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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   quotes 31   likes

Margaret Atwood Quotes

“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

“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

“I plunged in, and set up a Twitter account. My first problem was that there were already two Margaret Atwoods on Twitter, one of them with my picture. This grew; I gave commands; then all other Margaret Atwoods stopped together. I like to think they were sent to a nunnery, but in any case they disappeared. The Twitterpolice had got them. I felt a bit guilty.”

Margaret Atwood

"Atwood in the Twittersphere", The New York Review of Books (29 March 2010) http://blogs.nybooks.com/post/482335188/atwood-in-the-twittersphere

Problem , Thinking

“I became a poet at the age of sixteen. I did not intend to do it. It was not my fault.”

Margaret Atwood

On Writing Poetry (1995)

Age

“For every age there is a popular idea about what madness is, what causes it, and how a mad person should look and behave; and it's usually these popular ideas, rather than those of medical professionals, that turn up in songs and stories and plays and books.”

Margaret Atwood

Ophelia Has a Lot to Answer For (1997)

Books , Age , Idea , Personality

“Confess: it’s my profession
that alarms you.
This is why few people ask me to dinner,
though Lord knows I don’t go out of my way to be scary.”

Margaret Atwood book Morning in the Burned House

Morning in the Burned House (1995), The Loneliness of the Military Historian

People , Way

“An eye for an eye only leads to more blindness.”

Margaret Atwood book Cat's Eye

Cat's Eye (1988)

“The policemen's faces glisten too, they're holding themselves back, they love this, it's a ceremony, they're implementing a policy.”

Margaret Atwood book Bodily Harm

Bodily Harm (1981)

Love

“In restaurants we argue
over which of us will pay for your funeral though the real question is
whether or not I will make you immortal.”

Margaret Atwood

"They eat out"
Selected Poems 1965-1975 (1976)

Question

“A lot of people facing fascism didn’t become fascists. I don’t happen to believe that we are all monsters.”

Margaret Atwood

The Progressive interview (2010)

People

“That old standby of melodrama, the rich uncle shoved into the bin so the greedy relatives could get their hands on his estate, had a sound basis in fact. The Victorians cleaned up the straw and the chains of the old Bedlam-like institutions of the eighteenth century, but they didn't always clean up the practices. Patients were drugged, starved, drained of vast quantities of blood, beaten up, swung from ropes, immersed in cold water and whirled around in the air upside-down, all in the belief that it would improve their mental states. Ask yourself whether this is likely to have been true.”

Margaret Atwood

Ophelia Has a Lot to Answer For (1997)

Water

“He had that faint sick look in his eyes, as if he wanted to give her something, charity for instance.”

Margaret Atwood book Bodily Harm

Bodily Harm (1981)

“As for my birth month, a detail of much interest to poets, obsessed as they are with symbolic systems of all kinds: I was not pleased, during my childhood, to have been born in November, as there wasn't much inspiration for birthday party motifs. February children got hearts, May ones flowers, but what was there for me? A cake surrounded by withered leaves? November was a drab, dark and wet month, lacking even snow; its only noteworthy festival was Remembrance Day. But in adult life I discovered that November was, astrologically speaking, the month of sex, death and regeneration, and that November First was the Day of the Dead. It still wouldn't have been much good for birthday parties, but it was just fine for poetry, which tends to revolve a good deal around sex and death, with regeneration optional.”

Margaret Atwood

On Writing Poetry (1995)

Life , Death , Children , Sex

“"Well, maybe I'm a latent homosexual." He considered that for a moment. "Or maybe I'm a latent heterosexual. Anyway, I'm pretty latent. I don't know why. Of course, I've taken a number of stabs at it, but then I start thinking about the futility of it all and I give up. Maybe it's because you're expected to do something and after a certain point all I want to do is lie there and stare at the ceiling."”

Margaret Atwood book The Edible Woman

The Edible Woman (1969)

Lie , Thinking

“After I wrote Handmaid’s Tale, people came up to me and asked why weren’t there any protests. And I said, “You don’t understand totalitarianism.” A real totalitarianism doesn’t fool around with protests in the streets.”

Margaret Atwood

The Progressive interview (2010)

People , Fools , Understanding

“In the interests of research
I have walked on many battlefields
that once were liquid with pulped
men’s bodies and spangled with exploded
shells and splayed bone.
All of them have been green again
by the time I got there.
Each has inspired a few good quotes in its day.
Sad marble angels brood like hens
over the grassy nests where nothing hatches.”

Margaret Atwood book Morning in the Burned House

Morning in the Burned House (1995), The Loneliness of the Military Historian

Men , Sadness , Angels , Quotes

“I’m just as human as you. But it’s no use asking me for a final statement.
As I say, I deal in tactics.
Also statistics:
for every year of peace there have been four hundred
years of war.”

