in the whispering of obscenities, about those in power. There's something delightful about it, something naughty, secretive, forbidden, thrilling. It's like a spell, of sorts. It deflates them, reduces them to the common denominator where they can be dealt. ~ Margaret Atwood
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She did not believe he was a monster. He was not a monster, to her. Probably he had some endearing trait: he whistled, offkey, in the shower, he had a yen for truffles, he called his dog Liebchen and made it sit up for little pieces of raw steak. How easy it is to invent a humanity, for anyone at all. What an available temptation. ~ Margaret Atwood
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Before the Civil War, Canada was at the top of the underground railroad. If you made it into Canada, you were safe unless someone came and hauled you back. That was also true during the Vietnam War for draft resisters. ~ Margaret Atwood
Margaret Atwood quotes by Margaret Atwood
...I was shut up inside that doll of myself, and my true voice could not get out. ~ Margaret Atwood
Margaret Atwood quotes by Margaret Atwood
Marriage is not
a house or even a tent
it is before that, and colder:
the edge of the forest, the edge
of the desert
the unpainted stairs
at the back where we squat
outside, eating popcorn
the edge of the receding glacier
where painfully and with wonder
at having survived even
this far
we are learning to make fire ~ Margaret Atwood
Margaret Atwood quotes by Margaret Atwood
You need to give money when someone gives you a knife. So the bad luck won't cut you. I wouldn't like it for you to be cut by the bad luck, Jimmy. ~ Margaret Atwood
Margaret Atwood quotes by Margaret Atwood
Where there is an emptiness, the mind will obligingly fill it up. Fear is always at hand to supply any vacancies, as is curiosity. I have had ample experience with both. ~ Margaret Atwood
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I need to remember what they look like. I try to hold them still behind my eyes, their faces, like pictures in an album. But they won't stay still for me, they move, there's a smile and it's gone, their features curl and bend as if the paper's burning, blackness eats them. A glimpse, a pale shimmer on the air; a glow, aurora, dance of electrons, then a face again, faces. But they fade, though I stretch out my arms towards them, they slip away from me, ghosts at daybreak. Back to wherever they are. Stay with me, I want to say. But they won't. ~ Margaret Atwood
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They did not set out to disappoint their father, not on purpose, but neither did they wish to shoulder the lumpy, enervating burden of the mundane. ~ Margaret Atwood
Margaret Atwood quotes by Margaret Atwood
Oh God. It's no joke. Oh God oh God. How can I keep on living? ~ Margaret Atwood
Margaret Atwood quotes by Margaret Atwood
There are tenses that define us now: past tense, back then; future tense, not yet. We live in the small window between them, the space we've only recently come to think as still, and really it's no smaller than anyone else's window. ~ Margaret Atwood
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Yes, they know her. They touch her lips, gather her words, fly away with the message, disappear into the dark. Pass through the membrane that separates this world from the unseen world that lies just underneath it. ~ Margaret Atwood
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The witch is absolutely necessary. ~ Margaret Atwood
Margaret Atwood quotes by Margaret Atwood
You're dead, Cordelia.'
No I'm not.
'Yes you are. You're dead.
Lie down. ~ Margaret Atwood
Margaret Atwood quotes by 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
Margaret Atwood quotes by Margaret Atwood
Her husband sat silently while she talked, his hands fisted together, his half-smile set in concrete; he looked wisely down at the tablecloth. So this is marriage, I thought: this shared tedium, this twitchiness, and those little powdery runnels forming to the sides of the nose. ~ Margaret Atwood
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Usually I'm afraid to go so near the edge of the bridge, but this time I'm not. I don't feel anything as positive as fear. ~ Margaret Atwood
Margaret Atwood quotes by Margaret Atwood
The truth is I don't want him watching me while I eat. I don't want him to see my hunger. If you have a need and they find it out, they will use it against you. The best way is to stop from wanting anything. He ~ Margaret Atwood
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For me the experience of writing is really an experience of losing control. ... I think it's very much like dreaming or like surfing. You go out there and wait for a wave, and when it comes it takes you somewhere and you don't know where it'll go. ~ Margaret Atwood
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He's got his cigarette going. He offers her one; this time she takes it. Brief match-flare insider their cupped hands. Red finger-ends.
