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Margaret Atwood
130 quotes
“He was not condemned to death, freedom awaited him. What was the temptation, the one that worked? Perhaps he wanted to live with a woman whose life he had saved, who had seen down into the earth but had nevertheless followed him back up to life. It was his only chance to be a hero, to one person at least, for if he became the hangman the others would despise him. He was in prison for wounding another man, on one finger of the right hand, with a sword. This too is history.”
Margaret Atwood (born 1939) wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“My friends, who are both women, tell me their stories, which cannot be believed and which are true. They are horror stories and they have not happened to me, they have not yet happened to me, they have happened to me but we are detached, we watch our unbelief with horror.”
Margaret Atwood (born 1939) wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“He wants only the simple things: a chair, someone to pull off his shoes, someone to watch him while he talks, with admiration and fear, gratitude if possible, someone in whom to plunge himself for rest and renewal. These things can best be had by marrying a woman who has been condemned to death by other men for wishing to be beautiful. There is a wide choice.”
Margaret Atwood (born 1939) wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“Everyone said he was a fool. Everyone said she was a clever woman. They used the word ensnare.”
Margaret Atwood (born 1939) wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“The fact is there are no stories I can tell my friends that will make them feel better. History cannot be erased, although we can soothe ourselves by speculating about it.”
Margaret Atwood (born 1939) wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“NOTES: Jean Cololère, a drummer in the colonial troops at Québec, was imprisoned for duelling in 1751. In the cell next to his was Françoise Laurent, who had been sentenced to hang for stealing. Except for letters of pardon, the only way at the time for someone under sentence of death to escape hanging was, for a man, to become a hangman, or, for a woman, to marry one. Françoise persuaded Cololère to apply for the vacant (and undesirable) post of executioner, and also to marry her. —Condensed from the Dictionary of Canadian Biography, Volume III, 1741-1770”
Margaret Atwood (born 1939) wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“There is so much silence between the words, you say. You say, The sensed absence of God and the sensed presence amount to much the same thing, only in reverse. You say, I have too much white clothing. You start to hum. Several hundred years ago this could have been mysticism or heresy. It isn’t now. Outside there are sirens. Someone’s been run over. The century grinds on.”
Margaret Atwood (born 1939) wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“Confess: it’s my profession that alarms you. This is why few people ask me to dinner, though Lord knows I don’t go out of my way to be scary.”
Margaret Atwood (born 1939) wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“If I roll my eyes and mutter, if I clutch at my heart and scream in horror like a third-rate actress chewing up a mad scene, I do it in private and nobody sees but the bathroom mirror.”
Margaret Atwood (born 1939) wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“Instead of this, I tell what I hope will pass as truth. A blunt thing, not lovely. The truth is seldom welcome, especially at dinner, though I am good at what I do. My trade is courage and atrocities. I look at them and do not condemn. I write things down the way they happened, as near as can be remembered. I don’t ask why, because it is mostly the same. Wars happen because the ones who start them think they can win.”
Margaret Atwood (born 1939) wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“In the interests of research I have walked on many battlefields that once were liquid with pulped men’s bodies and spangled with exploded shells and splayed bone. All of them have been green again by the time I got there. Each has inspired a few good quotes in its day. Sad marble angels brood like hens over the grassy nests where nothing hatches.”
Margaret Atwood (born 1939) wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“I’m just as human as you. But it’s no use asking me for a final statement. As I say, I deal in tactics. Also statistics: for every year of peace there have been four hundred years of war.”
Margaret Atwood (born 1939) wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“I became a poet at the age of sixteen. I did not intend to do it. It was not my fault.”
Margaret Atwood (born 1939) wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“I did not know that the rules about these things were different if you were female. I did not know that "poetess" was an insult, and that I myself would some day be called one. I did not know that to be told I had transcended my gender would be considered a compliment. I didn't know — yet — that black was compulsory. All of that was in the future. When I was sixteen, it was simple. Poetry existed; therefore it could be written; and nobody had told me — yet — the many, many reasons why it could not be written by me.”
