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Margaret Atwood

Margaret Atwood Quotes

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Famous Margaret Atwood Quotes

“If you want to be a writer, you should go into the largest library you can find and stand there contemplating the books that have been written. Then you should ask yourself, 'Do I really have anything to add?' If you have the arrogance or the humility to say yes, you will know you have the vocation.”

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Book:Second words: selected critical prose
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“I grew up in the north woods of Canada. You had to know certain things about survival. Wilderness survival courses weren't very formalized when I was growing up, but I was taught certain things about what to do if I got lost in the woods.”

IfsKnowsCertainCoursesLostGrowing UpGrowingTaughtGrewGrew UpSurvivalWoodsCanadaWildernessLost In The Woods
Book:Waltzing Again: New and Selected Conversations with Margaret Atwood
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“Plato said that poets should be excluded from the ideal republic because they are such liars. I am a poet, and I affirm that this is true. About no subject are poets tempted to lie so much as about their own lives; I know one of them who has floated at least five versions of his autobiography, none of them true. I of course - being also a novelist - am a much more truthful person than that. But since poets lie, how can you believe me?”

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Author:Margaret Atwood
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“In the First World War, people would be receiving letters from loved ones who had been dead for weeks, and they would not know until that black-bordered telegram arrived. I remember, of course, when it was letters only, or the telephone, and you did not make expensive long-distance calls unless it was, "Come home to the funeral," or the like.”

PeopleKnowsWorldFirstsLongWarHomeWould BeRememberCoursesBlackWeekLettersDistanceWar Of The WorldsExpensiveComing HomeFuneralLoved OnesReceivingTelephonesLong DistanceFirst World WarTelegrams
Author:Margaret Atwood
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“When we're good, we're very, very good, and when we're bad, we're horrid. This is not news, because we're so much more inventive and we have two hands, the left and the right. That is how we think. It's all over our literature, and it's all over the way we arrange archetypes, the good version, the bad version, the god, the devil, the Abel, the Cain, you name it. We arrange things in pairs like that because we know about ourselves.”

ThinkingKnowsWayTwoHandsLiteratureNamesLeftNewsDevilVery GoodVersionsPairsArchetypeCainTwo HandsAbel
Author:Margaret Atwood
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“I sink down into my body as into a swamp, fenland, where only I know the footing…. I’m a cloud, congealed around a central 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.”

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Author:Margaret Atwood
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“The world is being run by people my age, men my age, with falling-out hair and health worries, and it frightens me. When the leaders were older than me I could believe in their wisdom, I could believe they had transcended rage and malice and the need to be loved. Now I know better. I look at the faces in newspapers, in magazines, and wonder: what greeds, what furies drive them on?”

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Book:Cat's Eye
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“No more photos. Surely there are enough. No more shadows of myself thrown by light onto pieces of paper, onto squares of plastic. No more of my eyes, mouths, noses, moods, bad angles. No more yawns, teeth, wrinkles. I suffer from my own multiplicity. Two or three images would have been enough, or four, or five. That would have allowed for a firm idea: This is she. As it is, I'm watery, I ripple, from moment to moment I dissolve into my other selves. Turn the page: you, looking, are newly confused. You know me too well to know me. Or not too well: too much.”

KnowsWellsHas BeensTwoIdeasSelfEnoughMomentsLightEyeSufferingTurnsThreeMy OwnFiveToo MuchPiecesFourPaperPagesMouthsShadowMoodTeethFirmNosesConfusedThrownSquaresPlasticKnow MeAngleWrinklesRippleMultiplicity
Book:The Tent
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“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. Time in dreams is frozen. You can never get away from where you've been.”

PeopleThinkingKnowsDreamHandsMovingYoungBehindsCarYouthHabitGet AwayFrozenComing BackBehind YouDisposableSpeedingSpeeding Cars
Author:Margaret Atwood
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“at last you, will say (maybe without speaking) (there are mountains inside your skull garden and chaos, ocean and hurricane; certain corners of rooms, portraits of great-grandmothers, curtains of a particular shade; your deserts; your private dinosaurs; the first woman) all i need to know: tell me everything just as it was from the beginning.”

