Margaret Atwood Quotes

He keeps his voice kindly but remote. A cross between a pedagogue, soothsayer, and a benevolent uncle – that should be his tone.

What should I take? Something that will not be missed. In the wood at midnight, a magic flower.

But people will do anything rather than admit that their lives have no meaning.

The past isn't quaint while you're in it. Only at a safe distance, later, when you can see it as décor, not as the shape your life's been squeezed into.

I wonderif I should let my hair go greyso my advice will be better.

You always do good ones. We trust you, Mr. Duke, " Says Dylan. Foolish lads, thinks Felix: never trust a professional ham.

Perhaps he was merely being friendly. Perhaps he saw the look on my face and mistook it for something else. Really what I wanted was the cigarette.

With the young writers now it’s F and C all day long, which he, personally, finds boring.

I am not scoffing at goodness, which is far more difficult to explain than evil, and just as complicated. But sometimes it's hard to put up with.

In the desert there is no sign that says, 'Thou shalt not eat stones.

Experiences were what you got when you couldn’t get what you wanted.

He put his arms around me. We were both feeling miserable. How were we to know we were happy, even then? Because we at least had that: arms, around.

I'm sad now, the way we're talking is infinitely sad: faded music, faded paper flowers, worn satin, an echo of an echo. All gone away, no longer possible.

Why do we want other people to like us, even if we don't really care about them all that much?

An odd thing souvenir-hunting: now becomes then even while it is still now.

A place with no handholds, no landmarks, no past at all:That would have been too much like dying

If someone wants to suck your toes, those toes should be worth sucking.

Life is warped. I'm just in sync.

I would like to be without shame. I would like to be shameless. I would like to be ignorant. Then I would not know how ignorant I was.

That’s what you get for being food.

It is shocking how many crimes the Bible contains. The Governor's wife should cut them all out and paste them into her scrapbook.

People change, though, especially after they are dead.

I am a believer in sensible choices, so different from many of my own. Also in sensible names for children.

Where were we? I've forgotten. He was deciding whether to cut her throat or love her forever.Right. Yes. The usual choices.

I used to jog but it's bad for the knees. Too much beta carotene turns you orange, too much calcium gives you kidney stones. Health kills.

Money isn't the only thing that must flow and circulate in order to have good value: good turns and gifts must flow and circulate . . . for any social system to remain in balance.

That's the kind of stories I know. Sad ones. Anyway, taken to it's logical conclusion, every story is sad, because at the end everyone dies.

Things that are falling apart encourage me: whatever else, I’m in better shape than they are.

It must have been an endless breathing in: between the wish to know and the wish to praise there was no seam.

Home, I think. But it's nowhere I can go back to.

I remember my mean mouth, I remember how wise I thought I was. But I was not wise then. Now I am wise.

I was tired of her getting away with being so young.

A writer's age at the time of a work's composition is never irrelevant.

I'm not going to have a husband anyway, " said Laura. "I'm going to live by myself in the garage.

Every Canadian has a complicated relationship with the United States, whereas Americans think of Canada as the place where the weather comes from.

Surviving Is the only warWe can afford

He would have died soon, but more painfully. Anyway, it was Urban Bloodshed Limitation. First rule: limit bloodshed by making sure that none of your own gets spilled.

And if I talk to him, I'll say something wrong, give something away. I can feel it coming, a betrayal of myself.

No wires tender even as nervescan transmit the impact ofour seasons, our catastropheswhile we are closed inside them

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

But unshed tears can turn rancid. So can memory. So can biting your tongue. My bad nights were beginning. I couldn't sleep.

...yes, in the obscured sky a moon does float, newly, a wishing moon, a sliver of ancient rock, a goddess, a wink.

Bless you. Be careful. Anyone intending to meddle with words needs such blessing, such warning.

I write as if I’ve lived a lot of things I haven’t lived.

Religious people of any serious kind made her nervous: they were like men in raincoats who might or might not be flashers.

Suddenly revenge is so close he can actually taste it. It tastes like steak, rare.

I thought my heart was pure. We do like to have such good opinions of our own motives when we're about to do something harmful, to someone else.

But what is a memorial, when you come right down to it, but a commemoration of wounds endured? Endured, and resented. Without memory, there can be no revenge.

So that’s what art is, for the artist, ” said Crake. “An empty drainpipe. An amplifier. A stab at getting laid.

So that made me happy but the part that really made me happy was that you wanted me to be happy. That's what Thank you means.