Margaret Atwood Quotes

But nothing is more opaque than absolute transparency.

I hope that people will finally come to realize that there is only one 'race' - the human race - and that we are all members of it.

Men are afraid that women will laugh at them. Women are afraid that men will kill them.

Canada was built on dead beavers.

A divorce is like an amputation: you survive it, but there's less of you.

We still think of a powerful man as a born leader and a powerful woman as an anomaly.

You can only be jealous of someone who has something you think you ought to have yourself.

Nature is to zoos as God is to churches.

If the national mental illness of the United States is megalomania, that of Canada is paranoid schizophrenia.

You think I'm not a goddess? Try me. This is a torch song. Touch me and you'll burn.

Another belief of mine; that everyone else my age is an adult, whereas I am merely in disguise.

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

Some of our earliest writing, in cuneiform, was about who owes what.

The body is so easily damaged, so easily disposed of, water and chemicals is all it is, hardly more to it than a jellyfish drying on sand.

There's the story, then there's the real story, then there's the story of how the story came to be told. Then there's what you leave out of the story. Which is part of the story too.

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

The Eskimos had fifty-two names for snow because it was important to them: there ought to be as many for love.

Touch comes before sight, before speech. It is the first language and the last, and it always tells the truth.

Everyone thinks writers must know more about the inside of the human head, but that's wrong. They know less, that's why they write. Trying to find out what everyone else takes for granted.

In the end, we'll all become stories.

Remember that, my child. Remember you are half water. If you can't go through an obstacle, go around it. Water does.

Little girls are cute and small only to adults. To one another they are not cute. They are life-sized.

Water does not resist. Water flows. When you plunge your hand into it, all you feel is a caress.

Good writing takes place at intersections, at what you might call knots, at places where the society is snarled or knotted up.

I feel like cotton candy: sugar and air. Squeeze me and I’d turn into a small sickly damp wad of weeping pinky-red.

Oppression involves a failure of the imagination: the failure to imagine the full humanity of other human beings.

Happy as a clam, is what my mother says for happy. I am happy as a clam: hard-shelled, firmly closed.

Where do the words go when we have said them?

If your not annoying somebody, you're not alive.

If you disagree with your government, that's political. If you disagree with your government that is approaching theocracy, then you're evil.

Inside the peach, there is a stone.

And yet it disturbs me to learn I have hurt someone unintentionally. I want all my hurts to be intentional.

But I began then to think of time as having a shape, something you could see, like a series of liquid transparencies, one laid on top of another.

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.

If we were all on trial for our thoughts, we would all be hanged.

Hatred would have been easier. With hatred, I would have known what to do. Hatred is clear, metallic, one-handed, unwavering; unlike love.

Lose your temper and you lose the fight.

A word after a word after a word is power.

If I love you, is that a fact or a weapon?

I exist in two places, here and where you are.

The desire to be loved is the last illusion. Give it up and you will be free.

This is the solstice, the still point of the sun, its cusp and midnight, the year's threshold and unlocking, where the past lets go of and becomes the future; the place of caught breath.

A fist is more than the sum of its fingers.

It's clear, it's fresh, like a mint candy.

I would like to be the air that inhabits you for a moment only. I would like to be that unnoticed and that necessary.

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

I myself have 12 hats and each one represents a different personality. Why just be yourself.

I’m not sure which is worse: intense feeling, or the absence of it.

More of your brain is involved when reading than it is when you watch television... because you are supplying just about everything... you're a creator.

I am not my childhood,' Snowman says out loud.