Margaret Atwood Quotes

The alcohol smell is on my fingers, cold and remote, piercing like a steel pin going in. It smells like white enamel basins. When I look up at the stars in the nighttime, cold and white and sharp, I think they must smell like that.

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

All Creatures know that some must die That all the rest may take and eat; Sooner or later, all transform Their blood to wine, their flesh to meat. But Man alone seeks Vengefulness, And writes his abstract Laws on stone; For this false Justice he has made, He tortures limb and crushes bone. Is this the image of a god? My tooth for yours, your eye for mine? Oh, if Revenge did move the stars Instead of Love, they would not shine.

There were a lot of gods. Gods always come in handy, they justify almost anything.

Optimism means better than reality; pessimism means worse than reality. I'm a realist.

He needed to exist only in the present, without guilt, without expectation.

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

for me the novel is a social vehicle, it reflects society.

Time has not stood still. It has washed over me, washed me away, as if I'm nothing more than a woman of sand, left by a careless child too near the water.

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.

The beginning of Canadian cultural nationalism was not 'Am I really that oppressed?' but 'Am I really that boring?'

I used to act in college, but always comedy. Didn't do [William] Shakespeare - did Ben Jonson.

If I am good enough and quiet enough, perhaps after all they will let me go; but it’s not easy being quiet and good, it’s like hanging on to the edge of a bridge when you’ve already fallen over; you don’t seem to be moving, just dangling there, and yet it is taking all your strength.

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."

All stories are about wolves. All worth repeating, that is. Anything else is sentimental drivel. ...Think about it. There's escaping from the wolves, fighting the wolves, capturing the wolves, taming the wolves. Being thrown to the wolves, or throwing others to the wolves so the wolves will eat them instead of you. Running with the wolf pack. Turning into a wolf. Best of all, turning into the head wolf. No other decent stories exist.

Love was like a steamroller. There was no avoiding it; it went over you and you came out flat.

We yearned for the future. How did we learn it, that talent for insatiability?

I'm working on my own life story. I don't mean I'm putting it together; no, I'm taking it apart.

More powerful than God, more evil than the Devil; the poor have it, the rich lack it, and if you eat it you die?

His mouth is on me, his hands, I can't wait and he's moving, already, love, it's been so long, I'm alive in my skin, again, arms around him, falling and water softly everywhere, never-ending.

I don't think of poetry as a 'rational' activity but as an aural one. My poems usually begin with words or phrases which appeal more because of their sound than their meaning, and the movement and phrasing of a poem are very important to me.

Some of the old diseases that we think are gone - case in point, measles - are back, now that somebody has spread around, in a very wicked way, the idea that these inoculations were making children autistic. Now we're getting outbreaks that are killing children. The end result is, if you create a population that lacks immunity, and diseases are still there, you're going to get outbreaks and you're going to get death.

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

Axiom: you are a sea. Your eye- lids curve over chaos My hands where they touch you, create small inhabited islands soon you will be all earth: a known land, a country.

You can wipe your feet on me, twist my motives around all you like, you can dump millstones on my head and drown me in the river, but you can’t get me out of the story. I’m the plot, babe, and don’t ever forget it.

You fit into me like a hook into an eye a fish hook an open eye

Men are not to be told anything they might find too painful; the secret depths of human nature, the sordid physicalities, might overwhelm or damage them. For instance, men often faint at the sight of their own blood, to which they are not accustomed. For this reason you should never stand behind one in the line at the Red Cross donor clinic.

... all this talking, this rather liquid confessing, was something I didn't think I could ever bring myself to do. It seemed foolhardy to me, like an uncooked egg deciding to to come out of its shell: there would be a risk of spreading out too far, turning into a formless puddle.

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

I was sand, I was snow—written on, rewritten, smoothed over.

Potential has a shelf life.

Our biggest moral debt is to the environment. Take-take-take, nothing given back.

If social stability goes pear-shaped, you have a choice between anarchy and dictatorship. Most people will opt for more security, even if they have to give up some personal freedom.

Most mothers worry when their daughters reach adolescence but I was the opposite. I relaxed, I sighed with relief. Little girls are cute and small only to adults. To one another they are not cute. They are life sized.

I'm working on my own life story. I don't mean I'm putting it together; no, I'm taking it apart. If you'd wanted the narrative line you should have asked earlier, when I still knew everything and was more than willing to tell. That was before I discovered the virtues of scissors, the virtues of matches.

Foreignness is all around. Only in the heart of the heart of the country, namely the heart of the United States, can you avoid such a thing. In the center of an empire, you can think of your experience as universal. Outside the empire or on the fringes of the empire, you cannot.

Winning intoxicates you, and numbs you to the sufferings of others.

I am not your justification for existence.

If it's all instruction, you get annoyed with it and bored, and you stop reading. If it's all entertainment, you read it quite quickly, your heart going pitty-pat, pitty-pat. But when you finish, that's it. You're not going to think about it much afterward, apart from the odd nightmare. You're not going to read that book again.

Where do the words go when we have said them?

People cry at weddings for the same reason they cry at happy endings: because they so desperately want to believe in something they know is not credible.

If the national mental illness of the United States is megalomania, that of Canada is paranoid schizophrenia.

Social media is called social media for a reason. It lends itself to sharing rather than horn-tooting.

In the spring, at the end of the day, you should smell like dirt.

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

If you disagree with your government, that's political. If you disagree with your government that is approaching theocracy, then you're evil.

The road to death is a lonely highway, and longer than it apears, even when it leads straight down from the scaffold, by way of a rope; and it's a dark road, with never any moon shining on it, to light your way.

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. There are all kinds of other things that we are not supposed to sell - political influence being one of them. We too rarely have public conversations about the common sense of money. We too rarely talk about the human cost of putting some of these economic measures into effect.