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Book:Selected Poems: 1965-1975
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“A wave of blood goes up to my head, my stomach shrinks together, as if something dangerous has just missed hitting me. It's as if I've been caught stealing, or telling a lie; or as if I've heard other people talking about me, saying bad things about me, behind my back. There's the same flush of shame, of guilt and terror, and of cold disgust with myself. But I don't know where these feelings have come from, what I've done.”

PeopleIfsKnowsDoneFeelingsTogetherLyingBehindsTalkingHeardBloodDangerousColdShameGuiltWaveCaughtTerrorStealingBad ThingsStomachDisgustingHittingShrinksPeople TalkingBehind My BackTalking About MeSaying Bad Things
Book:Cat's Eye
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“What a lost person needs is a map of the territory, with his own position marked on it so he can see where he is in relation to everything else. Literature is not only a mirror; it is also a map, a geography of the mind. Our literature is one such map, if we can learn to read it as our literature, as the product of who and where we have been. We need such a map desperately, we need to know about here, because here is where we live. For the members of a country or a culture, shared knowledge of their place, their here, is not a luxury but a necessity. Without that knowledge we will not survive.”

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Author:Margaret Atwood
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“Walking along past the store windows, into which she peers with her usual eagerness, her usual sense that maybe, today, she will discover behind them something that will truly be worth seeing, she feels as if her feet are not on cement at all but on ice. The blade of the skate floats, she knows, on a thin film of water, which it melts by pressure and which freezes behind it. This is the freedom of the present tense, this sliding edge.”

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Book:Bluebeard's Egg
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“We have begun to slam doors, and to throw things. I throw my purse, an ashtray, a package of chocolate chips, which breaks on impact. We are picking up chocolate chips for days. Jon throws a glass of milk, the milk, not the glass: he knows his own strength, as I do not. He throws a box of Cheerios, unopened. The things I throw miss, although they are worse things. The things he throws hit, but are harmless. I begin to see how the line is crossed, between histrionics and murder.”

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Book:Cat's Eye
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“All Creatures know that some must die That all the rest may take and eat; Sooner or later, all transform Their blood to wine, their flesh to meat. But Man alone seeks Vengefulness, And writes his abstract Laws on stone; For this false Justice he has made, He tortures limb and crushes bone. Is this the image of a god? My tooth for yours, your eye for mine? Oh, if Revenge did move the stars Instead of Love, they would not shine.”

IfsKnowsMenWritingMayMadeEyeMovingLawDiesStarsJusticeBloodMinesCreaturesStonesWineShiningBonesRevengeFleshTeethMeatTortureAbstractCrushSooner Or LaterLimbs
Book:The Year Of The Flood
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“But we still find the world astounding, we can't get enough of it; even as it shrivels, even as its many lights flicker and are extinguished (the tigers, the leopard frogs, the plunging dolphin flukes), flicker and are extinguished, by us, by us, we gaze and gaze. Where do you draw the line, between love and greed? We never did know, we always wanted more. We want to take it all in, for one last time, we want to eat the world with our eyes.”

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Author:Margaret Atwood
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“When they came to harvest my corpse (open your mouth, close your eyes) cut my body from the rope, surprise, surprise: I was still alive. Tough luck, folks, I know the law: you can't execute me twice for the same thing. How nice. I fell to the clover, breathed it in, and bared my teeth at them in a filthy grin. You can imagine how that went over. Now I only need to look out at them through my sky-blue eyes. They see their own ill will staring then in the forehead and turn tail Before, I was not a witch. But now I am one.”

KnowsNeedsLooksStillsBodyEyeLawTurnsNiceCuttingAliveImagineSkyMouthsToughBlueLuckSurpriseFolksIllTeethStaringWitchTailsHarvestRopeCorpsesForeheadsBlue EyesFilthyIll WillClovers
Author:Margaret Atwood
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