Margaret Atwood citations (350 citations, Page 11)

Margaret Atwood: 350 citations0 J'aime

Margaret Atwood Citations

“[…] je suis assise à ma table en bois pour griffer tant et plus le papier avec mon stylo. Non, pas griffer - les stylos ne griffent plus. Les mots roulent plutôt facilement et sans bruit sur la page; c'est réussir à les faire couler le long du bras, c'est les extirper des doigts qui est très difficile.”

Margaret Atwood livre Le tueur aveugle

The Blind Assassin

“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.”

Margaret Atwood livre Le tueur aveugle

The Blind Assassin

Margaret Atwood: Citations en anglais

“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.”

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Margaret Atwood

Ophelia Has a Lot to Answer For (1997)

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

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Margaret Atwood livre 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.”

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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.”

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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.”

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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.”

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Margaret Atwood

"Pig Song" 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.”

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Margaret Atwood

Ophelia Has a Lot to Answer For (1997)

“Blessed are they that mourn, for they shall be comforted.
Nobody said when.”

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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.”

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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”

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Margaret Atwood

On Writing Poetry (1995)

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

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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.”

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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.”

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Margaret Atwood

Ophelia Has a Lot to Answer For (1997)

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

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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.”

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Margaret Atwood

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

“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.”

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Margaret Atwood

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

“Time is not a line but a dimension, like the dimensions of space.”

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Margaret Atwood livre Cat's Eye

Cat's Eye (1988)

“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?”

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Margaret Atwood

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

“Freedom, like everything else, is relative.”

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Margaret Atwood

Source: The Handmaid’s Tale (1985), Chapter 36 (p. 231)

“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.”

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Margaret Atwood

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

“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.”

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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

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

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Margaret Atwood

On Writing Poetry (1995)

“Adam named the living animals, MaddAddam names the dead ones.”

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Margaret Atwood livre Oryx and Crake

Oryx and Crake (2003)

“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.”

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Margaret Atwood

Ophelia Has a Lot to Answer For (1997)

“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.”

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Margaret Atwood livre Morning in the Burned House

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

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

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Margaret Atwood livre 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.”

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Margaret Atwood livre Bodily Harm

Bodily Harm (1981)

“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.”

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Margaret Atwood

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

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

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Margaret Atwood

The Progressive interview (2010)

“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.”

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Margaret Atwood

Ophelia Has a Lot to Answer For (1997)

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