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Margaret Atwood

Margaret Atwood Quotes

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Famous Margaret Atwood Quotes

“Because you are never here but always there, I forget not you but what you look like You drift down the street in the rain, your face dissolving, changing shape, the colours running together My walls absorb you, breathe you forth again, you resume yourself, I do not recognize you You rest on the bed watching me watching you, we will never know each other any better than we do now”

KnowsLooksRunningTogetherFacesForgetStreetsLike YouWallShapesBedRainBreatheColourYour FaceResumesDissolvingRunning Together
Book:Power Politics
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“What else can I do? Once you've gone this far you aren't fit for anything else. Something happens to your mind. You're overqualified, overspecialized, and everybody knows it. Nobody in any other game would be crazy enough to hire me. I wouldn't even make a good ditch-digger, I'd start tearing apart the sewer-system, trying to pick-axe and unearth all those chthonic symbols - pipes, valves, cloacal conduits... No, no. I'll have to be a slave in the paper-mines for all time.”

KnowsTryingMindEnoughHappensWould BeGamesGoneCrazyMinesFitPaperPicksSlaveAll TimeSymbolsPipeBeing CrazyBe A SlaveSewersValveTearing ApartOverqualified
Book:The Edible Woman
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“By now you know: I come from another planet. But I will never say to you, "Take me to your leaders." Even I--unused to your ways though I am--would never make that mistake. We ourselves have such beings among us, made of cogs, pieces of paper, small disks of shiny metal, scraps of coloured cloth. I do not need to encounter more of them. Instead I will say, "Take me to your trees. Take me to your breakfasts, your sunsets, your bad dreams, your shoes, your nouns. Take me to your fingers; take me to your deaths." These are worth it. These are what I have come for.”

KnowsWayNeedsMadeDreamMistakeLeaderPiecesTreePlanetsPaperFingersShoesEncountersSunsetBreakfastTake MeMetalsWorth ItScrapNounsCogsBad DreamDisk
Author:Margaret Atwood
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“Hope drives us to invent new fixes for old messes, which in turn create ever more dangerous messes. Hope elects the politician with the biggest empty promise; and as any stockbroker or lottery seller knows, most of us will take a slim hope over prudent and predictable frugality. Hope, like greed, fuels the engine of capitalism.”

KnowsTurnsPoliticsDangerousPoliticianPromiseCapitalismEmptyGreedMessFuelEnginesPredictableLotteryPrudentSellersSlimFrugalityStockbrokersEmpty Promises
Author:Margaret Atwood
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“Either I'm alive or I'm dying, she said to Daniel. Please don't feel you can't tell me. Which is it? Which does it feel like? said Daniel. He patted her hand. You're not dead yet. You're a lot more alive than many people. This isn't good enough for Rennie. She wants something definite, the real truth, one way or the other. Then she will know what she should do next. It's this suspension, hanging in a void, this half-life she can't bear. She can't bear not knowing. She doesn't want to know.”

PeopleKnowsWayWantLifeFeelsShouldDoeSaidRealEnoughHandsTruthNextHalfKnowingAliveDyingBearsPleaseOne WayGood EnoughVoidNot KnowingDefiniteWant SomethingSuspensionI'm AliveReal TruthHalf Life
Book:Bodily Harm
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“And sometimes it happened, for a time. That kind of love comes and goes and is hard to remember afterwards, like pain. You would look at the man one day and you would think, I loved you, and the tense would be past, and you would be filled with a sense of wonder, because it was such an amazing and precarious and dumb thing to have done; and you would know too why your friends have been evasive about it, at the time.”

ThinkingKnowsMenLoveLooksKindHas BeensSometimesHardDoneWould BePainPastRememberWonderHappenedHe ManOne DayFilledDumbTenseComes And GoesTime LoveKinds Of LoveI Loved YouPrecariousSense Of WonderHandmaidsDumb ThingsHandmaids Tale
Book:The Handmaid's Tale
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“I did not know that 'poetess' was an insult, and that I myself would some day be called one. I did not know that to be told I had transcended my gender would be considered a compliment. I didn't know — yet — that black was compulsory. All of that was in the future. When I was sixteen, it was simple. Poetry existed; therefore it could be written; and nobody had told me — yet — the many, many reasons why it could not be written by me.”

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Author:Margaret Atwood
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