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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

“You might even provide a Heaven for them. We need You for that. Hell we can make for ourselves.”

Margaret Atwood book The Handmaid's Tale

Source: The Handmaid’s Tale (1985), Chapter 30 (pp. 194-195)
Source: The Handmaid's Tale
Context: (She is reciting the Lord’s prayer) Now we come to forgiveness. Don’t worry about forgiving me right now. There are more important things. For instance: keep the others safe, if they are safe. Don’t let them suffer too much. If they have to die, let it be fast. You might even provide a Heaven for them. We need You for that. Hell we can make for ourselves.

“But maybe boredom is erotic, when women do it, for men.”

Margaret Atwood book The Handmaid's Tale

Source: The Handmaid’s Tale (1985), Chapter 13
Source: The Handmaid's Tale
Context: These pictures were supposed to be erotic, and I thought they were, at the time; but I see now what they were really about. They were paintings about suspended animation; about waiting, about objects not in use. They were paintings about boredom. But maybe boredom is erotic, when women do it, for men.

“There’s only so long you can feel sorry for a person before you come to feel that their affliction is an act of malice committed by them against you.”

Margaret Atwood book Stone Mattress: Nine Tales

Source: Stone Mattress: Nine Tales

“Amazing how the heart clutches at anything familiar, whimpering Mine! Mine!”

Margaret Atwood book The Year of the Flood

Source: The Year of the Flood

“All I can hope for is a reconstruction: the way love feels is always only approximate.”

Margaret Atwood book The Handmaid's Tale

Source: The Handmaid's Tale

“But the adjectives change,” said Jimmy. “Nothing’s worse than last year’s adjectives.”

Margaret Atwood book Oryx and Crake

Source: Oryx and Crake

“I want, I don’t want.
How can one live with such a heart?”

Margaret Atwood

Source: Selected Poems II: 1976 - 1986

“How old do you have to get before wisdom descends like a plastic bag over your head and you learn to keep your big mouth shut? Maybe never. Maybe you get more frivolous with age.”

Margaret Atwood book The Robber Bride

Source: The Robber Bride

“Why are we designed to see the world as supremely beautiful just as we're about to be snuffed? Do rabbits feel the same as the fox teeth bite down on their necks? Is it mercy?”

Margaret Atwood book The Year of the Flood

Source: The Year of the Flood

“How easy it is, treachery. You just slide into it.”

Margaret Atwood book The Year of the Flood

Source: The Year of the Flood

“Sex is like a drink, it's bad to start brooding about it too early in the day.”

Margaret Atwood book Oryx and Crake

Source: Oryx and Crake

“People dressed in a certain kind of clothing are never wrong. Also they never fart.”

Margaret Atwood book Alias Grace

Source: Alias Grace

“It's his word against the Commander's, unless he wants to head a posse. Kick in the door, and what did I tell you? Caught in the act, sinfully Scrabbling. Quick, eat those words.”

Margaret Atwood book The Handmaid's Tale

Source: The Handmaid's Tale

“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

“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)

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

Margaret Atwood book Wilderness Tips

Wilderness Tips (1991)

“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)

“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)

“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)

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

Margaret Atwood

&quot;Pig Song&quot; http://www.poetryfoundation.org/archive/poem.html?id=21982 <br class="br">Selected Poems 1965-1975 (1976)

“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)

“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

“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)

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

Margaret Atwood

Time magazine (19 March 1973)

“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)

“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)

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

Margaret Atwood

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

“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