Margaret Atwood Quotes & Sayings

Knowing this secret, being the only one chosen to know, makes me feel important in a way. But it's a negative importance, it's the importance of a blank sheet of paper. I can know because I don't count. I feel singled out, but also bereft. — Margaret Atwood

That's what you get for being food. — Margaret Atwood

The butter is greasy and it will go rancid and I will smell like an old cheese; but at least it's organic, as they used to say.
To such devices we have descended. — Margaret Atwood

Unlike some other religions, we have never felt it served a higher purpose to lie to children about geology. — Margaret Atwood

Your friend is intellectually honourable," Jimmy's mother would say. "He doesn't lie to himself. — Margaret Atwood

The girls in the stories make such fools of themselves. They are so weak. They fall helplessly in love with the wrong men, they give in, they are jilted. Then they cry. — Margaret Atwood

Her metaphors for her children included barnacles encrusting a ship and limpets clinging to a rock. — Margaret Atwood

He could never get used to her, she was fresh every time, she was a casketful of secrets. Any moment now she would open herself up, reveal to him the essential thing, the hidden thing at the core of her life, or of her life, or of his life
the thing he was longing to know. The thing he'd always wanted. — Margaret Atwood

I wait, washed, brushed, fed, like a prize pig. Sometime in the eighties they invented pig balls, for pigs who were being fattened in pens. Pig balls were large colored balls; the pigs rolled them around with their snouts. The pig marketers said this improved their muscle tone; the pigs were curious, they liked having something to think about. I read about that in Introduction to Psychology; that, and the chapter on caged rats who'd give themselves electric shocks for something to do. And the one on the pigeons trained to peck a button that made a grain of corn appear. Three groups of them: the first one got one grain per peck, the second one grain every other peck, the third was random. When the man in charge cut off the grain, the first group gave up quite soon, the second group a little later. The third group never gave up. They'd peck themselves to death, rather than quit. Who knew what worked?
I wish I had a pig ball. — Margaret Atwood

He thought of it as a contest, like the children at school who would twist your arm and say Give in? Give in? until you did; then they would let go. He didn't love me, it was an idea of himself he loved and he wanted someone to join him, anyone would do, I didn't matter so I didn't have to care. — Margaret Atwood

This is a reconstruction. All of it is a reconstruction. It's a reconstruction now, in my head, as I lie flat on my single bed rehearsing what I should or shouldn't have said, what I should or shouldn't have done, how I should have played it. If I ever get out of here
Let's stop there. I intend to get out — Margaret Atwood

I am a believer in sensible choices, so different from many of my own. Also in sensible names for children. — Margaret Atwood

An old walrus-faced waiter attended to me; he had the knack of pouring the coffee and the hot milk from two jugs, held high in the air, and I found this entrancing, as if he were a child's magician. One day he said to me - he had some English - "Why are you sad?"
"I'm not sad," I said, and began to cry. Sympathy from strangers can be ruinous.
"You should not be sad," he said, gazing at me with his melancholy, leathery walrus eyes. "It must be the love. But you are young and pretty, you will have time to be sad later." The French are connoisseurs of sadness, they know all the kinds. This is why they have bidets. "It is criminal, the love," he said, patting my shoulder. "But none is worse. — Margaret Atwood

You want the truth, of course. You want me to put two and two together. But two and two doesn't necessarily get you the truth. Two and two equals a voice outside the window. Two and two equals the wind. The living bird is not its labeled bones. — Margaret Atwood

Craziness was considered funny, like all other things that were in reality frightening and profoundly shameful. — Margaret Atwood

Now the flesh arranges itself differently. I'm a cloud, congealed around a center object, the shape of a pear, which is hard and more real than I am and glows red within its translucent wrapping. Inside it is a space, huge as the sky at night and dark and curved like that, though black-red rather than black. Pinpoints of light swell, sparkle, burst and shrivel within it, countless as stars. Every month there is a moon, gigantic, round, heavy, an omen. — Margaret Atwood

