Margaret Atwood
writer, poet, novelist, pedagogue, literary critic, essayist, non-fiction writer, science fiction writer, inventor
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All Quotes by Margaret Atwood
“This world is not enough, but it will have to do. You can either hold on or let go.”
“You fit into me”
“A truth should exist,”
“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.”
“Screw poetry, it's you I want,”
“I'm a strict, strict agnostic. It's very different from a casual, 'I don't know.' It's that you cannot present as knowledge something that is not knowledge. You can present it as faith, you can present it as belief, but you can't present it as fact.”
“Well, maybe I'm a latent homosexual." He considered that for a moment. "Or maybe I'm a latent heterosexual. Anyway, I'm pretty latent. I don't know why. Of course, I've taken a number of stabs at it, but then I start thinking about the futility of it all and I give up. Maybe it's because you're expected to do something and after a certain point all I want to do is lie there and stare at the ceiling.”
“The Eskimo has fifty-two names for snow because it is important to them; there ought to be as many for love.”
“A divorce is like an amputation; you survive, but there’s less of you.”
“I would rather dance as a ballerina, though faultily, than as a flawless clown.”
“He's just a contact of hers, which is not the same as a friend. While she was in the hospital she decided that most of her friends were really just contacts.”
“He had that faint sick look in his eyes, as if he wanted to give her something, charity for instance.”
“The policemen's faces glisten too, they're holding themselves back, they love this, it's a ceremony, they're implementing a policy.”
“Another belief of mine: that everyone else my age is an adult, whereas I am merely in disguise.”
“Time is not a line but a dimension, like the dimensions of space.”
“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.”
“Roughing it builds a boy's character, but only certain kinds of roughing it.”
“War is what happens when language fails.”
“I am certain that a Sewing Machine would relieve as much human suffering as a hundred Lunatic Asylums, and possibly a good deal more.”
“Ten days after the war ended, my sister Laura drove a car off a bridge. The bridge was being repaired: she went right through the Danger sign. The car fell a hundred feet into the ravine, smashing through the treetops feathery with new leaves, then burst into flames and rolled down into the shallow creek at the bottom. Chunks of the bridge fell on top of it. Nothing much was left but charred smithereens.”
“All stories are about wolves. All worth repeating, that is. Anything else is sentimental drivel. …Think about it. There's escaping from the wolves, fighting the wolves, capturing the wolves, taming the wolves. Being thrown to the wolves, or throwing others to the wolves so the wolves will eat them instead of you. Running with the wolf pack. Turning into a wolf. Best of all, turning into the head wolf. No other decent stories exist.”
“I'm working on my own life story. I don't mean I'm putting it together; no, I'm taking it apart.”
“I plunged in, and set up a Twitter account. My first problem was that there were already two Margaret Atwoods on Twitter, one of them with my picture. This grew; I gave commands; then all other Margaret Atwoods stopped together. I like to think they were sent to a nunnery, but in any case they disappeared. The Twitterpolice had got them. I felt a bit guilty.”
“The weapons worth defending?”
“Your righteous eyes, your laconic skulls bleaching in the sunset.”
“I am the horizon as you pass through.”
“When you hear me singing to warn the others.”
“I am yours. If you feed me garbage, This is a hymn.”
“In view of the fading animals implements, to manoeuvres”
“In restaurants we argue whether or not I will make you immortal.”
“There is more than one kind of freedom, said Aunt Lydia. Freedom to and freedom from. In the days of anarchy, it was freedom to. Now you are being given freedom from. Don't underrate it.”
“Tell, rather than write, because I have nothing to write with and writing is in any case forbidden. But if it’s a story, even in my head, I must be telling it to someone. You don’t tell a story only to yourself. There’s always someone else. Even when there is no one.”
“The only way you can write the truth is to assume that what you set down will never be read. Not by any other person, and not even by yourself at some later date. Otherwise you begin excusing yourself. You must see the writing as emerging like a long scroll of ink from the index finger of your right hand; you must see your left hand erasing it.”
“Ignoring isn’t the same as ignorance, you have to work at it.”
“You must cultivate poverty of spirit. Blessed are the meek. She didn’t go on to say anything about inheriting the earth.”
“These pictures were supposed to be erotic, and I thought they were, at the time; but I see now what they were really about. They were paintings about suspended animation; about waiting, about objects not in use. They were paintings about boredom. But maybe boredom is erotic, when women do it, for men.”
“Where do the words go”
“The sitting room is subdued, symmetrical; it’s one of the shapes money takes when it freezes.”
“Blessed are they that mourn, for they shall be comforted. Nobody said when.”
“A truth should exist,”
“Sanity is a valuable possession; I hoard it the way people once hoarded money. I save it, so I will have enough, when the time comes.”
“A man is just a woman’s strategy for making other women.”
“You can think clearly only with your clothes on.”
“He was not a monster, to her. Probably he had some endearing trait: he whistled, off key, 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.”
“I'll take care of it, Luke said. And because he said it instead of her, I knew he meant kill. That is what you have to do before you kill, I thought. You have to create an it, where none was before. You do that first, in your head, and then you make it real.”
“(She is reciting the Lord’s prayer) Now we come to forgiveness. Don’t worry about forgiving me right now. There are more important things. For instance: keep the others safe, if they are safe. Don’t let them suffer too much. If they have to die, let it be fast. You might even provide a Heaven for them. We need You for that. Hell we can make for ourselves.”
“You can’t make an omelette without breaking eggs, is what he says. We thought we could do better. Better never means better for everyone, he says. It always means worse, for some.”
