Quotes by Margaret Atwood

About Margaret Atwood:

Margaret Eleanor Atwood is a Canadian poet, novelist, literary critic, essayist, and environmental activist. She is a winner of the Arthur C. Clarke Award and Prince of Asturias Award for Literature, has been shortlisted for the Booker Prize five times, winning once, and has been a finalist for the Governor General's Award several times, winning twice. In 2001 she was inducted into Canada's Walk of Fame. She is also a founder of the Writers' Trust of Canada, a non-profit literary organization that seeks to encourage Canada's writing community. Among innumerable contributions to Canadian literature, she was a founding trustee of the Griffin Poetry Prize.
A B C D E F G H I J K L M N O P Q R S T U V W X Y Z

Falling in love, we said; I fell for him. We were falling women. We believed in it, this downward motion: so lovely, like flying, and yet at the same time so dire, so extreme, so unlikely. God is love, they once said, but we reversed that, and love, ...

Margaret Atwood

But who can remember pain, once it’s over? All that remains of it is a shadow, not in the mind even, in the flesh. Pain marks you, but too deep to see. Out of sight, out of mind.

Margaret Atwood

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

Margaret Atwood

The sitting room is subdued, symmetrical; it's one of the shapes money takes when it freezes. Money has trickled through this room for years and years, as if through an underground cavern, crusting and hardening like stalactites into these forms.

Margaret Atwood

No mother is ever, completely, a child's idea of what a mother should be, and I suppose it works the other way around as well. But despite everything, we didn't do too badly by one another, we did as well as most.

Margaret Atwood

I am alive, I live, I breathe, I put my hand out, unfolded, into the sunlight.

Margaret Atwood

Night falls. Or has fallen. Why is it that night falls, instead of rising, like the dawn? Yet if you look east, at sunset, you can see night rising, not falling; darkness lifting into the sky, up from the horizon, like a black sun behind cloud cover....

Margaret Atwood

Why is it that night falls, instead of rising, like the dawn? Yet if you look east, at sunset, you can see night rising, not falling; darkness lifting into the sky, up from the horizon...

Margaret Atwood

I want everything back, the way it was. But there is no point to it, this wanting.

Margaret Atwood

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 up against a wall, every...

Margaret Atwood

There is something powerful in the whispering of obscenities, about those in power. There's something delightful about it, something naughty, secretive, forbidden, thrilling. It's like a spell, of sorts. It deflates them, reduces them to the common d...

Margaret Atwood

There were places you didn't want to walk, precautions you took that had to do with locks on windows and doors, drawing the curtains, leaving on lights. These things you did were like prayers; you did them and you hoped they would save you. And for t...

Margaret Atwood

It isn't the sort of thing you ask questions about, because the answers are not usually answers you want to know.

Margaret Atwood

Two-thirty comes during Testifying. It's Janine, telling about how she was gang-raped at fourteen and had an abortion.But whose fault was it? Aunt Helena says, holding up one plump finger. Her fault, her fault, her fault. We chant in unison. Who led ...

Margaret Atwood

I beliebe in the resistance as I believe there can be no light without shadow; or rather, no shadow unless there is also light.

Margaret Atwood

Men and women tried each other on, casually, like suits, rejecting whatever did not fit.

Margaret Atwood

If you worked out enough, maybe the man would too. Maybe you would be able to work it out together, as if the two of you were a puzzle that could be solved; otherwise, one of you, most likely the man, taking his addictive body with him and leaving yo...

Margaret Atwood

I believe in the resistance as I believe there can be no light without shadow; or rather, no shadow unless there is also light.

Margaret Atwood

Neither of us says the word love, not once. It would be tempting fate; it would be romance, bad luck.

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 cou...

Margaret Atwood

I'm sad now, the way we're talking is infinitely sad: faded music, faded paper flowers, worn satin, an echo of an echo. All gone away, no longer possible.

Margaret Atwood

Author Bio

  • NameMargaret Atwood
  • DescriptionCanadian writer
  • BornNovember 18, 1939
  • CountryCanada
  • ProfessionWriter; Poet; Novelist; Educationist
  • WorksThe Handmaid's Tale; Cat's Eye; Alias Grace; The Blind Assassin; Oryx And Crake; Surfacing
  • AwardsGuggenheim Fellowship; Companion Of The Order Of Canada; Order Of Ontario; Molson Prize; Humanist Of The Year; Prince Of Asturia Literary Prize