Margaret Atwood citations

“Si jeunesse savait, si vieillesse pouvait - Estienne; C'est de quoi j'ai le plus de peur que la peur - Montaigne; (…) L'histoire, cette vieille dame exaltée et menteuse - de Maupassant.”

“Stupidity is the same as evil if you judge by the results.”

“When we think of the past it's the beautiful things we pick out. We want to believe it was all like that.”

“You can only be jealous of someone who has something you think you ought to have yourself.”

“The best way of keeping a secret is to pretend there isn't one.”

“The moment of betrayal is the worst, the moment when you know beyond any doubt that you've been betrayed: that some other human being has wished you that much evil”

“If I thought this would never happen again I would die. But this is wrong, nobody dies from lack of sex. It's lack of love we die from.”

“A word after a word after a word is power.”

“I read for pleasure and that is the moment I learn the most.”

“Perhaps I write for no one. Perhaps for the same person children are writing for when they scrawl their names in the snow.”

“We still think of a powerful man as a born leader and a powerful woman as an anomaly.”

“Romance takes place in the middle distance. Romance is looking in at yourself through a window clouded with dew. Romance means leaving things out: where life grunts and shuffles, romance only sighs.”

“After a year or two of keeping my head down and trying to pass myself off as a normal person, I made contact with the five other people at my university who were interested in writing”

“My trade is courage and atrocities.
I look at them and do not condemn.
I write things down the way they happened,
as near as can be remembered.
I don’t ask why, because it is mostly the same.
Wars happen because the ones who start them
think they can win.”

“I exist in two places,
here and where you are.”

“This is what I miss, Cordelia: not something that’s gone, but something that will never happen. Two old women giggling over their tea.”

“Come away with me, he said, we will live on a desert island. I said, I am a desert island. It was not what he had in mind.”

“You don't look back along time but down through it, like water. Sometimes this comes to the surface, sometimes that, sometimes nothing. Nothing goes away.”

“Tell me where it hurts, she'd say. Stop howling. Just calm down and show me where.

But some people can't tell where it hurts. They can't calm down. They can't ever stop howling.”

“The past is so much safer, because whatever's in it has already happened. It can't be changed; so, in a way, there's nothing to dread.”

“All stories are about wolves. All worth repeating, that is. Anything else is sentimental drivel.”

“I am not mad because I'm a woman… I'm mad because you're an asshole.”

“Then sail, my fine lady, on the billowing wave -
The water below is as dark as the grave,
And maybe you'll sink in your little blue boat -
It's hope, and hope only, that keeps us afloat”

“We battled in secret, undeclared, and after a while I no longer fought back because I never won. The only defense was flight, invisibility.”

“War is what happens when language fails.”

“I would like to be the air that inhabits you for a moment only. I would like to be that unnoticed and that necessary.”

“Do not let the bastards grind you down.”
Nolite te bastardes carborundorum.

“In the spring, at the end of the day, you should smell like dirt.”

“Ignoring isn’t the same as ignorance, you have to work at it.”

“But who can remember pain, once it’s over? All that remains of it is a shadow, not in the mind even, in the flesh. Pain marks you, but too deep to see. Out of sight, out of mind.”