Margaret Atwood Quotes
The problem with meditating is I generally go to sleep, and that's because I'm doing it wrong.
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.
People use technology only to mean digital technology. Technology is actually everything we make.
Some bioengineering is good, especially if it results in plants that are more drought-resistant or perennial food crops.
Laughter may instruct but it may also conceal, defending the joker against anger and retaliation: a game is only a game.
It's probably a form of childish curiosity that keeps me going as a fiction writer. I ... want to open everybody's bureau drawers and see what they keep in there. I'm nosy.
A suicide is both a rebuke to the living and a puzzle that defies them to solve it. Like a poem, suicide is finished and refuses to answer questions as to its final cause.
I feel that the task of criticizing my poetry is best left to others (i.e. critics) and would much rather have it take place after I am dead. If at all.
Don't eat anything you aren't prepared to kill. Don't kill anything you aren't prepared to eat.
The central symbol for Canada-and this based on numerous instances of its occurrence in both English and French Canadian literature-is undoubtedly Survival, la Survivance.
But most hearts say, I want, I want, I want, I want. My heart is more duplicitous, though no twin as I once thought. It says, I want, I don't want, I want, and then a pause. It forces me to listen.
Writers and books are cheap dates, especially when you compare the cost of a book with a ticket to the opera - or an NHL game.
A reader can never tell if it's a real thimble or an imaginary thimble, because by the time you're reading it, they're the same. It's a thimble. It's in the book.
In the evenings there's been thunder, a distant bumping and stumbling, like God on a sullen binge.
It's his word against the Commander's, unless he wants to head a posse. Kick in the door, and what did I tell you? Caught in the act, sinfully Scrabbling. Quick, eat those words.
Then sail, my fine lady, on the billowing wave - The water below is as dark as the grave, And maybe you'll sink in your little blue boat - It's hope, and hope only, that keeps us afloat
When demons are required someone will always be found to supply the part, and whether you step forward or are pushed is all the same in the end.
He stops, looks up at this window, and I can see the white oblong of his face. We look at each other. I have no rose to toss, he has no lute. But it's the same kind of hunger.
The use of "religion" as an excuse to repress the freedom of expression and to deny human rights is not confined to any country or time.
Some cleric putting a match to her. /Neither of them looks happy about it. /Once lit, she'll burn like a book, /like a book that was ever finished, /like a locked-up library.
I'm a fool, to confuse this with goodness. I am not good. I know too much to be good. I know myself. I know myself to be vengeful, greedy, secretive and sly.
Things written down can cause a great deal of harm. All too often, people don't consider that.
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.
How shrunk, how dwindled, in our times Creation's mighty seed - For Man has broke the Fellowship With murder, lust, and greed.
He’d developed a strangely tender feeling towards such words, as if they were children abandoned in the woods and it was his duty to rescue them.
After everything that's happened, how can the world still be so beautiful? Because it is.
Why is it he feels some line has been crossed, some boundary transgressed? How much is too much, how far is too far?
The objects I chose were designed to hold something, but I didn't fill them up. They remained empty. They were little symbolic shrines to thirst.
A truth should exist, it should not be used like this. If I love you is that a fact or a weapon?
The only way you can write the truth is to assume that what you set down will never be read.
No male writer is likely to be asked to sit on a panel addressing itself to the special problems of a male writer.
When I was sixteen, it was simple. Poetry existed; therefore it could be written; and nobody had told me — yet — the many, many reasons why it could not be written by me.
If you want what's in the package you should at least know how to get the string off, is what I say.
Stick a shovel into the ground almost anywhere and some horrible thing or other will come to light. Good for trade, we thrive on bones; without them there'd be no stories.
