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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

“Cleverness is a quality a man likes to have in his wife as long as she is some distance away from him. Up close, he'll take kindness any day of the week, if there's nothing more alluring to be had.”

Margaret Atwood book The Penelopiad

Source: The Penelopiad

“In the end, we'll all become stories.”

Margaret Atwood

Source: Moral Disorder and Other Stories

“They will not let you have peace, they don't want you to have anything they don't have themselves.”

Margaret Atwood book Surfacing

Source: Surfacing

“She knows herself to be at the mercy of events, and she knows by now that events have no mercy.”

Margaret Atwood book The Blind Assassin

Source: The Blind Assassin

“I'm not senile," I snapped. "If I burn the house down it will be on purpose.”

Margaret Atwood book The Blind Assassin

Source: The Blind Assassin

“Faith is only a word, embroidered.”

Margaret Atwood book The Handmaid's Tale

Source: The Handmaid's Tale

“One and one and one and one doesn't equal four. Each one remains unique, there is no way of joining them together. They cannot be exchanged, one for the other. They cannot replace each other.”

Margaret Atwood book The Handmaid's Tale

Source: The Handmaid's Tale

“The young habitually mistake lust for love, they're infested with idealism of all kinds.”

Margaret Atwood book The Blind Assassin

Source: The Blind Assassin

“Most mothers worry when their daughters reach adolescence but I was the opposite. I relaxed, I sighed with relief. Little girls are cute and small only to adults. To one another they are not cute. They are life sized.”

Margaret Atwood

Source: CAT'S EYE.

“You can wet the rim of a glass and run your finger around the rim and it will make a sound. This is what I feel like: this sound of glass. I feel like the word shatter. I want to be with someone.”

Margaret Atwood book The Handmaid's Tale

Source: The Handmaid's Tale

“I'm a fool, to confuse this with goodness. I am not good.
I know too much to be good. I know myself.
I know myself to be vengeful, greedy, secretive and sly.”

Margaret Atwood book Cat's Eye

Source: Cat's Eye

“Immortality,' said Crake, ' is a concept. If you take 'mortality' as being, not death, but the foreknowledge of it and the fear of it, then 'immortality' is the absence of such fear. Babies are immortal. Edit out the fear, and you'll be…”

Margaret Atwood book Oryx and Crake

Source: Oryx and Crake

“There's the story, then there's the real story, then there's the story of how the story came to be told. Then there's what you leave out of the story. Which is part of the story too.”

Margaret Atwood book MaddAddam

Source: MaddAddam

“As all historians know, the past is a great darkness, and filled with echoes.”

Margaret Atwood book The Handmaid's Tale

Historical Notes (p. 311)
The Handmaid’s Tale (1985)
Source: The Handmaid's Tale
Context: As all historians know, the past is a great darkness, and filled with echoes. Voices may reach us from it; but what they say to us is imbued with the obscurity of the matrix out of which they come; and, try as we may, we cannot always decipher them precisely in the clearer light of our own day.

“We understand more than we know.”

Margaret Atwood book Oryx and Crake

Source: Oryx and Crake

“You can forget who you are if you're alone too much.”

Margaret Atwood book The Year of the Flood

Source: The Year of the Flood

“There's something to be said for hunger: at least it lets you know you're still alive.”

Margaret Atwood book Oryx and Crake

Source: Oryx and Crake

“Our heaven is their hell, said God. I like a balanced universe.”

Margaret Atwood

Source: The Tent

“These things sneak up on him for no reason, these flashes of irrational happiness. It's probably a vitamin deficiency.”

Margaret Atwood book Oryx and Crake

Source: Oryx and Crake

“Ah men,
why do you want
all this attention?
I can write poems for myself, make
love to a doorknob if absolutely
necessary. What do you have to offer me
I can't find otherwise
except humiliation? Which I no longer
need.”

Margaret Atwood

“I planned my death carefully, unlike my life, which meandered along from one thing to another, despite my feeble attempts to control it.”

