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Margaret Atwood
130 quotes
“Well, maybe I'm a latent homosexual." He considered that for a moment. "Or maybe I'm a latent heterosexual. Anyway, I'm pretty latent. I don't know why. Of course, I've taken a number of stabs at it, but then I start thinking about the futility of it all and I give up. Maybe it's because you're expected to do something and after a certain point all I want to do is lie there and stare at the ceiling.”
Margaret Atwood (born 1939) first seen 1969 wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
Recorded in: The Edible Woman (1969)
“The Eskimo has fifty-two names for snow because it is important to them; there ought to be as many for love.”
Margaret Atwood (born 1939) first seen 1972 wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
Recorded in: Surfacing (1972) p. 107
“A divorce is like an amputation; you survive, but there’s less of you.”
Margaret Atwood (born 1939) first seen 1973 wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
Recorded in: Time magazine (19 March 1973)
“I would rather dance as a ballerina, though faultily, than as a flawless clown.”
Margaret Atwood (born 1939) first seen 1976 wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
Recorded in: Lady Oracle (1976)
“He's just a contact of hers, which is not the same as a friend. While she was in the hospital she decided that most of her friends were really just contacts.”
Margaret Atwood (born 1939) first seen 1981 wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
Recorded in: Bodily Harm (1981)
“He had that faint sick look in his eyes, as if he wanted to give her something, charity for instance.”
Margaret Atwood (born 1939) first seen 1981 wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
Recorded in: Bodily Harm (1981)
“The policemen's faces glisten too, they're holding themselves back, they love this, it's a ceremony, they're implementing a policy.”
Margaret Atwood (born 1939) first seen 1981 wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
Recorded in: Bodily Harm (1981)
“Another belief of mine: that everyone else my age is an adult, whereas I am merely in disguise.”
Margaret Atwood (born 1939) first seen 1988 wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
Recorded in: Cat's Eye (1988)
“Time is not a line but a dimension, like the dimensions of space.”
Margaret Atwood (born 1939) first seen 1988 wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
Recorded in: Cat's Eye (1988)
“An eye for an eye only leads to more blindness.”
Margaret Atwood (born 1939) first seen 1988 wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
Recorded in: Cat's Eye (1988)
“Roughing it builds a boy's character, but only certain kinds of roughing it.”
Margaret Atwood (born 1939) first seen 1991 wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
Recorded in: Wilderness Tips (1991)
“War is what happens when language fails.”
Margaret Atwood (born 1939) first seen 1993 wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
Recorded in: The Robber Bride (1993), Ch. 6
“I am certain that a Sewing Machine would relieve as much human suffering as a hundred Lunatic Asylums, and possibly a good deal more.”
Margaret Atwood (born 1939) first seen 1996 wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
Recorded in: Alias Grace (1996)
“I'm working on my own life story. I don't mean I'm putting it together; no, I'm taking it apart.”
Margaret Atwood (born 1939) first seen 2006 wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
Recorded in: The Tent (2006)
“I can tell you that once upon a time when I was doing public events people would ask me, "What do you think about the arts?, What do you think of the role of women?, What do you think of men?, What do you think of all of these things?", and now they ask one thing, and that one thing is this, "Is there hope?”
Margaret Atwood (born 1939) first seen 2007 wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
Recorded in: Turning Pages: The Life and Literature of Margaret Atwood (September 13, 2007) Official television documentary credited on http://www.margaretatwood.ca/books_on.php
“I plunged in, and set up a Twitter account. My first problem was that there were already two Margaret Atwoods on Twitter, one of them with my picture. This grew; I gave commands; then all other Margaret Atwoods stopped together. I like to think they were sent to a nunnery, but in any case they disappeared. The Twitterpolice had got them. I felt a bit guilty.”
Margaret Atwood (born 1939) first seen 2010 wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
Recorded in: Atwood in the Twittersphere", The New York Review of Books (29 March 2010)
“I soon had a few thousand people I didn’t know sending me messages like “OMG! Is it really you?” “I love it when old ladies blog,” one early follower remarked. … and they really shone when, during the Olympics, I said that "Own the podium" was too brash to be Canadian, and suggested "A podium might be nice." Their own variations poured onto a feed tagged #cpodium: "A podium! For me?" "Rent the podium, see if we like it." "Mind if I squeeze by you to get onto that podium?" I was so proud of them! It was like having 33,000 precocious grandchildren!”
Margaret Atwood (born 1939) first seen 2010 wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
Recorded in: Atwood in the Twittersphere", The New York Review of Books (29 March 2010)
“[In the end] The Handmaid's Tale came true and Danielle Smith found herself with a nice new blue dress but no job.”
Margaret Atwood (born 1939) first seen 2025 wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
Recorded in: In response to Alberta's school book ban, as quoted in Canadian author Margaret Atwood takes another shot at Alberta's book ban with satirical story, CBC (1 September 2025)
“The weapons that were once outside sharpening themselves on war are now indoors there, in the fortress, fragile in glass cases; Why is it (I’m thinking of the careful moulding round the stonework archways) that in this time, such elaborate defences keep things that are no longer (much) worth defending?”
Margaret Atwood (born 1939) wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“Your righteous eyes, your laconic trigger-fingers people the streets with villains: as you move, the air in front of you blossoms with targetsand you leave behind you a heroic trail of desolation: beer bottles slaughtered by the side of the road, bird- skulls bleaching in the sunset.”
