Margaret Atwood: Trending quotes

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Margaret Atwood: 696 quotes32 likes

“I wait. I compose myself. My self is a thing I must now compose, as one composes a speech. What I must present is a made thing, not something born”

Margaret Atwood book The Handmaid's Tale

Source: The Handmaid's Tale

“it's doors I'm afraid of because I can't see through them, its the door opening by itself in the wind I'm afraid of.”

Margaret Atwood book Surfacing

Source: Surfacing

“If you don't like it, change it, we said, to each other and to ourselves. And so we would change for the man, for another one. Change, we were sure, was for the better always. We were revisionists; what we revised was ourselves.”

Margaret Atwood book The Handmaid's Tale

Source: The Handmaid's Tale

“When power is scarce, a little of it is tempting.”

Margaret Atwood book The Handmaid's Tale

Source: The Handmaid's Tale

“I've learned quite a lot, over the years, by avoiding what I was supposed to be learning.”

Margaret Atwood

Source: Moral Disorder and Other Stories

“What is the real breath of a man — the breathing out or the breathing in?”

Margaret Atwood book The Blind Assassin

Source: The Blind Assassin

“But in life, a tragedy is not one long scream. It includes everything that led up to it. Hour after trivial hour, day after day, year after year, and then the sudden moment: the knife stab, the shell burst, the plummet of the car from a bridge.”

Margaret Atwood book The Blind Assassin

Source: The Blind Assassin

“I've never understood why people consider youth a time of freedom and joy. It's probably because they have forgotten their own.”

Margaret Atwood

“The proper study of Mankind is Everything.”

Margaret Atwood book Oryx and Crake

Source: Oryx and Crake

“Life is warped. I'm just in sync.”

Margaret Atwood book MaddAddam

Source: MaddAddam

“The fabric of democracy is always fragile everywhere because it depends on the will of citizens to protect it, and when they become scared, when it becomes dangerous for them to defend it, it can go very quickly.”

Margaret Atwood

The Progressive interview (2010)

“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

Selected Poems 1976-1986 (1987), Marrying the Hangman

“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

Turning Pages: The Life and Literature of Margaret Atwood (2007)

“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?"”

Margaret Atwood

I was so proud of them! It was like having 33,000 precocious grandchildren!
"Atwood in the Twittersphere", The New York Review of Books (29 March 2010)

“In general I might agree with you:
women should not contemplate war,
should not weigh tactics impartially,
or evade the word enemy,
or view both sides and denounce nothing.
Women should march for peace,
or hand out white feathers to arouse bravery,
spit themselves on bayonets
to protect their babies,
whose skulls will be split anyway,
or, having been raped repeatedly,
hang themselves with their own hair.
These are the functions that inspire general comfort.
That, and the knitting of socks for the troops
and a sort of moral cheerleading.
Also: mourning the dead.
Sons, lovers, and so forth.
All the killed children.”

Margaret Atwood book Morning in the Burned House

Morning in the Burned House (1995), The Loneliness of the Military Historian

“Everyone said he was a fool.
Everyone said she was a clever woman.
They used the word ensnare.”

Margaret Atwood

Selected Poems 1976-1986 (1987), Marrying the Hangman

“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 book Bodily Harm

Bodily Harm (1981)

“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

Source: The Handmaid’s Tale (1985), Chapter 24