Canadian novelist, poet, and literary critic (1939- )
An eye for an eye only leads to more blindness.
MARGARET ATWOOD
Cat's Eye
Time is not a thing that passes ... it's a sea on which you float.
MARGARET ATWOOD
The Year of the Flood
A divorce is like an amputation; you survive, but there's less of you.
MARGARET ATWOOD
Time Magazine, Mar. 19, 1973
Human reason is a pin dancing on the head of an angel, so small is it in comparison to the Divine vastness that encircles us.
MARGARET ATWOOD
The Year of the Flood
Knowing too much about other people puts you in their power, they have a claim on you, you are forced to understand their reasons for doing things and then you are weakened.
MARGARET ATWOOD
Cat's Eye
In the spring, at the end of the day, you should smell like dirt.
MARGARET ATWOOD
Woman's Day Magazine, Apr. 1, 2007
The best way of keeping a secret is to pretend there isn't one.
MARGARET ATWOOD
The Blind Assassin
There is more than one kind of freedom... Freedom to and freedom from. In the days of anarchy, it was freedom to. Now you are being given freedom from. Don't underrate it.
MARGARET ATWOOD
The Handmaid's Tale
Too much God and you overdose. God needs to be filtered.
MARGARET ATWOOD
The Year of the Flood
God gave unto the
Animals A wisdom past our power to see:
Each knows innately how to live,
Which we must learn laboriously.
MARGARET ATWOOD
The Year of the Flood
War is what happens when language fails.
MARGARET ATWOOD
The Robber Bride
There's nothing like drawing a thing to make you really see it.
MARGARET ATWOOD
The Year of the Flood
Any religion is a shadow of God. But the shadows of God are not God.
MARGARET ATWOOD
The Year of the Flood
The past is a closed door.
MARGARET ATWOOD
The Year of the Flood
Longed for him. Got him. Shit.
MARGARET ATWOOD
"Very Short Stories", Wired, Nov. 2006
Another belief of mine: that everyone else my age is an adult, whereas I am merely in disguise.
MARGARET ATWOOD
Cat's Eye
The newspaper journalists like to believe the worst; they can sell more papers that way, as one of them told me himself; for even upstanding and respectable people dearly love to read ill of others.
MARGARET ATWOOD
Alias Grace
Vanity is becoming a nuisance, I can see why women give it up, eventually. But I'm not ready for that yet.
MARGARET ATWOOD
Cat's Eye
As with all knowledge, once you knew it, you couldn't imagine how it was that you hadn't known it before.
MARGARET ATWOOD
The Year of the Flood
"Why do men feel threatened by women?" I asked a male friend of mine.... "They're afraid women will laugh at them," he said.... Then I asked some women students in a quickie poetry seminar I was giving, "Why do women feel threatened by men?" "They're afraid of being killed," they said.
MARGARET ATWOOD
Writing the Male Character