“Freedom, like everything else, is relative.”
“A movie about the past is not the same as the past.”
“By telling you anything at all I'm at least believing in you, I believe you're there, I believe you into being. Because I'm telling you this story I will your existence. I tell, therefore you are.”
“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 own day.”
“One of the gravestones in the cemetery near the earliest church has an anchor on it and an hourglass, and the words In Hope.”
“She has been condemned to death by hanging. A man not fantasy, it is history.”
“To live in prison is to live without mirrors. To live becomes her mirror.”
“In order to avoid her death, her particular death, with hangman.”
“She must else is there to marry?”
“You wonder about her crime. She was condemned more beautiful. This desire in servants was not legal.”
“My friends, who are both women, tell me their stories, unbelief with horror.”
“He wants only the simple things: a chair, choice.”
“Everyone said he was a fool. They used the word ensnare.”
“The fact is there are no stories I can tell my friends that will make them feel better. History cannot be erased, although we can soothe ourselves by speculating about it.”
“If one of the arguments against eating meat is to do with cruelty and animal intelligence, then lab meat avoids that. There's also the environmental argument for it.”
“There is so much silence between the words, The century grinds on.”
“Confess: it’s my profession though Lord knows I don’t go out of my way to be scary.”
“It must have been then that I began to lose faith in reasonable argument as the sole measure of truth.”
“If I roll my eyes and mutter, but the bathroom mirror.”
“In the interests of research over the grassy nests where nothing hatches.”
“He has to find more and better ways of occupying his time. His time, what a bankrupt idea, as if he's been given a box of time belonging to him alone, stuffed to the brim with hours and minutes that he can spend like money. Trouble is, the box has holes in it and the time is running out, no matter what he does with it.”
“I’m just as human as you. years of war.”
“I became a poet at the age of sixteen. I did not intend to do it. It was not my fault.”
“After a year or two of keeping my head down and trying to pass myself off as a normal person, I made contact with the five other people at my university who were interested in writing; and through them, and some of my teachers, I discovered that there was a whole subterranean Wonderland of Canadian writing that was going on just out of general earshot and sight”
“Like all twenty-one-year-old poets, I thought I would be dead by thirty, and Sylvia Plath had not set a helpful example. For a while there, you were made to feel that, if a poet and female, you could not really be serious about it unless you'd made a least one suicide attempt. So I felt I was running out of time.”
“A lot of poets published their own work then; unlike novels, poetry was short, and therefore cheap to do. We had to print each poem separately, and then disassemble it, as there were not enough a's for the whole book; the cover was done with a lino-block. We printed 250 copies, and sold them through bookstores, for 50 cents each. They now go in the rare book trade for eighteen hundred dollars a pop. Wish I'd kept some.”
“If social stability goes pear-shaped, you have a choice between anarchy and dictatorship. Most people will opt for more security, even if they have to give up some personal freedom.”
“For every age there is a popular idea about what madness is, what causes it, and how a mad person should look and behave; and it's usually these popular ideas, rather than those of medical professionals, that turn up in songs and stories and plays and books.”
“When women let their hair down, it means either sexiness or craziness or death, the three by Victorian times having become virtually synonymous.”
“The fabric of democracy is always fragile everywhere because it depends on the will of citizens to protect it, and when they become scared, when it becomes dangerous for them to defend it, it can go very quickly.”
“After I wrote Handmaid’s Tale, people came up to me and asked why weren’t there any protests. And I said, “You don’t understand totalitarianism.” A real totalitarianism doesn’t fool around with protests in the streets.”
“Kill what you can't save”
“A lot of people facing fascism didn’t become fascists. I don’t happen to believe that we are all monsters.”
“The Chorus Line:”
“Time is not a line but a dimension, like the dimensions of space. If you can bend space you can bend time also, and if you knew enough and could move faster than light you could travel backward in time and exist in two places at once.”
“I'm a strict, strict agnostic. It's very different from a casual, 'I don't know.' It's that you cannot present as knowledge something that is not knowledge. You can present it as faith, you can present it as belief, but you can't present it as fact.”
“”
“Time: old cold time, old sorrow, settling down in layers like silt in a pond.”
“She talks with wolves, without knowing what sort of beasts they are:”
“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.”
“Another belief of mine; that everyone else my age is an adult, whereas I am merely in disguise.”
“Communications technology changes possibilities for communication, but that doesn't mean it changes the inherited structure of the brain. So you may think that you're addicted to online reading, but as soon as it isn't available anymore, your brain will pretty immediately adjust to other forms of reading. It's a habit like all habits.”
“I planned my death carefully, unlike my life, which meandered along from one thing to another, despite my feeble attempts to control it.”
“If one of the arguments against eating meat is to do with cruelty and animal intelligence, then lab meat avoids that. There's also the environmental argument for it.”
“You fit into me”
“In the spring, at the end of the day, you should smell like dirt.”
“You will always have partial points of view, and you'll always have the story behind the story that hasn't come out yet. And any form of journalism you're involved with is going to be up against a biased viewpoint and partial knowledge.”
“The truth is seldom welcome, especially at dinner.”
“If you really want to stay the same age you are now forever and ever, she'd be thinking, try jumping off the roof: death's a sure-fire method for stopping time.”
“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.”
“Glenn used to say the reason you can't really imagine yourself being dead was that as soon as you say, 'I'll be dead,' you've said the word I, and so you're still alive inside the sentence. And that's how people got the idea of the immortality of the soul - it was a consequence of grammar.”