Margaret Atwood book Morning in the Burned House

Morning in the Burned House (1995), The Loneliness of the Military Historian

War , Peace

“You must cultivate poverty of spirit. Blessed are the meek. She didn’t go on to say anything about inheriting the earth.”

Margaret Atwood

Source: The Handmaid’s Tale (1985), Chapter 12 (p. 64)

“NOTES: Jean Cololère, a drummer in the colonial troops at Québec, was imprisoned for duelling in 1751. In the cell next to his was Françoise Laurent, who had been sentenced to hang for stealing. Except for letters of pardon, the only way at the time for someone under sentence of death to escape hanging was, for a man, to become a hangman, or, for a woman, to marry one. Françoise persuaded Cololère to apply for the vacant (and undesirable) post of executioner, and also to marry her.
—Condensed from the Dictionary of Canadian Biography, Volume III, 1741-1770”

Margaret Atwood

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

Death , Way , Time

“If I roll my eyes and mutter,
if I clutch at my heart and scream in horror
like a third-rate actress chewing up a mad scene,
I do it in private and nobody sees
but the bathroom mirror.”

Margaret Atwood book Morning in the Burned House

Morning in the Burned House (1995), The Loneliness of the Military Historian

Heart , Madness

“In order to avoid her death, her particular death, with
wrung neck and swollen tongue, she must marry the
hangman.”

Margaret Atwood

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

Death

“The one good thing to be said about announcing yourself as a writer in the colonial Canadian fifties is that nobody told me I couldn't do it because I was a girl. They simply found the entire proposition ridiculous. Writers were dead and English, or else extremely elderly and American; they were not sixteen years old and Canadian. It would have been worse if I'd been a boy, though. Never mind the fact that all the really stirring poems I'd read at that time had been about slaughter, mayhem, sex and death — poetry was thought of as existing in the pastel female realm, along with embroidery and flower arranging. If I'd been male I would probably have had to roll around in the mud, in some boring skirmish over whether or not I was a sissy.”

Margaret Atwood

On Writing Poetry (1995)

Death , Sex , Girl , Boy

“When you hear me singing
you get the rifle down
and the flashlight, aiming for my brain,
but you always miss and when you set out the poison
I piss on it
to warn the others.”

Margaret Atwood

"Rat Song" http://www.poetryfoundation.org/archive/poem.html?id=21984 (1974)
Selected Poems 1965-1975 (1976)

Singing

“A lot of poets published their own work then; unlike novels, poetry was short, and therefore cheap to do. We had to print each poem separately, and then disassemble it, as there were not enough a's for the whole book; the cover was done with a lino-block. We printed 250 copies, and sold them through bookstores, for 50 cents each. They now go in the rare book trade for eighteen hundred dollars a pop. Wish I'd kept some.”

Margaret Atwood

On Writing Poetry (1995)

Books

“As I was writing about Grace Marks, and about her interlude in the Asylum, I came to see her in context — the context of other people's opinions, both the popular images of madness and the scientific explanations for it available at the time. A lot of what was believed and said on the subject appears like sheer lunacy to us now. But we shouldn't be too arrogant — how many of our own theories will look silly when those who follow us have come up with something better? But whatever the scientists may come up with, writers and artists will continue to portray altered mental states, simply because few aspects of our nature fascinate people so much. The so-called mad person will always represent a possible future for every member of the audience — who knows when such a malady may strike? When "mad," at least in literature, you aren't yourself; you take on another self, a self that is either not you at all, or a truer, more elemental one than the person you're used to seeing in the mirror. You're in danger of becoming, in Shakespeare's works, a mere picture or beast, and in Susanna Moodie's words, a mere machine; or else you may become an inspired prophet, a truth-sayer, a shaman, one who oversteps the boundaries of the ordinarily visible and audible, and also, and especially, the ordinarily sayable. Portraying this process is deep power for the artist, partly because it's a little too close to the process of artistic creation itself, and partly because the prospect of losing our self and being taken over by another, unfamiliar self is one of our deepest human fears.”

Margaret Atwood

Ophelia Has a Lot to Answer For (1997)

People , Truth , Fear , Literature

“My friends, who are both women, tell me their stories,
which cannot be believed and which are true. They
are horror stories and they have not happened to me,
they have not yet happened to me, they have
happened to me but we are detached, we watch our
unbelief with horror.”

Margaret Atwood

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

Women

“The sitting room is subdued, symmetrical; it’s one of the shapes money takes when it freezes.”

Margaret Atwood

Source: The Handmaid’s Tale (1985), Chapter 14 (p. 79)

Money

“Everybody knew. Nobody admitted to knowing. If other people began to discuss it, you tuned them out, because what they were saying was both so obvious and so unthinkable. We are using up the Earth. It is almost gone.”

Margaret Atwood book The Year of the Flood

The Year of the Flood (2009)

People

“Furthermore, I believe that in order to have civil and human rights for women there have to be civil and human rights, period …”

Margaret Atwood

Am I a bad feminist? (2018)

Women