MARGARET ATWOOD QUOTES II

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


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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
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The Blind Assassin


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You can think clearly only with your clothes on.

MARGARET ATWOOD

The Handmaid's Tale


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

MARGARET ATWOOD

"Backdrop addresses cowboy"


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


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

MARGARET ATWOOD

The Handmaid's Tale


No luck was dumb because luck was just another name for miracle.

MARGARET ATWOOD

The Year of the Flood

Tags: luck


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


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

MARGARET ATWOOD

Cat's Eye

Tags: love


What is needed for really good tyranny is an unquestionable idea or authority. Political disagreement is political disagreement. But political disagreement with a theocracy is heresy.

MARGARET ATWOOD

Moving Targets: Writing with Intent

Tags: tyranny


The Human moral keyboard is limited ... there's nothing you can play on it that hasn't been played before. And, my dear Friends, I am sorry to say this, but it has its lower notes.

MARGARET ATWOOD

The Year of the Flood

Tags: morality


Hunger is the best sauce.

MARGARET ATWOOD

The Year of the Flood


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


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

MARGARET ATWOOD

The Blind Assassin

Tags: writing


What I need is perspective. The illusion of depth, created by a frame, the arrangement of shapes on a flat surface. Perspective is necessary. Otherwise there are only two dimensions. Otherwise you live with your face squashed against a wall, everything a huge foreground, of details, close-ups, hairs, the weave of the bedsheet, the molecules of the face. Your own skin like a map, a diagram of futility, crisscrossed with tiny roads that lead nowhere. Otherwise you live in the moment. Which is not where I want to be.

MARGARET ATWOOD

The Handmaid's Tale


What am I living for and what am I dying for are the same question.

MARGARET ATWOOD

The Year of the Flood


Hunger is a powerful reorganizer of the conscience.

MARGARET ATWOOD

The Year of the Flood

Tags: hunger


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


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


Hatred would have been easier. With hatred, I would have known what to do. Hatred is clear, metallic, one-handed, unwavering; unlike love.

MARGARET ATWOOD

Cat's Eye


The only way you can write the truth is to assume that what you set down will never be read.

MARGARET ATWOOD

The Blind Assassin

Tags: truth