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Margaret Atwood Quotes
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Margaret Eleanor Atwood, is a Canadian poet, novelist, literary critic, essayist, inventor, and environmental activist. She is a winner of the Arthur C. Clarke Award, Prince of Asturias Award for Literature and the Peace Prize of the German Book Trade. She has been shortlisted for the Booker Prize five times, winning once, and has been a finalist for the Governor General's Award several times, winning twice. In 2001, she was inducted into Canada's Walk of Fame. She is also a founder of the Writers' Trust of Canada, a non-profit literary organization that seeks to encourage Canada's writing community. Among innumerable contributions to Canadian literature, she was a founding trustee of the Griffin Poetry Prize.

Atwood is also the inventor, and developer, of the LongPen and associated technologies that facilitate the remote robotic writing of documents. She is the Co-Founder and a Director of Syngrafii Inc. , a company that she started in 2004 to develop, produce and distribute the LongPen technology. She holds various patents related to the LongPen technologies.

While she is best known for her work as a novelist, she has also published fifteen books of poetry. Many of her poems have been inspired by myths and fairy tales, which have been interests of hers from an early age. Atwood has published short stories in Tamarack Review, Alphabet, Harper's, CBC Anthology, Ms., Saturday Night, and many other magazines. She has also published four collections of stories and three collections of unclassifiable short prose works.

✵ 18. November 1939  •  Other names Margaret Eleanor Atwood
Margaret Atwood photo
Margaret Atwood: 348 quotes32 likes

Margaret Atwood Quotes

“Forgiving men is so much easier than forgiving women.”

Margaret Atwood

Source: CAT'S EYE.

“If he wants to be an asshole, it's a free country. Millions before him have made the same life choice.”

Margaret Atwood book Oryx and Crake

Source: Oryx and Crake

“Potential has a shelf life.”

Margaret Atwood

Source: CAT'S EYE.

“A home filled with nothing but yourself. It's heavy, that lightness. It's crushing, that emptiness.”

Margaret Atwood

Source: The Tent

“I want to be held and told my name. I want to be valued, in ways that I am not; I want to be more than valuable. I repeat my former name; remind myself of what I once could do, how others saw me. I want to steal something.”

Margaret Atwood book The Handmaid's Tale

Source: The Handmaid's Tale

“There were a lot of gods. Gods always come in handy, they justify almost anything.”

Margaret Atwood book The Blind Assassin

Source: The Blind Assassin

“The Eskimo has fifty-two names for snow because it is important to them; there ought to be as many for love.”

Margaret Atwood book Surfacing

Surfacing (1972) p. 107 <br class="br">The premise for this quote is now known to be a linguistic myth stemming from the early 20th century work of Franz Boas. This quote by Atwood has been cited as an example of the perpetuation of this myth https://books.google.ca/books/about/White_Lies_about_the_Inuit.html?id=i-osjdNH3g8C. <br class="br">Variant: The Eskimos had 52 names for snow because it was important to them; there ought to be as many for love.

“I feel like the word shatter.”

Margaret Atwood book The Handmaid's Tale

Source: The Handmaid's Tale

“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.”

Margaret Atwood

Source: CAT'S EYE.

“Happiness is a garden walled with glass: there's no way in or out. In Paradise there are no stories, because there are no journeys. It's loss and regret and misery and yearning that drive the story forward, along its twisted road.”

Margaret Atwood book The Blind Assassin

Source: The Blind Assassin

“This is how the girl who couldn't speak and the man who couldn't see fell in love.”

Margaret Atwood book The Blind Assassin

Source: The Blind Assassin

“Tell, rather than write, because I have nothing to write with and writing is in any case forbidden. But if it’s a story, even in my head, I must be telling it to someone. You don’t tell a story only to yourself. There’s always someone else.
Even when there is no one.”

Margaret Atwood book The Handmaid's Tale

Source: The Handmaid’s Tale (1985), Chapter 7 (pp. 39-40)
Source: The Handmaid's Tale

“All you have to do, I tell myself, is keep your mouth shut and look stupid. It shouldn't be that hard.”

Margaret Atwood book The Handmaid's Tale

Source: The Handmaid's Tale

“We yearned for the future. How did we learn it, that talent for insatiability?”

Margaret Atwood book The Handmaid's Tale

Source: The Handmaid's Tale

“Never pray for justice, because you might get some.”

Margaret Atwood book Cat's Eye

Source: Cat's Eye

“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 book Oryx and Crake

Source: Oryx and Crake

“Vanity is becoming a nuisance, I can see why women give it up, eventually. But I'm not ready for that yet.”

Margaret Atwood book Cat's Eye

Source: Cat's Eye

“Beginnings are sudden, but also insidious. They creep up on you sideways, they keep to the shadows, they lurk unrecognized. Then, later, they spring.”

