Margaret Atwood Quotes

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.

A word after a word after a word is power.

a handful of crumpled stars

What a lost person needs is a map of the territory, with his own position marked on it so he can see where he is in relation to everything else. Literature is not only a mirror; it is also a map, a geography of the mind. Our literature is one such map, if we can learn to read it as our literature, as the product of who and where we have been. We need such a map desperately, we need to know about here, because here is where we live. For the members of a country or a culture, shared knowledge of their place, their here, is not a luxury but a necessity. Without that knowledge we will not survive.

All fat women look the same; they all look 42.

In my dreams of this city I am always lost.

I thought everyone would be familiar with this figure: if I'd studied a thing in school I assumed it was general knowledge. I hadn't yet discovered that I lived in a sort of transparent balloon, drifting over the world without making much contact with it, and that the people I knew appeared to me at a different angle from the one at which they appeared to themselves; and that the reverse was also true. I was smaller to others, up there in my balloon, than I was to myself. I was also blurrier.

If I were going to convert to any religion I would probably choose Catholicism because it at least has female saints and the Virgin Mary.

Everybody was going along thinking that it was a day like any other day, and bang, down went the Twin Towers. Changed everything. So you can't really predict the future, but you can say, "Boy, are those glaciers ever melting." You can measure that, and you can say, "When they're all melted there won't be any Athabasca River," and you can say, "What will happen to the oil sands then?" because you need a lot of water to make that oil. "Where's that going to come from?" You can say things like that.

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

But who can remember pain, once it’s over? All that remains of it is a shadow, not in the mind even, in the flesh. Pain marks you, but too deep to see. Out of sight, out of mind.

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

When things are really dismal, you can laugh, or you can cave in completely.

I think the book you always like best is the one you're about to write.

I see that there will be no end to imperfection, or to doing things the wrong way. Even if you grow up, no matter how hard you scrub, whatever you do, there will always be some other stain or spot on your face or stupid act, somebody frowning.

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

The objects I chose were designed to hold something, but I didn't fill them up. They remained empty. They were little symbolic shrines to thirst.

When we cracked the genetic DNA code, opened the big Pandora's box, and it really did become possible to produce chimeras, my ears shot up. Having been brought up among the biologists and having followed various debates about ways to improve the human template and other debates about the true nature of our nature, I began seriously to wonder: What if? We hold in our hands a tool that is more powerful - for good or ill - than any we have wielded before.

You can mean more than one. You can mean thousands. I'm not in any immediate danger, I'll say to you. I'll pretend you can hear me. But it's no good, because I know you can't.

All observations of life are harsh, because life is. I lament that fact, but I cannot change it.

[My favorite word is] and. It is so hopeful.

I've never understood why people consider youth a time of freedom and joy. It's probably because they have forgotten their own.

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

This is what I miss, Cordelia: not something that’s gone, but something that will never happen. Two old women giggling over their tea.

A wave of blood goes up to my head, my stomach shrinks together, as if something dangerous has just missed hitting me. It's as if I've been caught stealing, or telling a lie; or as if I've heard other people talking about me, saying bad things about me, behind my back. There's the same flush of shame, of guilt and terror, and of cold disgust with myself. But I don't know where these feelings have come from, what I've done.

I hate to tell you this, but you will never actually go to a galaxy far, far away and encounter Darth Vader. That's science fiction; it isn't going to happen.

Never mind. Point being that you don't have to get too worked up about us, dear educated minds. You don't have to think of us aas real girls, real flesh and blood, real pain, real injustice. That might be too upsetting. Just discard the sordid part. Consider us pure symbol. We're no more real than money.

A ratio of failures is built into the process of writing. The wastebasket has evolved for a reason. Think of it as the altar of the Muse Oblivion, to whom you sacrifice your botched first drafts, the tokens of your human imperfection.

As an artist your first loyalty is to your art. Unless this is the case, you're going to be a second-rate artist.

art happens. It happens when you have the craft and the vocation and are waiting for something else, something extra, or maybe not waiting; in any case it happens. It's the extra rabbit coming out of the hat, the one you didn't put there.

My favorite author's question of all time - because it's so simple to answer ... 'Is your hair really like that, or do you get it done?

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.

I did not know how to paint or even what to paint, but I knew I had to begin.

I grew up amongst biologists.

Writing is alone, but I don't think it's lonely. Ask any writer if they feel lonely when they're writing their book, and I think they'll say no.

I saw all of the films [based on The Tempest] available, including the one with Helen Mirren in which Prospero is Prospera - you wonder, "Would it work?" But it does, because anything she does works.

No male writer is likely to be asked to sit on a panel addressing itself to the special problems of a male writer.

My brother and I were both teenage writers, and he was, I have to say, better than I was, but he went into science, and I went into writing.

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.

Maybe I don't really want to know what's going on. Maybe I'd rather not know. Maybe I couldn't bear to know. The Fall was a fall from innocence to knowledge.

I am afraid of falling into hopeless despair, over my wasted life, and I am still not sure how it happened.

You hear doom and gloom about the Internet ruining young people's command of English - that's nonsense.

Lose your temper and you lose the fight.

In theory I can do almost anything; certainly I have been told how. In practice I do as little as possible. I pretend to myself that I would be quite happy in a hermit's cave, living on gruel, if someone else would make the gruel. Gruel, like so many other things, is beyond me.

Without the light, no chance; without the dark, no dance.

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.

If you're not annoying somebody, you're not really alive.

I'm not interested in cutting the feet off my characters or stretching them to make them fit my certain political view.