I don't believe in a perfect world. I don't believe it's achievable, and I believe the people who try to achieve it usually end up turning it into something like Cambodia or something very similar because purity tests set in. Are you ideologically pure enough to be allowed to live? Well, it turns out that very few people are, so you end up with a big powerful struggle and a mass killing scene.
Margaret AtwoodThe threat to the planet is us. It's actually not a threat to the planet - it's a threat to us.
Margaret AtwoodHe's lost something, some illusion I used to think was necessary to him. He's come to realize he too is human. Or is this a performance, for my benefit, to show me he's up-to-date? Maybe men shouldn't have been told about their own humanity. It's only made them uncomfortable. It's only made them trickier, slier, more evasive, harder to read.
Margaret AtwoodAll fiction is about people, unless it's about rabbits pretending to be people. It's all essentially characters in action, which means characters moving through time and changes taking place, and that's what we call 'the plot'.
Margaret AtwoodKafka 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.
Margaret AtwoodDespite their cool poses they wear their cravings on the outside, like the suckers on a squid. They want it all.
Margaret AtwoodThe only way you can write the truth is to assume that what you set down will never be read.
Margaret AtwoodThe story as told in The Odyssey doesn't hold water. There are too many inconsistencies.
Margaret AtwoodThe prospect of his future life stretched before him like a sentence; not a prison sentence but a long-winded sentence with a lot of unnecessary subordinate clauses, as he was soon in the habit of quipping during Happy Hour pickup time at the local campus bars and pubs. He couldn’t say he was looking forward to it, this rest-of-his-life.
Margaret AtwoodMyths can't be translated as they did in their ancient soil. We can only find our own meaning in our own time.
Margaret AtwoodRemember that, my child. Remember you are half water. If you can't go through an obstacle, go around it. Water does.
Margaret AtwoodI hate to break this to you: One of these days I'm going to die. I expect that when I croak I'll no longer be using Twitter, unless I can do it from the grave.
Margaret AtwoodThere's more than one way to skin a cat, my father used to say; it bothered me, I didn't see why they would want to skin a cat even one way.
Margaret AtwoodAmericans don't usually have to think about Canadian-American relations, or, as they would put it, American-Canadian relations. Why think about something which you believe affects you so little? We, on the other hand, have to think about you whether we like it or not.
Margaret AtwoodI tried for the longest time to find out what deconstructionism was. Nobody was able to explain it to me clearly. The best answer I got was from a writer, who said, 'Honey, it's bad news for you and me.
Margaret AtwoodI don't think it's a question of whether you eat meat. It's a question of what kind of meat, and where it comes from.
Margaret AtwoodHe considers me also a little fragile because artistic. I need to be cared for, like a potted plant.
Margaret AtwoodEating is our earliest metaphor, preceding our consciousness of gender difference, race, nationality, and language. We eat before we talk.
Margaret AtwoodEverybody 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.
Margaret AtwoodHope drives us to invent new fixes for old messes, which in turn create ever more dangerous messes. Hope elects the politician with the biggest empty promise; and as any stockbroker or lottery seller knows, most of us will take a slim hope over prudent and predictable frugality. Hope, like greed, fuels the engine of capitalism.
Margaret AtwoodAll stories are about wolves. All worth repeating, that is. Anything else is sentimental drivel.
Margaret AtwoodI tried to visualize my jealousy as a yellowy-brown cloud boiling around inside me, then going out through my nose like smoke and turning into a stone and falling down into the ground. That did work a little. But in my visualization a plant covered with poison berries would grow out of the stone, whether I wanted it to or not.
Margaret AtwoodI've been involved in activities with other people who were put in jail. We were protesting the closing of the prison farm program at the prison I used in a previous book, Alias Grace. Some of us also put up money in order to save the heirloom herd of cows there. So I own half a cow!
Margaret AtwoodI'm a person of whim, and easily distracted. I don't like multitasking. When I'm doing one thing, I like to do just that thing.
Margaret AtwoodShe 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.
Margaret AtwoodThat is what you have to do before you kill, I thought. You have to create an it, where none was before.
Margaret AtwoodScience and fiction both begin with similar questions: What if? Why? How does it all work? But they focus on different areas of life on earth.
Margaret AtwoodThe moment of betrayal is the worst, the moment when you know beyond any doubt that you've been betrayed: that some other human being has wished you that much evil
Margaret AtwoodWhen we think of the past it's the beautiful things we pick out. We want to believe it was all like that.
Margaret AtwoodBecause you are never here but always there, I forget not you but what you look like You drift down the street in the rain, your face dissolving, changing shape, the colours running together My walls absorb you, breathe you forth again, you resume yourself, I do not recognize you You rest on the bed watching me watching you, we will never know each other any better than we do now
Margaret AtwoodYou're sad because you're sad. It's psychic. It's the age. It's chemical. Go see a shrink or take a pill, or hug your sadness like an eyeless doll you need to sleep. Well, all children are sad but some get over it. Count your blessings. Better than that, buy a hat. Buy a coat or a pet. Take up dancing to forget.
Margaret AtwoodBut we still find the world astounding, we can't get enough of it; even as it shrivels, even as its many lights flicker and are extinguished (the tigers, the leopard frogs, the plunging dolphin flukes), flicker and are extinguished, by us, by us, we gaze and gaze. Where do you draw the line, between love and greed? We never did know, we always wanted more. We want to take it all in, for one last time, we want to eat the world with our eyes.
Margaret AtwoodThere were no men in this painting, but it was about men, the kind who caused women to fall. I did not ascribe any intentions to these men. They were like the weather, they didn't have a mind. They merely drenched you or struck you like lightning and moved on, mindless as blizzards. Or they were like rocks, a line of sharp slippery rocks with jagged edges. You could walk with care along between the rocks, picking your steps, and if you slipped you'd fall and cut yourself, but it was no use blaming the rocks.
Margaret AtwoodModesty is invisibility... Never forget it. To be seen - to be seen - is to be... penetrated. What you must be girls, is impenetrable.
Margaret AtwoodMaybe 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.
Margaret Atwood