Margaret Atwood Quotes

These things you did were like prayers; you did them and you hoped they would save you. And for the most part they did. Or something did; you could tell by the fact that you were still alive.

There may not be one Truth - there may be several truths - but saying that is not to say that reality doesn't exist.

Short forms are returning online. Interactivity is coming back; it was always there in oral storytelling. Each form has its pluses and its minuses.

You think you have the amount of money that is your credit limit. We're just wired to think that, you know? Until the bill arrives - a sobering moment - you think you're richer than you are.

Each form has its pluses and its minuses.

Nobody quite knows the truth about cats purring, but it does seem to be also a self-healing thing for them, which is why, when you take your cat to the vet and it's frightened, it will purr.

I was delighted with the film [Payback: Debt and the Shadow Side of Wealth]; it almost made me want to be a film-maker!

Debt is not just a money thing. It's about owing and being owed. Money is just one thing you can exchange. You can exchange good deeds, you can exchange revenge, you can exchange murders.

Short forms are returning online. Interactivity is coming back; it was always there in oral storytelling.

The future of narrative? Built in, part of the human template. Not going away.

You can pretty much trace when the big individual indebtedness kicked in, and it was when the credit card became generally available.

I'm with the spirit of Earth-Day-yet-to-come. Nobody can really predict the future, all you can do is look at trends, and that could change at any moment.

My family was scientifically inclined: My brother did turn into a neurophysiologist, and I almost became a scientist myself. I could have gone that way.

My parents were gardeners themselves, and perforce they used environmental techniques because it was during the war, and you didn't have the new sorts of chemicals.

In the animal world individuals cheat, as do we.

The future of the codex book, with pages and so forth? A platform for transmitting narratives. There are others.

I doubt that Canada will be seen forever on the international stage as Mr/s Boring Niceperson, as has been the habit.

I don't think it's a question of whether you eat meat. It's a question of what kind of meat, and where it comes from.

A lot of the stuff Kafka said he thought was hilariously funny.

The characters [of The Tempest] have always been favorites of mine. It is one of his meditations on art - what it does.

It's in Macbeth: "The devil damn thee black, thou cream-faced loon." I seldom have occasion to pull it out, but it's ready and waiting!

I am too old to have ever been very worried about what "genre" any given book of mine might be. I read everything. I am easily amused.

We do not know how we'd behave. But a lot of people facing fascism didn't become fascists. I don't happen to believe that we are all monsters.

Even in the tragedies, [William] Shakespeare always put in parts for the comic actors because his audience was mixed. He puts in people who talk like aristocrats. He puts in idiots and fools.

I was horrified in high school by the fate of the hanged maids at the end of the Odyssey; it seemed unfair to me, even then.

Kafka thought his stories were hilarious. We don't necessarily have that reaction to them, but he certainly laughed his head off every time he read them out loud.

Reading is one of the most individual things that happens. So every reader is going to read a piece in a slightly different way, sometimes a radically different way.

It doesn't really matter what "genre" your book is. What matters is that it's a good book of its kind. Whatever that kind may be.

Mary Baker Eddy is said to have had a phone installed in her coffin just in case she happened to wake up. I've been told that's an urban myth. Somebody should check it out.

Science is not something that exists apart from human beings. It's one of the things we do as human beings, and we always have done science and technology in some form.

I saw all of the films [based on The Tempest] available, including the one with Helen Mirren in which Prospero is Prospera - you wonder, "Would it work?" But it does, because anything she does works.

We are very short on organs, and the pig solution is probably a lot better than the human clone solution - though maybe not for the pigs.

My brother and I were both teenage writers, and he was, I have to say, better than I was, but he went into science, and I went into writing.

I'm not an activist by nature. I am suspicious of Utopian thinking and equally suspicious of its alternate.

There is so much going on all over the world that it's impossible for one person to keep up. And I can't.

It's rather useless to write a gripping narrative with nothing in it but climate change because novels are always about people even if they purport to be about rabbits or robots.

A truth should exist, it should not be usedlike this. If I love youis that a fact or a weapon?

The Eskimo has fifty-names for snow because it is important to them there ought to be as many for love.

I'm not senile, " I snapped. "If I burn the house down it will be on purpose.

It must have been then that I began to lose faith in reasonable argument as the sole measure of truth.

You might even provide a Heaven for them. We need You for that. Hell we can make for ourselves.

Via the conduit of a wild dog pack, she has now made the ultimate Gift to her fellow Creatures, and has become part of God's great dance of proteins.

You fit into melike a hook into an eyea fish hookan open eye

Kill what you can't savewhat you can't eat throw outwhat you can't throw out buryWhat you can't bury give awaywhat you can't give away you must carry with you, it is always heavier than you thought.

Where do the words gowhen we have said them?

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.

So we couldn't mingle with them, but we could eavesdrop. We got our knowledge that way--we caught it like germs.

Maybe I don’t really want to know what’s going on. Maybe I’d rather not know. Maybe I couldn’t bear to know.The Fall was a fall from innocence to knowledge.

You shouldn't do that, " said Laura. "You could set yourself on fire.

In the end, we'll all become stories