Margaret Atwood: Trending quotes (page 16)

“For a thousand years, the Bible was almost the only book people read, if they could read at all. The stories that were officially told and portrayed were Biblical and religious stories. That other fount of Western civilization as we know it today — the Greek classics — went largely unknown until the Renaissance. For our purposes, there's a noteworthy difference between these two literatures: in the Bible people are hardly ever said to be mad as such, whereas in Greek drama they go off their rockers with alarming frequency. It was the rediscovery of the classics that stimulated the long procession of literary madpeople of the past four hundred years.”

Margaret Atwood

Ophelia Has a Lot to Answer For (1997)

People , Books , Literature , Reading

“Roughing it builds a boy's character, but only certain kinds of roughing it.”

Margaret Atwood book Wilderness Tips

Wilderness Tips (1991)

Boy

“What Elizabethan playwrights learned from the Greek classics was not theories of insanity, but dramatic practice — that is, madness is a dandy theatrical element. It focuses the audience's attention and increases suspense, since you never know what a mad person may get up to next; and Shakespeare himself makes use of it in many forms. In King Lear, there's a scene in which one man pretending to be mad, another who has really gone mad, and a third who has probably always been a little addled, are brought together for purposes of comparison, irony, pathos, and tour de force acting. In Hamlet, there are two variations — Hamlet himself, who assumes madness, and Ophelia, who really does go winsomely bonkers. In MacBeth, it's Lady MacBeth who snaps.”

Margaret Atwood

Ophelia Has a Lot to Answer For (1997)

Learning , Personality , Madness

“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

Ophelia Has a Lot to Answer For (1997)

Sex

“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

On Writing Poetry (1995)

Feeling , Suicide , Time , Help

“I am yours. If you feed me garbage,
I will sing a song of garbage.
This is a hymn.”

Margaret Atwood

"Pig Song" http://www.poetryfoundation.org/archive/poem.html?id=21982
Selected Poems 1965-1975 (1976)

Singing

“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

Ophelia Has a Lot to Answer For (1997)

Death , Women , Time

“Blessed are they that mourn, for they shall be comforted.
Nobody said when.”

Margaret Atwood

Source: The Handmaid’s Tale (1985), Chapter 15 (p. 89)

“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

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

Feeling , History

“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

On Writing Poetry (1995)

People , Way , Idea

“A divorce is like an amputation; you survive, but there’s less of you.”

Margaret Atwood

Time magazine (19 March 1973)

Heartbreaking

“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

Ophelia Has a Lot to Answer For (1997)

Truth , Knowledge , Thinking , Appearance

“However, there are all sorts of behaviours in the Bible that might be called mad now, but aren't designated as insanity by the text itself. People see visions — of angels going up and down ladders, of fiery chariots — and, like Moses, who hears a bush talking, and Balaam the prophet who has a conversation with his donkey, they hear voices of those who cannot be said to be present in any usual sense of the word. They also speak in tongues, as the disciples do at Pentecost. Like madness, the visions, the voices and the speaking in tongues are due to external and usually divine agencies. In a world so permeated with supernatural powers, there are no accidents, and in one so riddled with prophets — who went into a frenzy while prophesying — many more kinds of behaviour were accepted as normal, at least for a prophet or an inspired person, than would be the case now. John the Baptist, dressed in animal skins and wandering around in the wilderness denouncing his social superiors, was not thought of as a de-institutionalized street person who's gone off his medications, but as a saint. And this was the pattern for mediaeval views of aberrant behaviour — if you were acting crazy it was a divine punishment, or else you were possessed, by powers either divine or demonic — perhaps aided, in the latter case, by witches.”

Margaret Atwood

Ophelia Has a Lot to Answer For (1997)

People , World , Angels , Sense

“A movie about the past is not the same as the past.”

Margaret Atwood

Source: The Handmaid’s Tale (1985), Chapter 37 (p. 235)

Past

“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

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

Death , Men , Fear , Beauty

“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

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

Death , History , Time

“Time is not a line but a dimension, like the dimensions of space.”

Margaret Atwood book Cat's Eye

Cat's Eye (1988)

Time

“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

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

“Freedom, like everything else, is relative.”

Margaret Atwood

Source: The Handmaid’s Tale (1985), Chapter 36 (p. 231)

Freedom

“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

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

Death , Beauty , Clothes