Margaret Atwood Quotes

All I can hope for is a reconstruction: the way love feels is always only approximate.

You can't keep a cool head when you're drowning in love. You just trash around a lot and scream, and wear yourself out.

A hot wind was blowing around my head, the strands of my hair lifting and swirling in it, like ink spilled in water.

Without the protection of surliness and levity, all children would be crushed by the past—the past of others, loaded onto their shoulders. Selfishness is their saving grace.

About no subject are poets tempted to lie so much as about their own lives.

I began to forget myself in the middle of sentences.

She knows the rituals, she knows how we're supposed to be behaving...But I think these things are impenetrable and fraudulent, and I can't do them without feeling I'm acting.

We battled in secret, undeclared, and after a while I no longer fought back because I never won. The only defense was flight, invisibility.

For if the world treats you well, Sir, you come to believe you are deserving of it.

You quickly find, when you are a hand-reader as I am, that nothing interests people so much as themselves.

Younger people have greatest fears. Why is that? Because they don't know the plot. They don't know their own individual plot... they don't know what's going to happen to them.

But maybe, underneath, she loves him too much. Maybe it's her excessive love that pushes him away.

You can’t buy it, but it has a price,” said Oryx. “Everything has a price.

I suppose these deadlines we set for ourselves are really a way of saying we appreciate time, and want to use all of it.

Is anything wrong, dear? the old joke went. No, why? You moved. Just don't move.

Some travelers think they want to go to foreign places but are dismayed when the places turn out actually to be foreign.

and each of his voices left his body in a different colored soul and floated up towards the sun still singing.

Make the verses flow together. If a following verse has nothing to do with the previous, you may lose our listener/reader. You want a smooth flow to hear or read, and it's easier to memorize.

Your hand is a warm stone I hold between two words.

The heart of Jesus glowed, because it was holy. Holy things glowed in general.

We love each other, that’s true whatever it means, but we aren’t good at it; for some it’s a talent, for others only an addiction.

You shouldn't do that," said Laura. "You could set yourself on fire.

I don't know why they are all so eager to be remembered. What good will it do them? There are some things that should be forgotten by everyone, and never spoken of again.

A language is everything you do.

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

Why are you so interested in amoebas?" "Oh, they're immortal," he said, "and sort of shapeless and flexible. Being a person is getting too complicated.

I am not a saint or a cripple, I am not a wound; now I will see whether I am a coward.

A prison does not only lock its inmates inside, it keeps all others out. Her strongest prison is of her own construction.

She had her reasons. Not that they were the same as anybody else's reasons.

expectation isn't the same as desire

How old do you have to get before wisdom descends like a plastic bag over your head and you learn to keep your big mouth shut? Maybe never. Maybe you get more frivolous with age.

I'm not senile," I snapped. "If I burn the house down it will be on purpose.

Extreme good, extreme evil: the abilities required are similar.

Cleverness is a quality a man likes to have in his wife as long as she is some distance away from him. Up close, he'll take kindness any day of the week, if there's nothing more alluring to be had.

What is the real breath of a man — the breathing out or the breathing in?

We have been shark to one another, but also lifeboat.

We slept in what had once been the gymnasium.

When a man is attacked in print, it's usually for saying what he says; when a woman is attacked in print, it's often for being who she is.

Where to start is the problem, because nothing begins when it begins and nothing's over when it's over, and everything needs a preface: a preface, a postscript, a chart of simultaneous events.

As with all knowledge, once you knew it, you couldn't imagine how it was that you hadn't known it before.

Writing... is an act of faith: I believe it's also an act of hope, the hope that things can get better than they are.

Keep an eye on the weather, which is changing faster than predicted, and on the new diseases escaping or being made, even as we speak. It's a race between new tech and biosphere bankruptcy, I'd say.

The biggest debt is always the government debt; it's always debt that government has run up on your behalf.

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

One good maxim to keep in mind, and I can't remember who said it, "You meet the same people on the way down that you meet on the way up, but you're going the other way."

The scroll is coming back (Twitter is a scroll.)

Everybody acts as if they have free will. They act as if they can make these decisions; do they know they don't? I think there's been some back-down on the idea that everything is determined.

Science is a tool, and we invent tools to do things we want. It's a question of how those tools are used by people.

We've learned to see the world in gasps.

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