Margaret Atwood Quotes

I read for pleasure and that is the moment I learn the most.

There are some women who seem to be born without fear, just as there are people who are born without the ability to feel pain ... Providence appears to protect such women, maybe out of astonishment.

You may not be able to alter reality, but you can alter your attitude towards it, and this, paradoxically, alters reality. Try it and see.

The proper study of Mankind is Everything.

Don't let the bastards grind you down.

If I waited for perfection... I would never write a word.

Potential has a shelf life.

A rat in a maze is free to go anywhere, as long as it stays inside the maze.

The society in 'The Handmaid's Tale' is a throwback to the early Puritans whom I studied extensively at Harvard under Perry Miller, to whom the book is dedicated.

Maybe the life I think I'm living is a paranoid delusion...Sanity is a valuable possession; I hoard it the way people once hoarded money. I save it, so I will have enough, when the time comes.

­Do back exercises. Pain is distracting.

What breaks in daybreak? Is it the night? Is it the sun, cracked in two by the horizon like an egg, spilling out light?

There is no fool like an educated fool.

Time is not a line but a dimension, like the dimensions of space.

The astrologers would tell that the U.S. is ruled by fire and Canada is ruled by water. Short version: You pep us up, we cool you down.

To live in prison is to live without mirrors. To live without mirrors is to live without the self.

Gardening is not a rational act.

But who can remember pain, once it’s over? All that remains of it is a shadow, not in the mind even, in the flesh. Pain marks you, but too deep to see. Out of sight, out of mind.

Which of us can resist the temptation of being thought indispensable?

I don't think I solve problems in my poetry; I think I uncover the problems.

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.

Better never means better for everyone... It always means worse, for some.

I am nervous about dogmas of any kind, whether they be religious, political, or anti-religious. Too many heads have rolled because of them.

Forgiving men is so much easier than forgiving women.

I think calling it climate change is rather limiting. I would rather call it the everything change.

You're never going to kill storytelling, because it's built into the human plan. We come with it.

Within one's own family, money is not the measure of things, unless the person is an absolute Scrooge. Only the most extreme kind of monster would put a price on everything.

Whatever is silenced will clamor to be heard, though silently.

I walk away from him. It's enormously pleasing to me, this walking away. It's like being able to make people appear and vanish, at will.

The problem is huge. We've just added seventy-five million people to the already large proportion of people in the world who are malnourished all the time, whose bodies are being starved.

Myths can't be translated as they did in their ancient soil. We can only find our own meaning in our own time.

There's an epigram tacked to my office bulletin board, pinched from a magazine -- "Wanting to meet an author because you like his work is like wanting to meet a duck because you like pâté.

The truth is seldom welcome, especially at dinner.

Ignoring isn’t the same as ignorance, you have to work at it.

Our heaven is their hell, said God. I like a balanced universe.

Anaesthesia, that's one technique: if it hurts, invent a different pain.

An eye for an eye only leads to more blindness.

People dressed in a certain kind of clothing are never wrong. Also they never fart.

But the adjectives change,” said Jimmy. “Nothing’s worse than last year’s adjectives.

Snowman wakes before dawn.

Even an obvious fabrication is some comfort when you have few others.

This above all, to refuse to be a victim.

I never say I'm an "ist" of any kind unless I know how the other person is defining it.

The sands of time are quicksands ... so much can sink into them without a trace.

Every habit he's ever had is still there in his body, lying dormant like flowers in the desert. Given the right conditions, all his old addictions would burst into full and luxuriant bloom.

I've never understood why people consider youth a time of freedom and joy. It's probably because they have forgotten their own.

War is what happens when language fails.

Love's never a fair trade.

There's nothing like a shovel full of dirt to encourage literacy.

It is better to hope than to mope!