Canadian novelist, poet, and literary critic (1939- )
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
No luck was dumb because luck was just another name for miracle.
MARGARET ATWOOD
The Year of the Flood
Hunger is the best sauce.
MARGARET ATWOOD
The Year of the Flood
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
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
Tell, rather than write, because I have nothing to write with and writing is in any case forbidden. But if it's a story, even in my head, I must be telling it to someone. You don't tell a story only to yourself. There's always someone else. Even when there is no one.
MARGARET ATWOOD
The Handmaid's Tale
It's a feature of our age that if you write a work of fiction, everyone assumes that the people and events in it are disguised biography -- but if you write your biography, it's equally assumed you're lying your head off.
MARGARET ATWOOD
On Writing Poetry
What am I living for and what am I dying for are the same question.
MARGARET ATWOOD
The Year of the Flood
Confronted by too much emptiness ... the brain invents. Loneliness creates company as thirst creates water. How many sailors have been wrecked in pursuit of islands that were merely a shimmering?
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
I am certain that a Sewing Machine would relieve as much human suffering as a hundred Lunatic Asylums, and possibly a good deal more.
MARGARET ATWOOD
Alias Grace
The minimalist life. Pleasure is an egg. Blessings that can be counted, on the fingers of one hand.
MARGARET ATWOOD
The Handmaid's Tale
The sitting room is subdued, symmetrical; it's one of the shapes money takes when it freezes.
MARGARET ATWOOD
The Handmaid's Tale
Time is not a line but a dimension, like the dimensions of space. If you can bend space you can bend time also, and if you knew enough and could move faster than light you could travel backward in time and exist in two places at once.
MARGARET ATWOOD
Cat's Eye
Surely only true love could justify my lack of taste.
MARGARET ATWOOD
Lady Oracle
If we were all on trial for our thoughts, we would all be hanged.
MARGARET ATWOOD
Alias Grace
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
When you're young, you think everything you do is disposable. You move from now to now, crumpling time up in your hands, tossing it away. You're your own speeding car. You think you can get rid of things, and people too--leave them behind. You don't yet know about the habit they have, of coming back.
MARGARET ATWOOD
The Blind Assassin
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.
MARGARET ATWOOD
"Ophelia Has a Lot to Answer For"
Water is patient. Dripping water wears away a stone. Remember that, my child. Remember you are half water. If you can't go through an obstacle, go around it. Water does.
MARGARET ATWOOD
The Penelopiad