Margaret Atwood (born 1939) first seen 1974 wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
Recorded in: Backdrop addresses cowboy" (1974)
“I am the horizon you ride towards, the thing you can never lasso I am also what surrounds you: my brain scattered with your tincans, bones, empty shells, the litter of your invasions. I am the space you desecrate as you pass through.”
Margaret Atwood (born 1939) first seen 1974 wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
Recorded in: Backdrop addresses cowboy" (1974)
“When you hear me singing you get the rifle down and the flashlight, aiming for my brain, but you always miss and when you set out the poison I piss on it to warn the others.”
Margaret Atwood (born 1939) first seen 1974 wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
Recorded in: Rat Song" (1974)
“I am yours. If you feed me garbage, I will sing a song of garbage. This is a hymn.”
Margaret Atwood (born 1939) wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“In view of the fading animals the proliferation of sewers and fears the sea clogging, the air nearing extinction we should be kind, we should take warning, we should forgive each other Instead we are opposite, we touch as though attacking, the gifts we bring even in good faith maybe warp in our hands to implements, to manoeuvres”
Margaret Atwood (born 1939) wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“In restaurants we argue over which of us will pay for your funeral though the real question is whether or not I will make you immortal.”
Margaret Atwood (born 1939) wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“There is more than one kind of freedom, said Aunt Lydia. Freedom to and freedom from. In the days of anarchy, it was freedom to. Now you are being given freedom from. Don't underrate it.”
Margaret Atwood (born 1939) wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“Tell, rather than write, because I have nothing to write with and writing is in any case forbidden. But if it’s a story, even in my head, I must be telling it to someone. You don’t tell a story only to yourself. There’s always someone else. Even when there is no one.”
Margaret Atwood (born 1939) wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“Nolite te bastardes carborundorum.”
Margaret Atwood (born 1939) wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“Ignoring isn’t the same as ignorance, you have to work at it.”
Margaret Atwood (born 1939) wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“You must cultivate poverty of spirit. Blessed are the meek. She didn’t go on to say anything about inheriting the earth.”
Margaret Atwood (born 1939) wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“These pictures were supposed to be erotic, and I thought they were, at the time; but I see now what they were really about. They were paintings about suspended animation; about waiting, about objects not in use. They were paintings about boredom. But maybe boredom is erotic, when women do it, for men.”
Margaret Atwood (born 1939) wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“The sitting room is subdued, symmetrical; it’s one of the shapes money takes when it freezes.”
Margaret Atwood (born 1939) wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“Blessed are they that mourn, for they shall be comforted. Nobody said when.”
Margaret Atwood (born 1939) wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“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 (born 1939) wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“A man is just a woman’s strategy for making other women.”
Margaret Atwood (born 1939) wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“You can think clearly only with your clothes on.”
Margaret Atwood (born 1939) wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“He was not a monster, to her. Probably he had some endearing trait: he whistled, off key, in the shower, he had a yen for truffles, he called his dog Liebchen and made it sit up for little pieces of raw steak. How easy it is to invent a humanity, for anyone at all.”
Margaret Atwood (born 1939) wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“I'll take care of it, Luke said. And because he said it instead of her, I knew he meant kill. That is what you have to do before you kill, I thought. You have to create an it, where none was before. You do that first, in your head, and then you make it real.”
Margaret Atwood (born 1939) wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“(She is reciting the Lord’s prayer) Now we come to forgiveness. Don’t worry about forgiving me right now. There are more important things. For instance: keep the others safe, if they are safe. Don’t let them suffer too much. If they have to die, let it be fast. You might even provide a Heaven for them. We need You for that. Hell we can make for ourselves.”
Margaret Atwood (born 1939) wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“You can’t make an omelette without breaking eggs, is what he says. We thought we could do better. Better? I say, in a small voice. How can he think this is better? Better never means better for everyone, he says. It always means worse, for some.”
Margaret Atwood (born 1939) wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“Freedom, like everything else, is relative.”
Margaret Atwood (born 1939) wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“A movie about the past is not the same as the past.”
Margaret Atwood (born 1939) wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“By telling you anything at all I'm at least believing in you, I believe you're there, I believe you into being. Because I'm telling you this story I will your existence. I tell, therefore you are.”
Margaret Atwood (born 1939) wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“As all historians know, the past is a great darkness, and filled with echoes. Voices may reach us from it; but what they say to us is imbued with the obscurity of the matrix out of which they come; and, try as we may, we cannot always decipher them precisely in the clearer light of our own day.”
Margaret Atwood (born 1939) wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“Better never means better for everyone." The Handmaid's Tale (TV Series 2017)”
Margaret Atwood (born 1939) wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“She has been condemned to death by hanging. A man may escape this death by becoming the hangman, a woman by marrying the hangman. But at the present time there is no hangman; thus there is no escape. There is only a death, indefinitely postponed. This is not fantasy, it is history.”
Margaret Atwood (born 1939) wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“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.”
Margaret Atwood (born 1939) wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“In order to avoid her death, her particular death, with wrung neck and swollen tongue, she must marry the hangman.”
Margaret Atwood (born 1939) wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“She must transform his hands so they will be willing to twist the rope around throats that have been singled out as hers was, throats other than hers. She must marry the hangman or no one, but that is not so bad. Who else is there to marry?”
Margaret Atwood (born 1939) wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“You wonder about her crime. She was condemned to death for stealing clothes from her employer, from the wife of her employer. She wished to make herself more beautiful. This desire in servants was not legal.”
Margaret Atwood (born 1939) wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source