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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

“Genius is an infinite capacity for causing pain.”

Margaret Atwood book The Robber Bride

Source: The Robber Bride

“Canadians are fond of a good disaster, especially if it has ice, water, or snow in it. You thought the national flag was about a leaf, didn't you? Look harder. It's where someone got axed in the snow.”

Margaret Atwood

“But my dreaming self refuses to be consoled. It continues to wander, aimless, homeless, alone. It cannot be convinced of its safety by any evidence drawn from my waking life.”

Margaret Atwood

“I stand on the corner, pretending I am a tree.”

Margaret Atwood book The Handmaid's Tale

Source: The Handmaid's Tale

“Can I be blamed for wanting a real body, to put my arms around? Without it I too am disembodied. I can listen to my own heartbeat against the bedsprings… but there’s something dead about it, something deserted.”

Margaret Atwood book The Handmaid's Tale

Source: The Handmaid's Tale

“There's always something to occupy the inquiring mind.”

Margaret Atwood book The Handmaid's Tale

Source: The Handmaid's Tale

“Human understanding is fallible, and we see through a glass, darkly. Any religion is a shadow of God. But the shadows of God are not God.”

Margaret Atwood book The Year of the Flood

Source: The Year of the Flood

“Murderess is a strong word to have attached to you. It has a smell to it, that word - musky and oppressive, like dead flowers in a vase. Sometimes at night I whisper it over to myself:. It rustles, like a taffeta skirt across the floor.”

Margaret Atwood book Alias Grace

Source: Alias Grace

“EXTINCTATHON, Monitored by MaddAddam. Adam named the living animals, MaddAddam names the dead ones. Do you want to play?”

Margaret Atwood book Oryx and Crake

Source: Oryx and Crake

“In my dreams of this city I am always lost.”

Margaret Atwood book Cat's Eye

Source: Cat's Eye

“Fatigue is here, in my body, in my legs and eyes. That is what gets you in the end. Faith is only a word, embroidered.”

Margaret Atwood book The Handmaid's Tale

Source: The Handmaid's Tale

“You aren't sick & unhappy
only alive & stuck with it.”

Margaret Atwood book Power Politics

Source: Power Politics

“At moments like this I envy those who have found a safe haven in which to bestow their hearts; or perhaps I envy them for having a heart to bestow. I often feel that I myself am without one, and possess in its stead merely a heart shaped stone.”

Margaret Atwood book The Handmaid's Tale

Source: The Handmaid's Tale

“I wanted to forget the past, but it refused to forget me; it waited for sleep, then cornered me.”

Margaret Atwood book Lady Oracle

Source: Lady Oracle

“Perhaps its not the world that is soundless but we who are deaf.”

Margaret Atwood

Source: The Tent

“You can’t buy it, but it has a price,” said Oryx. “Everything has a price.”

Margaret Atwood book Oryx and Crake

Source: Oryx and Crake

“All observations of life are harsh, because life is. I lament that fact, but I cannot change it.”

Margaret Atwood

Source: The Tent

“Better not to invent her in her absence. Better to wait until she's actually here. Then he can make her up as she goes along.”

Margaret Atwood book The Blind Assassin

Source: The Blind Assassin

“Her glass wings are gone.”

Margaret Atwood book Lady Oracle

Source: Lady Oracle

“I am not my childhood,' Snowman says out loud.”

Margaret Atwood book Oryx and Crake

Source: Oryx and Crake

“They seemed to be able to choose. We seemed to be able to choose, then. We were a society dying of too much choice.”

Margaret Atwood book The Handmaid's Tale

Source: The Handmaid's Tale

“Madness is only an amplification of what you already are.”

Margaret Atwood book Surfacing

Source: Surfacing

“It was like being in an elevator cut loose at the top. Falling, falling, and not knowing when you will hit.”

Margaret Atwood book The Handmaid's Tale

Source: The Handmaid's Tale

“Every night when I go to bed I think, In the morning I will wake up in my own house and things will be back the way they were.
It hasn’t happened this morning, either.”

Margaret Atwood book The Handmaid's Tale

Source: The Handmaid's Tale

“By telling you anything at all I'm at least believing in you, I believe you're there, I believe you into being.”

Margaret Atwood book The Handmaid's Tale

Source: The Handmaid's Tale

“Where do the words go
when we have said them?”

Margaret Atwood

Source: Procedures For Underground

“How were we to know we were happy?”

Margaret Atwood book The Handmaid's Tale

Variant: We thought we had such problems. How were we to know we were happy?
Source: The Handmaid's Tale

“Kill what you can't save
what you can't eat throw out
what you can't throw out bury

What you can't bury give away
what you can't give away you must carry with you,
it is always heavier than you thought.”

Margaret Atwood

Source: You are Happy

“That is what you have to do before you kill, I thought. You have to create an it, where none was before.”

Margaret Atwood book The Handmaid's Tale

Source: The Handmaid’s Tale (1985), Chapter 30 (pp. 192-193)
Source: The Handmaid's Tale
Context: I'll take care of it, Luke said. And because he said it instead of her, I knew he meant kill. That is what you have to do before you kill, I thought. You have to create an it, where none was before. You do that first, in your head, and then you make it real.

“… we must be a beacon of hope, because if you tell people there's nothing they can do, they will do worse than nothing.”

Margaret Atwood book The Year of the Flood

Source: The Year of the Flood

“I'll make you mine, lovers said in old books. They never said, I'll make you me.”

Margaret Atwood book Oryx and Crake

Source: Oryx and Crake

“One of the gravestones in the cemetery near the earliest church has an anchor on it and an hourglass, and the words In Hope.

In Hope. Why did they put that above a dead person? Was it the corpse hoping, or those still alive?”

Margaret Atwood book The Handmaid's Tale

Source: The Handmaid's Tale

“There's blood, a taste I remember. It tastes of orange popsicles, penny gumballs, red licorice, gnawed hair, dirty ice.”

Margaret Atwood book Cat's Eye

Source: Cat's Eye

“Inside the peach, there is a stone.”

Margaret Atwood

“Just because there's a silence it doesn't mean that nothing is going on.”

Margaret Atwood book The Robber Bride

Source: The Robber Bride

“Why is it he feels some line has been crossed, some boundary transgressed? How much is too much, how far is too far?”

Margaret Atwood book Oryx and Crake

Source: Oryx and Crake

“There is no fool like an educated fool…”

Margaret Atwood book Alias Grace

Source: Alias Grace

“So much better to travel than to arrive.”

Margaret Atwood book The Blind Assassin

Source: The Blind Assassin

“It's Paradise, but we can't get out of it. And anything you can't get out of is Hell.”

Margaret Atwood book The Blind Assassin

Source: The Blind Assassin

“Remember,' she'd tell her staff, 'every customer wants to feel like a princess, and princesses are selfish and overbearing.”

Margaret Atwood book The Year of the Flood

Source: The Year of the Flood

“I am tempted to think that to be despised by her sex is a very great compliment to a woman.”

Margaret Atwood book The Penelopiad

Source: The Penelopiad

“The objects I chose were designed to hold something, but I didn't fill them up. They remained empty. They were little symbolic shrines to thirst.”

Margaret Atwood

Source: Moral Disorder and Other Stories

“We love each other, that’s true whatever it means, but we aren’t good at it; for some it’s a talent, for others only an addiction.”

Margaret Atwood book Dancing Girls

Source: Dancing Girls