Margaret Atwood: Trending quotes

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Margaret Atwood: 696   quotes 31   likes

“In the spring, at the end of the day, you should smell like dirt.”

Margaret Atwood book Bluebeard's Egg

Source: Bluebeard's Egg

Beauty , Spring

“Maybe the life I think I'm living is a paranoid delusion… 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 book The Handmaid's Tale

Source: The Handmaid's Tale

Life , Money , People , Way

“The moment of betrayal is the worst, the moment when you know beyond any doubt that you've been betrayed: that some other human being has wished you that much evil”

Margaret Atwood book The Handmaid's Tale

Source: The Handmaid's Tale

Evil , Betrayal

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

Margaret Atwood book Cat's Eye

Source: Cat's Eye

Women , Tea

“If I thought this would never happen again I would die. But this is wrong, nobody dies from lack of sex. It's lack of love we die from.”

Margaret Atwood book The Handmaid's Tale

Source: The Handmaid's Tale

Love , Sex

“You can only be jealous of someone who has something you think you ought to have yourself.”

Margaret Atwood book The Handmaid's Tale

Source: The Handmaid's Tale

Thinking

“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 book The Handmaid's Tale

Source: The Handmaid's Tale

Missing You , Beauty , Thinking , Past

“Tell me where it hurts, she'd say. Stop howling. Just calm down and show me where.

But some people can't tell where it hurts. They can't calm down. They can't ever stop howling.”

Margaret Atwood
People , Hurt

“The past is so much safer, because whatever's in it has already happened. It can't be changed; so, in a way, there's nothing to dread.”

Margaret Atwood book The Heart Goes Last

Source: The Heart Goes Last

Way , Change , Past

“Perhaps I write for no one. Perhaps for the same person children are writing for when they scrawl their names in the snow.”

Margaret Atwood
Children , Personality

“The best way of keeping a secret is to pretend there isn't one.”

Margaret Atwood book The Blind Assassin

Source: The Blind Assassin

Secret , Way

“Men are afraid that women will laugh at them. Women are afraid that men will kill them.”

Margaret Atwood

Context: "Why do men feel threatened by women?" I asked a male friend of mine. (I love that wonderful rhetorical device, "a male friend of mine." It's often used by female journalists when they want to say something particularly bitchy but don't want to be held responsible for it themselves. It also lets people know that you do have male friends, that you aren't one of those fire-breathing mythical monsters, The Radical Feminists, who walk around with little pairs of scissors and kick men in the shins if they open doors for you. "A male friend of mine" also gives — let us admit it — a certain weight to the opinions expressed.) So this male friend of mine, who does by the way exist, conveniently entered into the following dialogue. "I mean," I said, "men are bigger, most of the time, they can run faster, strangle better, and they have on the average a lot more money and power." "They're afraid women will laugh at them," he said. "Undercut their world view." Then I asked some women students in a quickie poetry seminar I was giving, "Why do women feel threatened by men?" "They're afraid of being killed," they said.

For women , Women , Men

“All stories are about wolves. All worth repeating, that is. Anything else is sentimental drivel.”

Margaret Atwood book The Blind Assassin

Source: The Blind Assassin (2000)
Context: 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.

“We battled in secret, undeclared, and after a while I no longer fought back because I never won. The only defense was flight, invisibility.”

Margaret Atwood book Surfacing

Source: Surfacing

Secret

“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.”

Margaret Atwood book Cat's Eye

Source: Cat's Eye

Water , Time

“Romance takes place in the middle distance. Romance is looking in at yourself through a window clouded with dew. Romance means leaving things out: where life grunts and shuffles, romance only sighs.”

Margaret Atwood
Life

“Come away with me, he said, we will live on a desert island. I said, I am a desert island. It was not what he had in mind.”

Margaret Atwood