Quotes by Margaret Atwood

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“ Better not to invent her in her absence. Better to wait until she's actually here. Then he can make her up as she goes along. “

-Margaret Atwood-

Better not to invent her in her absence. Better to wait until she's actually here. Then he can make her up as she goes along.

You fit into melike a hook into an eyea fish hookan open eye.

In my dreams of this city I am always lost.

We must be a beacon of hope, because if you tell people there's nothing they can do, they will do worse than nothing.

We yearned for the future. How did we learn it, that talent for insatiability?

There is never only one, of anyone

For the poets nothing is wasted, because even if it is, they can write about the waste.

Potential has a shelf life.

A home filled with nothing but yourself. It's heavy, that lightness. It's crushing, that emptiness.

This is what I miss, Cordelia: not something that’s gone, but something that will never happen. Two old women giggling over their tea.

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

He put his arms around me. We were both feeling miserable. How were we to know we were happy, even then? Because we at least had that: arms, around.

A truth should exist,it should not be usedlike this. If I love youis that a fact or a weapon?

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

The facts of this world seen clearly are seen through tears.

If I waited for perfection, I would never write a word.

In the end, we’ll all become stories.

A prison does not only lock its inmates inside, it keeps all others out. Her strongest prison is of her own construction.

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

The beginning of Canadian cultural nationalism was not 'Am I really that oppressed?' but 'Am I really that boring?'

Men are afraid that women will laugh at them. Women are afraid that men will kill them.

An eye for an eye only leads to more blindness.

Walking into the crowd was like sinking into a stew - you became an ingredient, you took on a certain flavor.

A truth should exist, it should not be used like this. If I love you, is that a fact or a weapon?

Knowing was a temptation. What you don't know won't tempt you.

If we were all on trial for our thoughts, we would all be hanged.

You can't help what you feel, but you can help how you behave.

Nature is to zoos as God is to churches.

Popular art is the dream of society; it does not examine itself.

I am certain of nothing but the holiness of the heart's affections, and the truth of imagination.

Whatever is silenced will clamor to be heard, though silently.

When the past is recaptured by the imagination, breath is put back into life.

Never pray for justice, because you might get some.

If I were a tree, I would have no reason to love a human.

There's something to be said for hunger: at least it lets you know you’re still alive.

The best way of keeping a secret is to pretend there isn't one.

A voice is a human gift; it should be cherished and used, to utter fully human speech as possible. Powerlessness and silence go together.

Gardening is not a rational act.

You might as well fall flat on your face as lean over too far backward.

The moment of betrayal is the worst, the moment when you know beyond any doubt that you've been betrayed: that some other human being has wished you that much evil.

A divorce is like an amputation: you survive it, but there's less of you.

We thought we had such problems. How were we to know we were happy?

We still think of a powerful man as a born leader and a powerful woman as an anomaly.

I hope that people will finally come to realize that there is only one 'race' - the human race - and that we are all members of it.

The answers you get from literature depend on the questions you pose.

A rat in a maze is free to go anywhere, as long as it stays inside the maze.

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

Love blurs your vision; but after it recedes, you can see more clearly than ever.

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

Don't let the bastards grind you down.

Nothing changes instantaneously: in a gradually heating bathtub you'd be boiled to death before you knew it.

I am not your justification for existence.

Ignoring isn’t the same as ignorance, you have to work at it.

Time is not a line but a dimension, like the dimensions of space.

We were the people who were not in the papers. We lived in the blank white spaces at the edges of print.

Change isn't freedom; it's time.

When we think of the past it's the beautiful things we pick out. We want to believe it was all like that.

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

You’re never going to kill storytelling because it’s built into the human plan. We come with it.

In the spring, at the end of the day, you should smell like dirt.

Freedom, like everything else, is relative.

A word after a word after a word is power.

Nothing makes me more nervous than people who say "It can't happen".

If you want to find out what a man is made of, give him power.

In the end, we'll all become stories.

We were the people who were not in the papers. We lived in the blank white spaces at the edges of print. It gave us more freedom. We lived in the gaps between the stories.

What a strange thing to be alive amidst all this death.

We were the dreamers; we who would not live for today, but for tomorrow.

I would like to be the air that inhabits you for a moment only. I would like to be that unnoticed and that necessary.

War is what happens when language fails.

Nơi có tự do cho phụ nữ, có tự do cho tất cả.

Introducing Margaret Atwood

Margaret Atwood or was known as Margaret Eleanor Atwood CC OOnt CH FRSC FRSL (born November 18, 1939) is a Canadian novelist, poet, and literary critic. Since 1961, she has published 18 books of poetry, 18 novels, 11 books of nonfiction, nine collections of short fiction, eight children's books, two graphic novels, and a number of small press editions of both poetry and fiction. Her best-known work is the 1985 dystopian novel The Handmaid's Tale. Atwood has won numerous awards and honors for her writing, including two Booker Prizes, the Arthur C. Clarke Award, the Governor General's Award, the Franz Kafka Prize, Princess of Asturias Awards, and the National Book Critics and PEN Center USA Lifetime Achievement Awards. A number of her works have been adapted for film and television.

Atwood's works encompass a variety of themes including gender and identity, religion and myth, the power of language, climate change, and "power politics". Many of her poems are inspired by myths and fairy tales which interested her from a very early age.

Atwood is a founder of the Griffin Poetry Prize and the Writers' Trust of Canada. She is also a Senior Fellow of Massey College, Toronto. She is the inventor of the LongPen device and associated technologies that facilitate remote robotic writing of documents.