Margaret Atwood book Lady Oracle

Source: Lady Oracle

“I avoid looking down at my body, not so much because it’s shameful or immodest but because I don’t want to see it. I don’t want to look at something that determines me so completely.”

Margaret Atwood book The Handmaid's Tale

Source: The Handmaid's Tale

“When any civilization is dust and ashes," he said, "art is all that's left over. Images, words, music. Imaginative structures. Meaning—human meaning, that is—is defined by them. You have to admit that.”

Margaret Atwood book Oryx and Crake

Source: Oryx and Crake

“It wasn't so easy though, ending the war. A war is a huge fire; the ashes from it drift far, and settle slowly.”

Margaret Atwood book The Blind Assassin

Source: The Blind Assassin

“When they're gone out of his head, these words, they'll be gone, everywhere, forever. As if they had never been.”

Margaret Atwood book Oryx and Crake

Source: Oryx and Crake

“I believe that everyone else my age is an adult whereas I am merely in disguise.”

Margaret Atwood book Cat's Eye

Variant: Another belief of mine: that everyone else my age is an adult, whereas I am merely in disguise.
Source: Cat's Eye (1988)

“When you're unhinged, things make their way out of you that should be kept inside, and other things get in that ought to be shut out. The locks lose their powers. The guards go to sleep. The passwords fail.”

Margaret Atwood book The Blind Assassin

Source: The Blind Assassin

“A man is just a woman’s strategy for making other women.”

Margaret Atwood

Source: The Handmaid’s Tale (1985), Chapter 20 (p. 121)

“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

“Neither of us says the word love, not once. It would be tempting fate; it would be romance, bad luck.”

Margaret Atwood book The Handmaid's Tale

Source: The Handmaid's Tale

“If I waited for perfection, I would never write a word.”

Margaret Atwood

“You want the truth, of course. You want me to put two and two together. But two and two doesn’t necessarily get you the truth. Two and two equals a voice outside the window. Two and two equals the wind. The living bird is not its labeled bones.”

Margaret Atwood book The Blind Assassin

Source: The Blind Assassin

“Today on the way home, it snows. Big, soft caressing flakes fall onto our skin like cold moths; the air fills with feathers.”

Margaret Atwood book Cat's Eye

Source: Cat's Eye

“I see that there will be no end to imperfection, or to doing things the wrong way. Even if you grow up, no matter how hard you scrub, whatever you do, there will always be some other stain or spot on your face or stupid act, somebody frowning.”

Margaret Atwood book Cat's Eye

Source: Cat's Eye

“Ordinary, said Aunt Lydia, is what you are used to. This may not seem ordinary to you now, but after a time it will. It will become ordinary.”

Margaret Atwood book The Handmaid's Tale

Source: The Handmaid's Tale

“So this was the rest of his life. It felt like a party to which he'd been invited, but at an address he couldn't actually locate. Someone must be having fun at it, this life of his; only, right at the moment, it wasn't him.”

Margaret Atwood book Oryx and Crake

Source: Oryx and Crake

“Now that I am dead, I know everything.”

Margaret Atwood book The Penelopiad

Source: The Penelopiad

“Little girls are cute and small only to adults. To one another they are not cute. They are life sized.”

Margaret Atwood book Cat's Eye

Source: Cat's Eye

“The night is mine, my own time, to do with it as I will, as long as I am quiet. As long as I don't move. As long as I lie still. The difference betweenand. Lay is always passive.”

Margaret Atwood book The Handmaid's Tale

Source: The Handmaid's Tale

“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 (1985), Chapter 19 (p. 109)
Source: The Handmaid's Tale

“For if the world treats you well, Sir, you come to believe you are deserving of it.”

Margaret Atwood book Alias Grace

Source: Alias Grace

“No mother is ever, completely, a child's idea of what a mother should be, and I suppose it works the other way around as well. But despite everything, we didn't do too badly by one another, we did as well as most.”

Margaret Atwood book The Handmaid's Tale

Source: The Handmaid's Tale