She thinks, Any more flame and we'd see the bones. It's like X-rays. We're just a kind of haze, just coloured water. Water does what it likes. It always goes downhill. ~ Margaret Atwood
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There are to be no toeholds for love. We are two-legged wombs, that's all: sacred vessels, ambulatory chalices. ~ Margaret Atwood
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Whoever said that light was life and darkness nothing? For some of us mythologies are different ~ Margaret Atwood
Margaret Atwood quotes by Margaret Atwood
I meant it for the best, or for the best available, which is not the same thing. ~ Margaret Atwood
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Backward glances are not encouraged. ~ Margaret Atwood
Margaret Atwood quotes by Margaret Atwood
Canlit might not exert the fascination of - say - a venereal wart. ~ Margaret Atwood
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He loved her; in some ways he was devoted to her. But he couldn't reach her, and it was the same on her side. It was as if they'd drunk some fatal potion that would keep them forever apart, even though they lived in the same house, ate at the same table, slept in the same bed. ~ Margaret Atwood
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Repeat reading for me shares a few things with hot-water bottles and thumbsucking: comfort, familiarity, the recurrence of the expected. ~ Margaret Atwood
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Tell me, Elly Kleinman, why do men feel threatened by women? ~ Margaret Atwood
Margaret Atwood quotes by Margaret Atwood
More powerful than God, more evil than the Devil; the poor have it, the rich lack it, and if you eat it you die? ~ Margaret Atwood
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What was about this that made us feel we deserved it? ~ Margaret Atwood
Margaret Atwood quotes by Margaret Atwood
He's heard Unitarianism called a featherbed for falling Christians, but his mother doesn't seem like a woman who has fallen anywhere. (Where is the featherbed for falling Unitarians, he wonders? Such as himself.) [From "Life Before Man," 1979) ~ Margaret Atwood
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Why do I hate her so much? Why do I care, in any way, what went on in her head? ~ Margaret Atwood
Margaret Atwood quotes by Margaret Atwood
The Eskimo has fifty-names for snow because it is important to them; there ought to be as many for love. ~ Margaret Atwood
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They meet in church basements and offer bandages to those wounded by the shrapnel of exploding families. ~ Margaret Atwood
Margaret Atwood quotes by Margaret Atwood
Well of course people cross genres all the time. You could have something called science-fiction-fantasy. Some galaxy far, far away and in another time with spaceships, but also dragons. And there's no rule that says you can't do that. ~ Margaret Atwood
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I was taking something away from her, although she didn't know it. I was filching. Never mind that it was something she apparently didn't want or had no use for, had rejected even; still, it was hers, and if I took it away, this mysterious "it" I couldn't quite define. ~ Margaret Atwood
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And yet it disturbs me to learn I have hurt someone unintentionally. I want all my hurts to be intentional. ~ Margaret Atwood
Margaret Atwood quotes by Margaret Atwood
Anaesthesia, that's one technique: if it hurts, invent a different pain. ~ Margaret Atwood
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There is no fool like an educated fool... ~ Margaret Atwood
Margaret Atwood quotes by Margaret Atwood
I grew up in the golden age of Flash Gordon and sci-fi. ~ Margaret Atwood
Margaret Atwood quotes by Margaret Atwood
Well stuff it, Jimmy thought. If he wants to be an asshole it's a free country. Millions before him have made the same life choice. He was annoyed with himself for jabbering and capering, while Crake gave him brief, indifferent glances, and that one-sided demi-smile. Nevertheless there was something about Crake. That kind of cool slouchiness always impressed Jimmy, coming from another guy: it was the sense of energies being held back, held in reserve for something more important than present company. ~ Margaret Atwood
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Hey. Everyone's different," says Derek.
"But some are more different than others," says Budge, and they all laugh. ~ Margaret Atwood
Margaret Atwood quotes by Margaret Atwood
Her glass wings are gone. ~ Margaret Atwood
Margaret Atwood quotes by Margaret Atwood
The desire to be loved is the last illusion. Give it up and you will be free. ~ Margaret Atwood
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Serena has begun to cry. I ~ Margaret Atwood
Margaret Atwood quotes by Margaret Atwood
Canada is built on dead beavers. ~ Margaret Atwood
Margaret Atwood quotes by Margaret Atwood
He'd meant well, or at least he hadn't meant ill. He'd never wanted to hurt anyone, not seriously, not in real space-time. Fantasies didn't count. It ~ Margaret Atwood
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Pearls are congealed oyster spit. ~ Margaret Atwood
Margaret Atwood quotes by Margaret Atwood
This is the rock garden.
In it, the stones
too are flowers ~ Margaret Atwood
Margaret Atwood quotes by Margaret Atwood
Men can imagine their own deaths, they can see them coming, and the mere though of impending death acts like an aphrodisiac. A dog or rabbit doesn't behave like that. Take birds
in a lean season they cut down on the eggs, or they won't mate at all. They put their energy into staying alive themselves until times get better. But human beings hope they can stick their souls into someone else, some new version of themselves, and live on forever.
As a species were doomed by hope, then?
You could call it hope. That, or desperation.
But we're doomed without hope, as well, said Jimmy.
Only as individuals, said Crake cheerfully. ~ Margaret Atwood
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He'll find out somehow, because journeys end in lovers meeting. ~ Margaret Atwood
Margaret Atwood quotes by Margaret Atwood
There had been something willed about it though, his ignorance. Or not willed, exactly: structured. He'd grown up in walled spaces, and then he had become one. He had shut things out. ~ Margaret Atwood
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