Margaret Atwood Quotes

Writing is alone, but I don't think it's lonely. Ask any writer if they feel lonely when they're writing their book, and I think they'll say no.

My brother and I were both good at science, and we were both good at English literature. Either one of us could have gone either way.

I grew up with the biologists. I know how they think.

Although from you I far must roam, do not be broken hearted. We two, who in the souls are one, are never truly parted.

Powerlessness and silence go together.

Things musicals taught me: All your problems will go away if you sing about it.

So much better to travel than to arrive.

The facts of this world seen clearly are seen through tears.

I tend to feel if people say they're going to do something, they will, if given the chance.

When I am writing fiction, I believe I am much better organized, more methodical - one has to be when writing a novel. Writing poetry is a state of free float.

I always thought eating was a ridiculous activity anyway. I'd get out of it myself if I could, though you've got to do it to stay alive, they tell me.

Pink is supposed to weaken your enemies, make them go soft on you, which must be why it's used for baby girls. It's a wonder the military hasn't got on to this.

They seemed to be able to choose. We seemed to be able to choose, then. We were a society dying of too much choice.

I didn't much like it, this grudge-holding against the past.

I want everything back, the way it was. But there is no point to it, this wanting.

There is never only one, of anyone

In my dreams of this city I am always lost.

But my dreaming self refuses to be consoled. It continues to wander, aimless, homeless, alone. It cannot be convinced of its safety by any evidence drawn from my waking life.

How easy it is to invent a humanity, for anyone at all.

Those who live alone slide into the habit of vertical eating: why bother with the niceties when there's no one to share or censure? But laxity in one area may lead to derangement in all.

Perhaps its not the world that is soundless but we who are deaf.

They will not let you have peace, they don't want you to have anything they don't have themselves.

When we think of the past it's the beautiful things we pick out. We want to believe it was all like that.

More and more I feel like a letter—deposited here, collected there. But a letter addressed to no one.

I could end this with a moral, as if this were a fable about animals, though no fables are really about animals.

He was deciding whether to cut her throat or love her forever.

His father was self-made, but his mother was constructed by others, and such edifices are notoriously fragile.

The best way of keeping a secret is to pretend there isn't one.

This is what I miss, Cordelia: not something that’s gone, but something that will never happen. Two old women giggling over their tea.

I lie on the floor, washed by nothing and hanging on. I cry at night. I am afraid of hearing voices, or a voice. I have come to the edge, of the land. I could get pushed over.

The heart with letters on it shining like a light bulb through the trim hole painted in the chest, art history.

She knows herself to be at the mercy of events, and she knows by now that events have no mercy.

The best way of being kind to bears is not to be very close to them.

They spent the first three years of school getting you to pretend stuff and then the rest of it marking you down if you did the same thing.

To take that risk, to offer life and remain alive, open yourself like this and become whole.

Knowing was a temptation. What you don't know won't tempt you.

Creating some god for one's inspirations was always a good way to avoid accusations of pride should the scheme succeed, as well as the blame if did not.

When they're gone out of his head, these words, they'll be gone, everywhere, forever. As if they had never been.

Time in dreams is frozen. You can never get away from where you've been.

If you really want to stay the same age you are now forever and ever, she'd be thinking, try jumping off the roof: death's a sure-fire method for stopping time.

It isn't running away they're afraid of. We wouldn't get far. It's those other escapes, the ones you can open in yourself, given a cutting edge.

Sooner or later, I hate to break it to you, you're gonna die, so how do you fill in the space between here and there? It's yours. Seize your space.

I planned my death carefully, unlike my life, which meandered along from one thing to another, despite my feeble attempts to control it.

What a moron I was to think you were sweet and innocent, when it turns out you were actually college-educated the whole time!

Science fiction, to me, has not only things that wouldn't happen, but other planets.

...we must be a beacon of hope, because if you tell people there's nothing they can do, they will do worse than nothing.

If one of the arguments against eating meat is to do with cruelty and animal intelligence, then lab meat avoids that. There's also the environmental argument for it.

This is how the girl who couldn't speak and the man who couldn't see fell in love.

All you have to do, I tell myself, is keep your mouth shut and look stupid. It shouldn't be that hard.

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.