What is believed in society is not always the equivalent of what is true; but as regards to a woman's reputation, it amounts to the same thing. — Margaret Atwood

If social stability goes pear-shaped, you have a choice between anarchy and dictatorship. Most people will opt for more security, even if they have to give up some personal freedom. — Margaret Atwood

These things you did were like prayers; you did them and you hoped they would save you. And for the most part they did. Or something did; you could tell by the fact that you were still alive. — Margaret Atwood

That was the trouble with Blood and Roses: it was easier to remember the Blood stuff. The other trouble was that the Blood player usually won, but winning meant you inherited a wasteland. This — Margaret Atwood

Life's not fair; why should I be? — Margaret Atwood

So by the time the morning came, Odysseus and I were indeed friends, as Odysseus had promised we would be. Or let me put it another way: I myself had developed friendly feelings towards him - more than that, loving and passionate ones - and he behaved as if he reciprocated them. Which is not quite the same thing. — Margaret Atwood

Time rises and rises, and when it reaches the level of your eyes you drown. — Margaret Atwood

I remember thinking when the girls were born, first one and then the other, that I should have had sons and not daughters. I didn't feel up to daughters, I didn't know how they worked. I must have been afraid of hating them. With sons I would have known what to do. — Margaret Atwood

It was only a dream. It was only a larval poem. - — Margaret Atwood

Also I could hear Amanda's voice: Why are you being so weak? Love's never a fair trade. So Jimmy's tired of you, so what, there's guys all over the place like germs, and you can pick them like flowers and toss them away when they're wilted. But you have to act like you're having a spectacular time and every day's a party. — Margaret Atwood

She was an infallible prophetess, and these powers came from her ability to look into the patterns of the universe. — Margaret Atwood

She looks like a very young old person, or a very old young person; but then, she's looked that way ever since she was two. — Margaret Atwood

They did not set out to disappoint their father, not on purpose, but neither did they wish to shoulder the lumpy, enervating burden of the mundane. — Margaret Atwood

Roughing it builds a boy's character, but only certain kinds of roughing it. — Margaret Atwood

I was taking something away from her, although she didn't know it. I was filching. Never mind that it was something she apparently didn't want or had no use for, had rejected even; still, it was hers, and if I took it away, this mysterious "it" I couldn't quite define. — Margaret Atwood

But now it's officially a sitting room, because that's what is done in it, by some. For others there's standing room only. — Margaret Atwood

We lived in the gaps between the stories. From — Margaret Atwood

I don't want to see anyone. I lie in the bedroom with the curtains drawn and nothingness washing over me like a sluggish wave. Whatever is happening to me is my own fault. I have done something wrong, something so huge I can't even see it, something that's drowning me. I am inadequate and stupid, without worth. I might as well be dead. — Margaret Atwood

She goes off to see a shrink, to see if she can improve herself, make herself over into a new woman, one who no longer gives a shit. She would like that. The shrink is a nice person; Roz likes her. Together the two of them labor over Roz's life as if it's a jigsaw puzzle, a mystery story with a solution at the end. They arrange and rearrange the pieces, trying to get them to come out better. They are hopeful: if Roz can figure out what story she's in, then they will be able to spot the erroneous turns she took, they can retrace her steps, they can change the ending. They work out a tentative plot. — Margaret Atwood

There are to be no toeholds for love. We are two-legged wombs, that's all: sacred vessels, ambulatory chalices. — Margaret Atwood

Oryx," he says. "I know you're there." He repeats the name. It's not even her real name, which he'd never known anyway; it's only a word. It's a mantra. Sometimes he can conjure her up. At first she's pale and shadowy, but if he can say her name over and over, then maybe she'll glide into his body and be present with him in his flesh, and his hand on himself will become her hand. But she's always been evasive, you can never pin her down. Tonight she fails to materialize and he is left alone, whimpering ridiculously, jerking off all by himself in the dark. — Margaret Atwood

The values ascribed to the Indian will depend on what the white writer feels about Nature, and America has always had mixed feelings about that. At one end of the spectrum is Thoreau, wishing to immerse himself in swamps for the positive vibrations; at the other end is Benjamin Franklin, who didn't like Nature. [p.91] — Margaret Atwood

