MARGARET ATWOOD QUOTES II

Canadian novelist, poet, and literary critic (1939- )

In an age that persecutes deviants, you can yet lose your life for being the possessor of a dangerous or unacceptable story. Words are powerful, which means that words can also be fatal.

MARGARET ATWOOD

address at the Jaipur Literature Festival, January 21, 2016

Tags: words


The Eskimo has fifty-two names for snow because it is important to them; there ought to be as many for love.

MARGARET ATWOOD

Surfacing


Change, we were sure, was for the better always. We were revisionists; what we revised was ourselves.

MARGARET ATWOOD

The Handmaid's Tale


Farewells can be shattering, but returns are surely worse. Solid flesh can never live up to the bright shadow cast by its absence.

MARGARET ATWOOD

The Blind Assassin


No mother is ever, completely, a child's idea of what a mother should be, and I suppose it works the other way around as well.

MARGARET ATWOOD

The Handmaid's Tale


Hunger is a powerful reorganizer of the conscience.

MARGARET ATWOOD

The Year of the Flood

Tags: hunger


I knew what love was supposed to be: obsession with undertones of nausea.

MARGARET ATWOOD

Cat's Eye

Tags: love


I would rather dance as a ballerina, though faultily, than as a flawless clown.

MARGARET ATWOOD

Lady Oracle

Tags: dance


You can think clearly only with your clothes on.

MARGARET ATWOOD

The Handmaid's Tale


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.

MARGARET ATWOOD

The Handmaid's Tale

Tags: pain


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

MARGARET ATWOOD

The Handmaid's Tale

Tags: jealousy


A man is just a woman's strategy for making other women.

MARGARET ATWOOD

The Handmaid's Tale

Tags: men


But remember that forgiveness too is a power. To beg for it is a power, and to withhold or bestow it is a power, perhaps the greatest.

MARGARET ATWOOD

The Handmaid's Tale


Potential has a shelf life.

MARGARET ATWOOD

Cat's Eye


Love blurs your vision; but after it recedes, you can see more clearly than ever. It's like the tide going out, revealing whatever's been thrown away and sunk: broken bottles, old gloves, rusting pop cans, nibbled fishbodies, bones.

MARGARET ATWOOD

Cat's Eye

Tags: love


As God contains all good things, He must also contain a sense of playfulness -- a gift he has shared with Creatures other than ourselves, as witness the tricks Crows play, and the sportiveness of Squirrels, and the frolicking of Kittens.

MARGARET ATWOOD

The Year of the Flood


When I was sixteen, it was simple. Poetry existed; therefore it could be written; and nobody had told me -- yet -- the many, many reasons why it could not be written by me.

MARGARET ATWOOD

On Writing Poetry


I am the horizon
you ride towards, the thing you can never lasso

MARGARET ATWOOD

"Backdrop addresses cowboy"


To live in prison is to live without mirrors. To live without mirrors is to live without the self.

MARGARET ATWOOD

"Marrying the Hangman", Selected Poems

Tags: prison


One of the things about totalitarianism is that people disappear, and you can't find out what happened to them.

MARGARET ATWOOD

"Margaret Atwood Is Still Seeing the Future", The Ringer, April 27, 2017

Tags: totalitarianism