Margaret Atwood Quotes

Canada was built on dead beavers.

I'm a refugee from the past, and like other refugees I go over the customs and habits of being I've left or been forced to leave behind me, and it all seems just as quaint, from here, and I am just as obsessive about it.

making final judgements about poets, cities or regions on the basis of an anthology is always dangerous: anthologies are mirages created, finally, by their editors.

Don't wait until you're 'in the mood.' Get into the mood by writing.

Time rises and rises, and when it reaches the level of your eyes you drown.

Even an obvious fabrication is some comfort when you have few others.

In Shakespeare Saved My Life, [author Laura Bates] said she got better papers from [prisoners] than she got from people in her regular classes. Because she was teaching, of course, Macbeth, and a number of them had murdered people. The guy who wrote the best paper said, "You do have this, 'Is this a dagger which I see before me?' before you do it, but in my case it was a gun."

Some days I do appreciate things more, eggs, flowers, but then I decide I'm only having an attack of sentimentality, my brain going pastel Technicolor, like a beautiful-sunset greeting cards they used to make so many of in California. High-gloss hearts. The danger is grayout.

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

I was delighted with the film [Payback: Debt and the Shadow Side of Wealth]; it almost made me want to be a film-maker!

Storytelling is a very old human skill that gives us an evolutionary advantage. If you can tell young people how you kill an emu, acted out in song or dance, or that Uncle George was eaten by a croc over there, don't go there to swim, then those young people don't have to find out by trial and error.

If a god showed up every time you put a quarter in the prayer slot it wouldn't be God, it would be a puppet that you could control by doing that...that would make the deity subservient to you. So it wouldn't be a deity would it?

These things sneak up on him for no reason, these flashes of irrational happiness. It's probably a vitamin deficiency.

at last you, will say (maybe without speaking) (there are mountains inside your skull garden and chaos, ocean and hurricane; certain corners of rooms, portraits of great-grandmothers, curtains of a particular shade; your deserts; your private dinosaurs; the first woman) all i need to know: tell me everything just as it was from the beginning.

Those walls and bars are there for a reason,” said Crake. “Not to keep us out, but to keep them in. Mankind needs barriers in both cases.” “Them?” “Nature and God.” “I thought you didn’t believe in God,” said Jimmy. “I don’t believe in Nature either,” said Crake. “Or not with a capital N.

Well. Then we had the irises, rising beautiful and cool on their tall stalks, like blown glass, like pastel water momentarily frozen in a splash, light blue, light mauve, and the darker ones, velvet and purple, black cat's ears in the sun, indigo shadow, and the bleeding hearts, so female in shape it was a surprise they'd not long since been rooted out. There is something subversive about this garden of Serena's, a sense of buried things bursting upwards, wordlessly, into the light, as if to point, to say: Whatever is silenced will clamor to be heard, though silently.

Don't let the bastards grind you down.

There's nothing like a shovel full of dirt to encourage literacy.

Gardening is not a rational act.

You can never read your own book with the innocent anticipation that comes with that first delicious page of a new book, because you wrote the thing. You've been backstage. You've seen how the rabbits were smuggled into the hat. Therefore ask a reading friend or two to look at it before you give it to anyone in the publishing business. This friend should not be someone with whom you have a ­romantic relationship, unless you want to break up.

But remember that forgiveness too is a power. To beg for it is a power, and to withhold or bestow it is a power, perhaps the greatest. Maybe none of this is about control. Maybe it isn't really about who can own whom, who can do what to whom and get away with it, even as far as death. Maybe it isn't about who can sit and who has to kneel or stand or lie down, legs spread open. Maybe it's about who can do what to whom and be forgiven for it. Never tell me it amounts to the same thing.

Writing poetry is a state of free float.

Human understanding is fallible, and we see through a glass, darkly. Any religion is a shadow of God. But the shadows of God are not God.

The thing about delirium is you think it's great, but it actually isn't.

Your friend is intellectually honourable," Jimmy's mother would say. "He doesn't lie to himself.

Can I be blamed for wanting a real body, to put my arms around? Without it I too am disembodied. I can listen to my own heartbeat against the bedsprings...but there’s something dead about it, something deserted.

You will always have partial points of view, and you'll always have the story behind the story that hasn't come out yet. And any form of journalism you're involved with is going to be up against a biased viewpoint and partial knowledge.

Immortality,' said Crake, ' is a concept. If you take 'mortality' as being, not death, but the foreknowledge of it and the fear of it, then 'immortality' is the absence of such fear. Babies are immortal. Edit out the fear, and you'll be.

I am rather saddened at the end of a book. I think most writers find this. It's like a friend departing on a voyage.

Truly amazing, what people can get used to, as long as there are a few compensations.

I became a poet at the age of sixteen. I did not intend to do it. It was not my fault.

We'll choose knowledge no matter what, we'll maim ourselves in the process, we'll stick our hands into the flames for it if necessary. Curiosity is not our only motive; love or grief or despair or hatred is what drives us on. We'll spy relentlessly on the dead; we'll open their letters, we'll read their journals, we'll go through their trash, hoping for a hint, a final word, an explanation, from those who have deserted us--who've left us holding the bag, which is often a good deal emptier than we'd supposed.

Another belief of mine; that everyone else my age is an adult, whereas I am merely in disguise.

Walter turned on the radio: electric violins wailing, twisted romance, the four-square beat of heartbreak. Trite suffering, but suffering nonetheless. The entertainment business. What voyeurs we have all become.

What a moron I was to think you were sweet and innocent, when it turns out you were actually college-educated the whole time!

To live in prison is to live without mirrors. To live without mirrors is to live without the self. She is living selflessly, she finds a hole in the stone wall and on the other side of the wall, a voice. The voice comes through darkness and has no face. This voice becomes her mirror.

Blank pages inspire me with terror.

You can pretty much trace when the big individual indebtedness kicked in, and it was when the credit card became generally available.

I'm from the generation that had the boys' door and the girls' door when you went to school, and you got in big trouble if you went in the wrong one.

My family was big on sharing. I guess it was just the way I was brought up. Or maybe, I read those fairy tales in which one good turn elicits another. But in writing, yes, some older writers were kind to me when I was young; although some others were not.

The future of the codex book, with pages and so forth? A platform for transmitting narratives. There are others.

Faith is only a word, embroidered.

We do not know how we'd behave. But a lot of people facing fascism didn't become fascists. I don't happen to believe that we are all monsters.

I think every age lives in a blend of technology so there's always older ones mixed in with newer ones, and when the new technology goes down, the immediate fallback position is either that technology just before that or one several technologies back.

I have periods now, like normal girls; I too am among the knowing, I too can sit out volleyball games and go to the nurse's for aspirin and waddle along the halls with a pad like a flattened rabbit tail wadded between my legs, sopping with liver-colored blood.

I would not change [my past work] anymore than I would airbrush a photo of myself.

You could tell 'The Handmaid's Tale' from a male point of view. People have mistakenly felt that the women are oppressed, but power tends to organise itself in a pyramid. I could pick a male narrator from somewhere in that pyramid. It would interesting.

He doesn't know which is worse, a past he can't regain or a present that will destroy him if he looks at it too clearly. Then there's the future. Sheer vertigo.