Margaret Atwood book The Blind Assassin

Source: The Blind Assassin

“I want everything back, the way it was. But there is no point to it, this wanting.”

Margaret Atwood book The Handmaid's Tale

Source: The Handmaid's Tale

“If I love you, is that a fact or a weapon?”

Margaret Atwood book Power Politics

Source: Power Politics

“Truly amazing, what people can get used to, as long as there are a few compensations.”

Margaret Atwood book The Handmaid's Tale

Source: The Handmaid's Tale

“is a futile word. It's about what didn't happen. It belongs in a parallel universe. It belongs in another dimension of space.”

Margaret Atwood book The Blind Assassin

Source: The Blind Assassin

“Every habit he's ever had is still there in his body, lying dormant like flowers in the desert. Given the right conditions, all his old addictions would burst into full and luxuriant bloom.”

Margaret Atwood

“They spent the first three years of school getting you to pretend stuff and then the rest of it marking you down if you did the same thing.”

Margaret Atwood book Oryx and Crake

Source: Oryx and Crake

“What we share may be a lot like a traffic accident but we get one another. We are survivors of each other. We have been shark to one another, but also lifeboat. That counts for something.”

Margaret Atwood book Cat's Eye

Source: Cat's Eye

“It isn't running away they're afraid of. We wouldn't get far. It's those other escapes, the ones you can open in yourself, given a cutting edge.”

Margaret Atwood book The Handmaid's Tale

Source: The Handmaid's Tale

“Why is it we want so badly to memorialize ourselves? Even while we're still alive. We wish to assert our existence, like dogs peeing on fire hydrants.”

Margaret Atwood book The Blind Assassin

Source: Der blinde Mörder

“And yet it disturbs me to learn I have hurt someone unintentionally. I want all my hurts to be intentional.”

Margaret Atwood book Cat's Eye

Source: Cat's Eye

“Old lovers go the way of old photographs, bleaching out gradually as in a slow bath of acid: first the moles and pimples, then the shadings. Then the faces themselves, until nothing remains but the general outlines.”

Margaret Atwood book Cat's Eye

Source: Cat's Eye

“I believe in the resistance as I believe there can be no light without shadow; or rather, no shadow unless there is also light.”

Margaret Atwood book The Handmaid's Tale

Source: The Handmaid's Tale

“Happy as a clam, is what my mother says for happy. I am happy as a clam: hard-shelled, firmly closed.”

Margaret Atwood book Cat's Eye

Source: Cat's Eye

“What fabrications they are, mothers. Scarecrows, wax dolls for us to stick pins into, crude diagrams. We deny them an existence of their own, we make them up to suit ourselves -- our own hungers, our own wishes, our own deficiencies.”

Margaret Atwood book The Blind Assassin

Source: The Blind Assassin

“Nature is to zoos as God is to churches.”

Margaret Atwood book Oryx and Crake

Source: Oryx and Crake

“Nothing changes instantaneously: in a gradually heating bathtub you'd be boiled to death before you knew it.”

Margaret Atwood book The Handmaid's Tale

Source: The Handmaid's Tale

“Why does the mind do such things? Turn on us, rend us, dig the claws in. If you get hungry enough, they say, you start eating your own heart. Maybe it's much the same.”

Margaret Atwood book The Blind Assassin

Source: The Blind Assassin

“The true story is vicious and multiple and untrue after all. Why do you need it? Don’t ever ask for the true story.”

Margaret Atwood

“They wore blouses with buttons down the front that suggested the possibilities of the word. These women could be undone; or not. They seemed to be able to choose.”

Margaret Atwood book The Handmaid's Tale

Source: The Handmaid's Tale

“To want is to have a weakness.”

Margaret Atwood book The Handmaid's Tale

Source: The Handmaid's Tale

“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 book Oryx and Crake

Source: Oryx and Crake

“I feel like cotton candy: sugar and air. Squeeze me and I’d turn into a small sickly damp wad of weeping pinky-red.”

Margaret Atwood book The Handmaid's Tale

Source: The Handmaid's Tale

“After everything that's happened, how can the world still be so beautiful? Because it is.”

Margaret Atwood book Oryx and Crake

Source: Oryx and Crake

“Modesty is invisibility… Never forget it. To be seen—to be—is to be… penetrated. What you must be girls, is impenetrable.”

Margaret Atwood book The Handmaid's Tale

Source: The Handmaid's Tale

“Time folds you in its arms and gives you one last kiss, and then it flattens you out and folds you up and tucks you away until it's time for you to become someone else's past time, and then time folds again.”

Margaret Atwood

Source: The Tent