Margaret Atwood Quotes

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

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

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.

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.

For drinking Life there are two cups: The No Cup is bitter, the Yes Cup is yummy -- Now, which one would you rather have in your tummy?

Gravity works in your life, the notion of free will works in your life, however problematic it may at times be.

Jimmy found himself wishing to make a dent in Crake, get a reaction; it was one of his weaknesses, to care what other people thought of him.

Roughing it builds a boy's character, but only certain kinds of roughing it.

I tell, therefore you are.

Once upon a time, novelists of the 19th century, such as Charles Dickens, published in serial form.

Hunger is a powerful reorganizer of the conscience.

Where there's a doctor it's always a bad sign. Even when they are not doing the killing themselves it means a death is close, and in that way they are like ravens or crows.

No matter how much you've been warned, Death always comes without knocking. Why now? is the cry. Why so soon? It's the cry of a child being called home at dusk.

There's nothing like drawing a thing to make you really see it.

Human reason is a pin dancing on the head of an angel, so small is it in comparison to the Divine vastness that encircles us.

I'm from the generation that had the boys' door and the girls' door when you went to school, and you got in big trouble if you went in the wrong one.

I'm the only person you've ever met who has read Longfellow.

I'm interested in the Gothic novel because it's very much a woman's form. Why is there such a wide readership for books that essentially say, 'Your husband is trying to kill you'?

It is my contention that the process of reading is part of the process of writing, the necessary completion without which writing can hardly be said to exist.

No luck was dumb because luck was just another name for miracle.

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.

It's evening, one of those gray water-color washes, like liquid dust.

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.

He considers me also a little fragile because artistic. I need to be cared for, like a potted plant.

It wasn't so easy though, ending the war. A war is a huge fire; the ashes from it drift far, and settle slowly.

Ten days after the war ended, my sister Laura drove a car off a bridge.

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.

Despite their cool poses they wear their cravings on the outside, like the suckers on a squid. They want it all.

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.

Too much God and you overdose. God needs to be filtered.

Her glass wings are gone.

Here and there are worms, evidence of the fertility of the soil, caught by the sun, half dead; flexible and pink, like lips.

When I finally went to school I had to adjust to other girls and learn their fiendish ways. Having learnt them, I turned them on all and sundry.

Yelling is a form of publishing

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.

Toast is me. I am toast.

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.

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.

We've learned to see the world in gasps.

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.

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.

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.

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.

Maybe sadness was a kind of hunger, she thought. Maybe the two went together.

How easy it is, treachery. You just slide into it.