Margaret Atwood Quotes
Margaret Atwood Quotes
Time has not stood still. It has washed over me, washed me away as if I’m nothing more than a woman of sand, left by a careless child too near the water.
Every ending is arbitrary because the end is where you write The end. A period, a dot of punctuation, a point of stasis. A pinprick in the paper: you could put your eye to it and see-through, to the other side, to the beginning of something else. Or, as Tony says to her students, Time is not solid, like wood, but a fluid, like water or the wind. It doesn’t come neatly cut into even-sized length, into decades and centuries. Nevertheless, for our purposes, we have to pretend it does. The end of any history is a lie in which we all agree to conspire.
Water does not resist. Water flows. When you plunge your hand into it, all you feel is a caress. Water is not a solid wall, it will not stop you. But water always goes where it wants to go, and nothing, in the end, can stand against it. Water is patient. Dripping water wears away a stone. Remember that, my child. Remember you are half water. If you can’t go through an obstacle, go around it. Water does.
A hot wind was blowing around my head, the strands of my hair lifting and swirling in it, like ink spilled in water.
In his student days, he used to argue that if a woman has no other course open to her but starvation, prostitution, or throwing herself from a bridge, then surely the prostitute, who has shown the most tenacious instinct for self-preservation, should be considered stronger and saner than her frailer and no longer living sisters. One couldn’t have it both ways, he’d pointed out: if women are seduced and abandoned they’re supposed to go mad, but if they survive, and seduce in their turn, then they were mad to begin with.
A word after a word after a word is power.
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.
The astrologers would tell that the U.S. is ruled by fire and Canada is ruled by water. Short version: You pep us up, we cool you down.
Reading and writing, like everything else, improve with practice. And, of course, if there are no young readers and writers, there will shortly be no older ones. Literacy will be dead, and democracy – which many belief goes hand in hand with it – will be dead as well.
Reading … changes you. You aren’t the same person after you’ve read a particular book as you were before, and you will read the next book, unless both are Harlequin Romances, in a slightly different way.
Communications technology changes possibilities for communication, but that doesn’t mean it changes the inherited structure of the brain. So you may think that you’re addicted to online reading, but as soon as it isn’t available anymore, your brain will pretty immediately adjust to other forms of reading. It’s a habit like all habits.
I read for pleasure and that is the moment I learn the most.
When you are in the middle of a story it isn’t a story at all, but only a confusion; a dark roaring, a blindness, a wreckage of shattered glass and splintered wood; like a house in a whirlwind, or else a boat crushed by the icebergs or swept over the rapids, and all aboard powerless to stop it. It’s only afterward that it becomes anything like a story at all. When you are telling it, to yourself or to someone else.
Margaret Atwood Quotes from Cat’s Eye
Forgiving men is so much easier than forgiving women.
I lie on the floor, washed by nothing and hanging on. I cry at night. I am afraid of hearing voices, or a voice. I have come to the edge, of the land. I could get pushed over.
Hatred would have been easier. With hatred, I would have known what to do. Hatred is clear, metallic, one-handed, unwavering; unlike love.
I knew what love was supposed to be: obsession with undertones of nausea.
Short Margaret Atwood Quotes on Water
You don’t look back along time but down through it, like water. Sometimes this comes to the surface, sometimes that, sometimes nothing. Nothing goes away.
The body is so easily damaged, so easily disposed of, water and chemicals is all it is, hardly more to it than a jellyfish drying on sand.
Canadians are fond of a good disaster, especially if it has ice, water, or snow in it. You thought the national flag was about a leaf, didn’t you? Look harder. It’s where someone got axed in the snow.
Then sail, my fine lady, on the billowing wave – The water below is as dark as the grave, And maybe you’ll sink in your little blue boat – It’s hope, and hope only, that keeps us afloat
Margaret Atwood Quotes Oryx and Crake
These things sneak up on him for no reason, these flashes of irrational happiness. It’s probably a vitamin deficiency.
If he wants to be an asshole, it’s a free country. Millions before him have made the same life choice.
After everything that’s happened, how can the world still be so beautiful? Because it is.
There’s something to be said for hunger: at least it lets you know you’re still alive.
Short Margaret Atwood Quotes on Nature
Nature is to zoos as God is to churches.
Nature is an expert in cost-benefit analysis,’ she says. ‘Although she does her accounting a little differently. As for debts, she always collects in the long run…
In the spring, at the end of the day, you should smell like dirt.
Margaret Atwood Quotes on Writing
Everyone thinks writers must know more about the inside of the human head, but that’s wrong. They know less, that’s why they write. Trying to find out what everyone else takes for granted.
If I waited for perfection… I would never write a word.
You most likely need a thesaurus, a rudimentary grammar book, and a grip on reality. This latter means: there’s no free lunch. Writing is work. It’s also gambling. You don’t get a pension plan. Other people can help you a bit, but essentially you’re on your own. Nobody is making you do this: you chose it, so don’t whine.
I write as if I’ve lived a lot of things I haven’t lived.
Margaret Atwood Quotes on Alias Grace
I am afraid of falling into hopeless despair, over my wasted life, and I am still not sure how it happened.
Murderess is a strong word to have attached to you. It has a smell to it, that word – musky and oppressive, like dead flowers in a vase. Sometimes at night I whisper it over to myself: Murderess, Murderess. It rustles, like a taffeta skirt across the floor.
There is no fool like an educated fool.
Because you may think a bed is a peaceful thing, Sir, and to you it may mean rest and comfort and a good night’s sleep. But it isn’t so for everyone; and there are many dangerous things that may take place in a bed.
Margaret Atwood Quotes Handmaid’s Tale
Nolite te bastardes carborundorum.
Don’t let the bastards grind you down.
Better never means better for everyone… It always means worse, for some.
When we think of the past it’s the beautiful things we pick out. We want to believe it was all like that.
Margaret Atwood Quotes about Reading
Repeat reading for me shares a few things with hot-water bottles and thumb sucking: comfort,
familiarity, the recurrence of the expected.
More of your brain is involved when reading than it is when you watch television… because you are supplying just about everything… you’re a creator.
A reader can never tell if it’s a real thimble or an imaginary thimble, because by the time you’re reading it, they’re the same. It’s a thimble. It’s in the book.
It is my contention that the process of reading is part of the process of writing, the necessary completion without which writing can hardly be said to exist.
Margaret Atwood Quotes on Feminism
The 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.
Does feminist mean large unpleasant person who’ll shout at you or someone who believes women are human beings. To me it’s the latter, so I sign up
Men are afraid that women will laugh at them. Women are afraid that men will kill them.
Margaret Atwood Quotes on Blind Assassin
There were a lot of gods. Gods always come in handy, they justify almost anything.
Touch comes before sight, before speech. It is the first language and the last, and it always tells the truth.
Women have curious ways of hurting someone else. They hurt themselves instead; or else they do it so the guy doesn’t even know he’s been hurt until much later. Then he finds out. Then his dick falls off.
The best way of keeping a secret is to pretend there isn’t one.
Short Margaret Atwood Quotes on Dystopia
Our problem right now is that we’re so specialized that if the lights go out, there are a huge number of people who are not going to know what to do. But within every dystopia there’s a little utopia.
Short Margaret Atwood Quotes on Love
Love is giving, marriage is buying and selling. You can’t put love into a contract.
The Eskimos had fifty-two names for snow because it was important to them: there ought to be as many for love.