Margaret Atwood (born 1939) wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“I will pass over my flirtation with journalism as a way of making a living, an idea I dropped when I discovered that in the fifties — unlike now — female journalists always ended up writing the obituaries and the ladies' page. But how was I to make a living? There was not a roaring market in poetry, there, then. I thought of running away and being a waitress, which I later tried, but got very tired and thin; there's nothing like clearing away other people's mushed-up dinners to make you lose your appetite”
Margaret Atwood (born 1939) wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“After a year or two of keeping my head down and trying to pass myself off as a normal person, I made contact with the five other people at my university who were interested in writing; and through them, and some of my teachers, I discovered that there was a whole subterranean Wonderland of Canadian writing that was going on just out of general earshot and sight”
Margaret Atwood (born 1939) wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“Like all twenty-one-year-old poets, I thought I would be dead by thirty, and Sylvia Plath had not set a helpful example. For a while there, you were made to feel that, if a poet and female, you could not really be serious about it unless you'd made a least one suicide attempt. So I felt I was running out of time.”
Margaret Atwood (born 1939) wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“A lot of poets published their own work then; unlike novels, poetry was short, and therefore cheap to do. We had to print each poem separately, and then disassemble it, as there were not enough a's for the whole book; the cover was done with a lino-block. We printed 250 copies, and sold them through bookstores, for 50 cents each. They now go in the rare book trade for eighteen hundred dollars a pop. Wish I'd kept some.”
Margaret Atwood (born 1939) wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“Her mother volunteered that the thing about people from another culture was that you could never tell whether they were insane or not because their ways were so different.”
Margaret Atwood (born 1939) first seen 1996 wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
Recorded in: Short story, 'The Man from Mars' , at p.26 [Page numbers per the 1996 Vintage Books paperback edition.]
“She attracted people he called "sponges".”
Margaret Atwood (born 1939) wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“It must be said at the outset that the field of mental illness has always been debatable ground. Who is sane, who isn't, and who is qualified to judge? Standards have fluctuated wildly, and abuses have been numerous. In the last century, in the United States, a wife could be committed to an asylum on the say-so of her husband and two easily-paid-off doctors alone, and there are cases on record of wives who were "put away" for holding theological opinions that differed from those of the husband, or for refusing to have as much sex as he would like.”
Margaret Atwood (born 1939) wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“That old standby of melodrama, the rich uncle shoved into the bin so the greedy relatives could get their hands on his estate, had a sound basis in fact. The Victorians cleaned up the straw and the chains of the old Bedlam-like institutions of the eighteenth century, but they didn't always clean up the practices. Patients were drugged, starved, drained of vast quantities of blood, beaten up, swung from ropes, immersed in cold water and whirled around in the air upside-down, all in the belief that it would improve their mental states. Ask yourself whether this is likely to have been true.”
Margaret Atwood (born 1939) wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“For every age there is a popular idea about what madness is, what causes it, and how a mad person should look and behave; and it's usually these popular ideas, rather than those of medical professionals, that turn up in songs and stories and plays and books.”
Margaret Atwood (born 1939) wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“When women let their hair down, it means either sexiness or craziness or death, the three by Victorian times having become virtually synonymous.”
Margaret Atwood (born 1939) wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“We tend to think of Freud as a great innovator, but the truth is that he himself rested, like a ship on an iceberg, on a huge body of theory and knowledge which had accumulated before his time. Even the famous Unconscious had made its appearance at least seven decades earlier. As for such supposedly modern phenomena as multiple personalities, the vogue for them began in the first half of the nineteenth century; and the first case in which the perpetrator of a murder pleaded amnesia, and got off, was in the eighteen eighties.”
