I walk away from him. It's enormously pleasing to me, this walking away. It's like being able to make people appear and vanish, at will.
Margaret AtwoodWhen faced with the inevitable, you always have a choice... As I learned during my liberal arts education, any symbol can have, in the imaginative context, two versions, a positive and a negative... If you spill your milk you're left with a glass which is either half empty or half full... You may not be able to alter reality, but you can alter your attitude towards it, and this, paradoxically, alters reality. Try it and see.
Margaret AtwoodWe're facing growing climate change, more floods, more droughts, more crisis on a planetary level, and the systems we put in place in the twentieth century are just not going to work. We've run out of stuff. Our big problems are going to be energy supplies and food supplies. This is not a right-left issue.
Margaret AtwoodThe goals of the feminist movement have not been achieved, and those who claim we're living in a post-feminist era are either sadly mistaken or tired of thinking about the whole subject.
Margaret AtwoodRepeat reading for me shares a few things with hot-water bottles and thumbsucking: comfort, familiarity, the recurrence of the expected.
Margaret AtwoodThis is the middle of my life, I think of it as a place, like the middle of a river, the middle of a bridge, halfway across, halfway over. I'm supposed to have accumulated things by now: possessions, responsibilities, achievements, experience and wisdom. I'm supposed to be a person of substance.
Margaret AtwoodIt's probably a form of childish curiosity that keeps me going as a fiction writer. I ... want to open everybody's bureau drawers and see what they keep in there. I'm nosy.
Margaret AtwoodI didn't want him to become gray and multi-dimensional and complicated like everyone else. Was every Heathcliff a Linton in disguise?
Margaret AtwoodThe darkness is really out there. It's not something that's in my head, just. It's in my work because it's in the world.
Margaret AtwoodBy telling you anything at all I'm at least believing in you, I believe you're there, I believe you into being.
Margaret AtwoodIf you're waiting for the perfect moment, you'll never write a thing because it will never arrive. I have no routine. I have no foolproof anything. There's nothing foolproof.
Margaret AtwoodWhat else can I do? Once you've gone this far you aren't fit for anything else. Something happens to your mind. You're overqualified, overspecialized, and everybody knows it. Nobody in any other game would be crazy enough to hire me. I wouldn't even make a good ditch-digger, I'd start tearing apart the sewer-system, trying to pick-axe and unearth all those chthonic symbols - pipes, valves, cloacal conduits... No, no. I'll have to be a slave in the paper-mines for all time.
Margaret AtwoodWriting... is an act of faith: I believe it's also an act of hope, the hope that things can get better than they are.
Margaret AtwoodOne of the reasons [William] Shakespeare is so endlessly fascinating is that you can look at that figure from about 10 different angles: Caliban in Shakespeare's day was probably viewed as a sort of comic, barbarian type, but into the 19th century there were productions where Caliban was the hero. He's a potential rapist of a minor. Is that a good thing? No, it is not. On the other hand, Prospero's got him cooped up in a cave and tortures him if he doesn't do what Prospero wants. Is that a good thing? No. Shakespeare doesn't let you off easy.
Margaret AtwoodThe world is being run by people my age, men my age, with falling-out hair and health worries, and it frightens me. When the leaders were older than me I could believe in their wisdom, I could believe they had transcended rage and malice and the need to be loved. Now I know better. I look at the faces in newspapers, in magazines, and wonder: what greeds, what furies drive them on?
Margaret AtwoodMen and women are not "equal" if "equal" means "exactly the same." Our many puzzlements and indeed unhappinesses come from trying to figure out what the differences really mean, or should mean, or should not mean.
Margaret AtwoodLike many modern poets, I tend to conceal rhymes by placing them in the middle of lines, and to avoid immediate alliteration and assonance in favor of echoes placed later in the poems.
Margaret AtwoodAt moments like this I envy those who have found a safe haven in which to bestow their hearts; or perhaps I envy them for having a heart to bestow. I often feel that I myself am without one, and possess in its stead merely a heart shaped stone.
Margaret AtwoodI wanted to forget the past, but it refused to forget me; it waited for sleep, then cornered me.
Margaret AtwoodPeople talking about politics usually start from the ass end backwards in that they think you have a political agenda, and then you make your work fit that cookie cutter. It's the other way around. One works by simple observation, looking into things. It's usually called insight and out of that comes your view - not that you have the view first and then squash everything to make it fit. I'm not interested in cutting the feet off my characters or stretching them to make them fit my certain political view.
Margaret AtwoodI'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'?
Margaret AtwoodYou always think, 'Oh, if only I had a little chalet in the mountains! How great that would be and I'd do all this writing' Except, no, I wouldn't. I'd do the same amount of writing I do now and the rest of the time I'd go stir crazy. If you're waiting for the perfect moment you'll never write a thing because it will never arrive. I have no routine. I have no foolproof anything. There's nothing foolproof.
Margaret AtwoodI would like to believe this is a story I’m telling. I need to believe it. I must believe it. Those who can believe that such stories are only stories have a better chance. If it’s a story I’m telling, then I have control over the ending. Then there will be an ending, to the story, and real life will come after it. I can pick up where I left off.
Margaret AtwoodIf you're put on a pedestal, you're supposed to behave yourself like a pedestal type of person. Pedestals actually have a limited circumference. Not much room to move around.
Margaret AtwoodThe idea of the chickens with the multiple breasts and thighs came from an urban legend that some fast-food places had developed chickens with four thighs. It wasn't true, but it is a suggestive rumor.
Margaret AtwoodHe’d developed a strangely tender feeling towards such words, as if they were children abandoned in the woods and it was his duty to rescue them.
Margaret AtwoodOnce you publish a book, it is out of your control. You cannot dictate how people read it.
Margaret AtwoodThere's something to be said for hunger: at least it lets you know you're still alive.
Margaret AtwoodAnd yes, I know it's you; and that is what we will come to, sooner or later, when it's even darker than it is now, when the snow is colder, when it's darkest and coldest and candles are no longer any use to us and the visibility is zero: yes. It's still you. It's still you.
Margaret AtwoodNo mother is ever, completely, a child's idea of what a mother should be, and I suppose it works the other way around as well. But despite everything, we didn't do too badly by one another, we did as well as most.
Margaret AtwoodWe are silent, considering shortfalls. There's not much time left, for us to become what we once intended. Jon had potential, but it's not a word that can be used comfortably any more. Potential has a shelf-life.
Margaret AtwoodIf you DJ reality, that is, if you make a mash-up of actual reality, you're going to end up with something that inevitably people will say, "This is feminist." Because you cannot avoid that.
Margaret Atwood