Margaret Atwood Quotes

Time: old cold time, old sorrow, settling down in layers like silt in a pond.

We were the people who were not in the papers. We lived in the blank white spaces on the edges of print.

That is how we writers all started: by reading. We heard the voice of a book speaking to us.

Fear is a powerful stimulant.

I don't smile. Why tempt her to friendship?

Could it be he was feeling a certain nostalgia for the war, despite its stench and meaningless carnage? For that questionless life of instinct?

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?

from under the ground, from under the waters, they clutch at us, they clutch at us, we won’t let go.

We were the people who were not in the papers. We lived in the blank white spaces at the edges of print. It gave us more freedom.We lived in the gaps between the stories.

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.

The sun is free, it is still there to be enjoyed.

Her metaphors for her children included barnacles encrusting a ship and limpets clinging to a rock.

Here's a health to our Captain, so gallant and freeWhether stuck on a rock or asleep 'neath a treeOr rolled in the arms of some nymph of the seaWhich is where we would all like to be, man!

My self is a thing that I must now compose...as one composes a speech. What I must present is a 'made' thing. Not something born.

Our big mistake was teaching them to read. We won't do that again.

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...

You can't lead if no one will follow.

Nature is an expert in cost-benefit analysis, ' she says. 'Although she does her accounting a little differently. As for debts, she always collects in the long run...

What you don’t know won’t hurt you. A dubious maxim: sometimes what you don’t know can hurt you very much.

Longed for him. Got him. Shit.

They were new money, without a doubt: so new it shrieked. Their clothes looked as it they'd covered themselves in glue, then rolled around in hundred-dollar bills.

Expand your world. (Stories about wizards and spells) are very frequently about power relationships...

No mother is ever, completely, a child's idea of what a mother should be, and I suppose it works the other way around as well.

Moira had power now, she’d been set loose, she’d set herself loose. She was now a loose woman.I think we found this frightening.

They didn't realize that her clumsiness was not the ordinary kind, not poor coordination. It was just because she wasn't sure where the edges of her body ended and the rest of the world began.

This form of love is like the painof childbirth: so intenseit's hard to remember afterwards,

Messy love is better than none.I guess. I'm no authorityon sane living.

But it seems she’d wanted children after all, because when she was told she’d been accidentally sterilized she could feel all the light leaking out of her.

She was not stunned, the way I was. In some strange way she was gleeful, as if this was what she had been expecting for some time and now she'd been proven right.

There's just one thing I want you to remember. You know those chemicals women have in them, when they've got PMS? Well, men have the very same chemicals in them all the time.

I don't want a man around, what use are they except for ten seconds' worth of half babies

Lambhood and tigerishness may be found in either gender, and in the same individual at different times.

But if you happen to be a man, sometime in the future, and you've made it this far, please remember: you will never be subjected to the temptation of feeling you must forgive, a man, as a woman.

But there's something missing in them, even the nice ones. It's like they're permanently absent-minded, like that can't quite remember who they are.

Fraternize means to behave like a brother. Luke told me that. He said there was no corresponding word that meant to behave like a sister. Sororize, it would have to be, he said. From the Latin.

Though I knew how this failure would hurt you, I had to fold like a grey moth and let go.You could not believe I was more than your echo.

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.

Debt . . . . that peculiar nexus where money, narrative or story, and religious belief intersect, often with explosive force.

Writing poetry is a state of free float

speech to him was a task, a battle, words mustered behind his beard and issued one at a time, heavy and square like tanks.

You couldn’t leave words lying around where our enemies might find them.

Last night I felt the approach of nothing. Not too close but on its way, like a wingbeat, like the cooling of the wind, the slight initial tug of an undertow.

Men and women tried each other on, casually, like suits, rejecting whatever did not fit.

...He was wrong about the sadness though: far better to have it when you're young. A sad pretty girl inspires the urge to console, unlike a sad old crone.

It's psychic. It's the age. It's chemical.

Sympathy from strangers can be ruinous.

After they had skated around the pond several times, my father asked my mother to marry him. I expect he did it awkwardly, but awkwardness in men was a sign of sincerity then.

Is there no end to his diguises of benevolence?

The fact is that I hate this city. I've hated it so long I can hardly remember feeling any other way about it.

I can't remember what I really felt. Maybe nothing happened, maybe these emotions I remember are not the right emotions.