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

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....

Margaret Atwood

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

Margaret Atwood

I tried to visualize my jealousy as a yellowy-brown cloud boiling around inside me, then going out through my nose like smoke and turning into a stone and falling down into the ground. That did work a little. But in my visualization a plant covered w...

Margaret Atwood

So we couldn't mingle with them, but we could eavesdrop. We got our knowledge that way--we caught it like germs.

Margaret Atwood

But she went to tell the bees. She felt like an idiot doing it, but she'd promised. She remembered that it wasn't enough just to think at them: you had to say the words out loud. Bees were the messengers between this world and the other worlds, Pilar...

Margaret Atwood

Yet each flower, each twig, each pebble, shines as though illuminated from within, as once before, on her first day in the Garden. It’s the stress, it’s the adrenalin, it’s a chemical effect: she knows this well enough. But why is it built in? ...

Margaret Atwood

What am I living for and what am I dying for are the same question.

Margaret Atwood

Why do we want other people to like us, even if we don't really care about them all that much?

Margaret Atwood

You couldn’t leave words lying around where our enemies might find them.

Margaret Atwood

The possibility of injury or death was a strong attraction: as the online world became more and more pre-edited and slicked up, and as even its so-called reality sites raised questions about authenticity in the minds of the viewers, the rough, unpoli...

Margaret Atwood

Had she believed all that? Old Pilar's folklore? No, not really; or not exactly. Most likely Pilar hadn't quite believed it either, but it was a reassuring story: that the dead were not entirely dead but were alive in a different way; a paler way adm...

Margaret Atwood

The best way of being kind to bears is not to be very close to them.

Margaret Atwood

He would have died soon, but more painfully. Anyway, it was Urban Bloodshed Limitation. First rule: limit bloodshed by making sure that none of your own gets spilled.

Margaret Atwood

Gender roles suck," says Swift Fox. Then you should stop playing them, thinks Toby.

Margaret Atwood

Life is warped. I'm just in sync.

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 vibration...

Margaret Atwood

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

Margaret Atwood

If the national mental illness of the United States is megalomania, that of Canada is paranoid schizophrenia.

Margaret Atwood

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

Margaret Atwood

An eye for an eye only leads to more blindness.

Margaret Atwood

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

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