God cannot be held to the narrowness of literal and materialistic interpretations, nor measured by Human measurements, for His days are eons, and a thousand ages of our time are like an evening to Him. — Margaret Atwood

I lie flat, the damp air above me like a lid. Like earth. I wish it would rain. Better still, a thunderstorm, black clouds, lightning, ear-splitting sound. — Margaret Atwood

Yes, good, kind Crake. Please stop singing or I can't go on with the story. — Margaret Atwood

Love was like a steamroller. There was no avoiding it, it went over you and you came out flat. — Margaret Atwood

I look up at the ceiling, tracing the foliage of the wreath. Today it makes me think of a hat, the large-brimmed hats women used to wear at some period during the old days: hats like enormous halos, festooned with fruit and flowers, and the feathers of exotic birds; hats like an idea of paradise, floating just above the head, a thought solidified. — Margaret Atwood

Why is it always such a surprise? thinks Toby. The moon. Even though we know it's coming. Every time we see it, it makes us pause, and hush. — Margaret Atwood

All myths are stories, but not all stories are myths: among stories, myths hold a special place. — Margaret Atwood

The body may be the home of the soul and the pathway of the spirit, but it is also the perversity, the stubborn resistance, the malign contagion of the material world. Having a body, being in the body, is like being roped to a sick cat. — Margaret Atwood

How easy it is to invent a humanity, for anyone at all. — Margaret Atwood

But in the end, if he were a betting man, he says, he'd put his money on the insects. The insects are older than people, they have more experience at surviving, and there are a lot more of them than there are of us. Anyway, we'll probably blow ourselves sky-high before the end of the century, given the atom bomb and the way things are going. The future belongs to the insects. — Margaret Atwood

I began to forget myself
in the middle
of sentences. — Margaret Atwood

Modesty is Invisibility — Margaret Atwood

Love was merely a tool, smiles were another tool, they were both just tools for accomplishing certain ends. No magic, merely chemicals. I felt I'd never really loved anyone, not Paul, not Chuck the Royal Porcupine, not even Arthur. I'd polished them with my love and expected them to shine, brightly enough to return my own reflection, enhanced and sparkling. — Margaret Atwood

Don't misunderstand me. I am not scoffing at goodness, which is far more difficult to explain than evil, and far more complicated. But sometimes it's hard to put up with. — Margaret Atwood

Blondes are like white mice, you only find them in cages. They wouldn't last long in nature. They're too conspicuous. — Margaret Atwood

I would pore for hours over the stalls of worn necklaces, sets of gilt spoons, sugar tongs in the shape of hen's feet or midget hands, clocks that didn't work, flowered china, spotty mirrors and ponderous furniture, the flotsam left by those receding centuries in which, more and more, I was living. — Margaret Atwood

If I am good enough and quiet enough, perhaps after all they will let me go; but it's not easy being quiet and good, it's like hanging on to the edge of a bridge when you've already fallen over; you don't seem to be moving, just dangling there, and yet it is taking all your strength. — Margaret Atwood

I did ... learn an important distinction in graduate school: a speculation about who had syphilis when is gossip if it's about your friends, a plot element if it's about a character in a novel, and scholarship if it's about John Keats. — Margaret Atwood

One of the gravestones in the cemetery near the earliest church has an anchor on it and an hourglass, and the words In Hope.
In Hope. Why did they put that above a dead person? Was it the corpse hoping, or those still alive? — Margaret Atwood

Something about a bunch of trees made people think they could cut loose. "Wherever there's Nature, there's assholes," he said cheerfully. — Margaret Atwood

Sympathy from strangers can be ruinous. — Margaret Atwood

Nothing. Just that sound, like the sound of starlight scratching its way through outer space: kkkkkkk. — Margaret Atwood

Even sex was no longer what it had once been, though he was still as addicted to it as ever. He felt jerked around by his own dick, as if the rest of him was merely an inconsequential knob that happened to be attached to one end of it. Maybe the thing would be happier if left to roam around on its own. — Margaret Atwood