Margaret Atwood (born 1939) wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“Ten days after the war ended, my sister Laura drove a car off a bridge. The bridge was being repaired: she went right through the Danger sign. The car fell a hundred feet into the ravine, smashing through the treetops feathery with new leaves, then burst into flames and rolled down into the shallow creek at the bottom. Chunks of the bridge fell on top of it. Nothing much was left but charred smithereens.”
Margaret Atwood (born 1939) wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“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.”
Margaret Atwood (born 1939) wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“The only way you can write the truth is to assume that what you set down will never be read. Not by any other person, and not even by yourself at some later date. Otherwise you begin excusing yourself. You must see the writing as emerging like a long scroll of ink from the index finger of your right hand; you must see your left hand erasing it.”
Margaret Atwood (born 1939) wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“Adam named the living animals, MaddAddam names the dead ones.”
Margaret Atwood (born 1939) wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“Nature is to zoos as God is to churches.”
Margaret Atwood (born 1939) wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“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.”
Margaret Atwood (born 1939) wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“After everything that's happened, how can the world still be so beautiful? Because it is.”
Margaret Atwood (born 1939) wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“All it takes,” said Crake, “is the elimination of one generation. One generation of anything. Beetles, trees, microbes, scientists, speakers of French, whatever. Break the link in time between one generation and the next, and it’s game over forever.”
Margaret Atwood (born 1939) wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“When any civilization is dust and ashes," he said, "art is all that's left over. Images, words, music. Imaginative structures. Meaning—human meaning, that is—is defined by them. You have to admit that.”
Margaret Atwood (born 1939) wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“There's something to be said for hunger: at least it lets you know you're still alive.”
Margaret Atwood (born 1939) wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“He has to find more and better ways of occupying his time. His time, what a bankrupt idea, as if he's been given a box of time belonging to him alone, stuffed to the brim with hours and minutes that he can spend like money. Trouble is, the box has holes in it and the time is running out, no matter what he does with it.”
Margaret Atwood (born 1939) wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“I am not my childhood," Snowman says out loud.”
Margaret Atwood (born 1939) wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“Anyway, maybe there weren't any solutions. Human society, corpses and rubble. It never learned, it made the same cretinous mistakes over and over, trading short-term gain for long-term pain.”
Margaret Atwood (born 1939) wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“Everybody knew. Nobody admitted to knowing. If other people began to discuss it, you tuned them out, because what they were saying was both so obvious and so unthinkable. We are using up the Earth. It is almost gone.”
Margaret Atwood (born 1939) wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“What am I living for and what am I dying for are the same question.”
Margaret Atwood (born 1939) wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“You can forget who you are if you're alone too much.”
Margaret Atwood (born 1939) wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“we must be a beacon of hope, because if you tell people there's nothing they can do, they will do worse than nothing.”
Margaret Atwood (born 1939) wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“I could see how you could do extreme things for the person you loved. Adam One said that when you loved a person, that love might not always get returned the way you wanted, but it was a good thing anyway because love went out all around you like an energy wave, and a creature you didn't know would be helped by it.”
Margaret Atwood (born 1939) wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“How easy it is, treachery. You just slide into it.”
Margaret Atwood (born 1939) wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“We shouldn't have been so scornful; we should have had compassion. But compassion takes work, and we were young.”
Margaret Atwood (born 1939) wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“Without the light, no chance; without the dark, no dance.”
Margaret Atwood (born 1939) wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“As with all knowledge, once you knew it, you couldn't imagine how it was that you hadn't known it before. Like stage magic, knowledge before you knew it took place before your very eyes, but you were looking elsewhere.”
Margaret Atwood (born 1939) wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“I'm fine," said Pilar, "for the moment. And the moment is the only time we can be fine in.”
Margaret Atwood (born 1939) wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“You couldn’t leave words lying around where our enemies might find them.”
Margaret Atwood (born 1939) wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“It's better to hope than mope!”
Margaret Atwood (born 1939) wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source