If I were to meet Cordelia again, what would I tell her about myself? The truth, or whatever would make me look good?
Probably the latter. I still have that need. — Margaret Atwood

Blank pages inspire me with terror. — Margaret Atwood

First, the front lines. They are not lines, really: the war seems to be going on in many places at once. Wooded — Margaret Atwood

She walks towards Karen and Karen feels a cool wind against her skin, and the grandmother holds out both of her knobby old hands, and Karen puts out her own hands and touches her, and her hands feel as if sand is falling over them. There's a smell of milkweed flowers and garden soil. The grandmother keeps on walking; her eyes are light blue, and her cheek comes against Karen's, cool grains of dry rice. Then she's like the dots on the comic page, close up, and then she's only a swirl in the air, and then she's gone. — Margaret Atwood

Zenia has stolen something from him, the one thing he always kept safe before, from all women, even from Roz. Call it his soul. She slipped it out of his breast pocket when he wasn't looking, easy as rolling a drunk, and looked at it, and bit it to see if it was genuine, and sneered at it for being so small after all, and then tossed it away, because she's the kind of woman who wants what she doesn't have and gets what she wants and then despises what she gets. What — Margaret Atwood

When you alter yourself, the alterations become the truth ... — Margaret Atwood

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. This is the kind of thing you see if you sit in the darkness with open eyes, not knowing the future. — Margaret Atwood

I'm not an activist by nature. I am suspicious of Utopian thinking and equally suspicious of its alternate. — Margaret Atwood

Keep calm, they said on television. Everything is under control. I was stunned. Everyone was, I know that. It was hard to believe. The entire government, gone like that. How did they get in, how did it happen? That was when they suspended the Constitution. They said it would be temporary. There wasn't even any rioting in the streets. People stayed home at night, watching television, looking for some direction. There wasn't even an enemy you could put your finger on. Look out, said Moira to me, over the phone. Here it comes. Here what comes? I said. You wait, she said. They've been building up to this. It's you and me up against the wall, baby. She was quoting an expression of my mother's, but she wasn't intending to be funny. — Margaret Atwood

All hearts float in their own
deep oceans of no light,
wetblack and glimmering,
their four mouths gulping like fish.
Hearts are said to pound:
this is to be expected, the heart's
regular struggle against being drowned. — Margaret Atwood

In the east a bank of cloud rises up silently like dark bread. — Margaret Atwood

The bathrobe was magenta, a colour that still makes him anxious whenever he sees it. — Margaret Atwood

They wouldn't know mad when they saw it in any case, because a good portion of the women in the Asylum were no madder than the Queen of England. Many were sane enough when sober, as their madness came out of a bottle, which is a kind I knew very well. One of them was in there to get away from her husband, who beat her black and blue, he was the mad one but nobody would lock him up; — Margaret Atwood

Laughter may instruct but it may also conceal, defending the joker against anger and retaliation: a game is only a game. — Margaret Atwood

You are a transitional generation, said Aunt Lydia. It is the hardest for you. We know the sacrifices you are being expected to make. It is hard when men revile you. For the ones who come after you, it will be easier. They will accept their duties with willing hearts.
She did not say: Because they will have no memories, of any other way.
She said: Because they won't want things they can't have. — Margaret Atwood

It had helped to keep her sane, that writing. Then, when time had begun again and real people had entered it, she'd abandoned it here. Now it's a whisper from the past.
Is that what writing amounts to? The voice your ghost would have, if it had a voice? — Margaret Atwood

Better never means better for everyone ... It always means worse, for some. — Margaret Atwood

Nor did I make any distinctions between great literature and any other kind. I just liked reading. — Margaret Atwood

she was beginning to emerge from the initial sex-induced coma created by him through — Margaret Atwood

In Paradise there are no stories, because there are no journeys. — Margaret Atwood

Just do your duty in silence. When in doubt, when flat on your back, you can look at the ceiling. Who knows what you may see, up there? Funeral wreaths and angels, constellations of dust, stellar or otherwise, the puzzles left by spiders. There's always something to occupy the inquiring mind. Is anything wrong, dear? the old joke went. No, why? You moved. Just don't move. What — Margaret Atwood

There's more private security in the United States than there are publicly funded forces, like police. What you don't want is a meld of government and commerce - you really want to keep those two things separate - because once you have that meld, you've got megacorruption, and you have no third force to whom you can say this stuff is poisoning our kids. — Margaret Atwood

Of course (said Oryx), having a money value was no substitute for love. Every child should have love, every person should have it ... but love was undependable, it came and then it went, so it was good to have a money value, because then at least those who wanted to make a profit from you would make sure you were fed enough and not damaged too much. Also there were many who had neither love nor a money value, and having one of these things was better than having nothing. — Margaret Atwood

His generation believed that if there was trouble all you'd have to do was shoot someone and then it would be okay. — Margaret Atwood

The world is full of weapons if you're looking for them. — Margaret Atwood

The cemetery has ... an inscription: 'Though I walk through the Valley of the Shadow of Death I will Fear No Evil, For Thou Art With Me.' Yes, it does feel deceptively safer with two; but Thou is a slippery character. Every Thou I've known has had a way of going missing. — Margaret Atwood

A Paradox, the doughnut hole. Empty space, once, but now they've learned to market even that. A minus quantity; nothing, rendered edible. I wondered if they might be used-metaphorically, of course-to demonstrate the existence of God. Does naming a sphere of nothingness transmute it into being? — Margaret Atwood

The act of making a photograph is less a question of what is being looked at than how. — Margaret Atwood

Truly amazing, what people can get used to, as long as there are a few compensations. — Margaret Atwood

Now that she's the carrier of life, she is closer to death, and needs special security. — Margaret Atwood

Men can imagine their own deaths, they can see them coming, and the mere though of impending death acts like an aphrodisiac. A dog or rabbit doesn't behave like that. Take birds
in a lean season they cut down on the eggs, or they won't mate at all. They put their energy into staying alive themselves until times get better. But human beings hope they can stick their souls into someone else, some new version of themselves, and live on forever.
As a species were doomed by hope, then?
You could call it hope. That, or desperation.
But we're doomed without hope, as well, said Jimmy.
Only as individuals, said Crake cheerfully. — Margaret Atwood

She was faintly terrifying. She wanted it all. She wanted them all. She wanted experiences. In Tin's already jaded view, experiences were what you got when you couldn't get what you wanted, but Jorrie had always been more optimistic than him. — Margaret Atwood

You wouldn't poison anyone!" she said. Pilar gave her a straight look. "You never know, dear," she said. "When you might have to. — Margaret Atwood

Language, like the mouths that hold and release it, is wet & living, each word is wrinkled with age, swollen with other words, with blood, smoothed by the numberless flesh tongues that have passed across it. Your language hangs around your neck, a noose, a heavy necklace; each word is empire, each word is vampire and mother. — Margaret Atwood

All those years I'd kept an outline of my father in my head, like a chalk line enclosing a father-shaped space. When I was little, I'd coloured it in often enough. But those colours had been too bright and the outline had been too large ... — Margaret Atwood

There were a few other moves of his father's he could do without as well - the sucker punches, the ruffling of the hair, the way of pronouncing the word son, in a slightly deeper voice. This hearty way of talking was getting worse, as if his father were auditioning for the role of Dad, but without much hope. — Margaret Atwood

He manages to appear puzzled, as if he can't quite remember how we all got in here. As if we are something he inherited, like a Victorian pump organ, and he hasn't figured out what to do with us. What we are worth. — Margaret Atwood

Their mothers had finally caught up to them and been proven right. There were consequences after all but they were the consequences to things you didn't even know you'd done. — Margaret Atwood

She stood for a long time, breathing in and breathing in, the scent of the trees and dogs and night flowers and water, because this was the best thing, it was what she wanted, to be outside in the night by herself. She wasn't sick any longer. — Margaret Atwood