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

What would that be like - to long, to yearn for someone who is right there before your eyes, day in and day out?

Margaret Atwood

This is how the girl who couldn't speak and the man who couldn't see fell in love.

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.

Margaret Atwood

The young habitually mistake lust for love, they're infested with idealism of all kinds.

Margaret Atwood

Love is giving, marriage is buying and selling. You can't put love into a contract.

Margaret Atwood

Where was the threshold, between the inner world and the outer one? We each move unthinkingly through this gateway every day, we use the passwords of grammar-- --paying for the privilege of sanity with common coin, with meanings we've agreed on.

Margaret Atwood

Sympathy from strangers can be ruinous.

Margaret Atwood

Why is it we want so badly to memorialize ourselves? Even while we're still alive. We wish to assert our existence, like dogs peeing on fire hydrants. We put on display our framed photographs, our parchment diplomas, our silver-plated cups; we monogr...

Margaret Atwood

I and the girl in the picture have ceased to be the same person. I am her outcome, the result of the life she once lived headlong; whereas she, if she can be said to exist at all, is composed only of what I remember. I have the better view - I can se...

Margaret Atwood

Farewells can be shattering, but returns are surely worse. Solid flesh can never live up to the bright shadow cast by its absence. Time and distance blur the edges; then suddenly the beloved has arrived, and it's noon with its merciless light, and ev...

Margaret Atwood

She knows herself to be at the mercy of events, and she knows by now that events have no mercy.

Margaret Atwood

Time rises and rises, and when it reaches the level of your eyes you drown.

Margaret Atwood

They were new money, without a doubt: so new it shrieked. Their clothes looked as it they'd covered themselves in glue, then rolled around in hundred-dollar bills.

Margaret Atwood

I feel despised there, for having so little money; also for once having had so much. I never actually had it, of course. Father had it, and then Richard. But money was imputed to me, the same way crimes are imputed to those who've simply been present...

Margaret Atwood

An unearned income encourages self-pity in those already prone to it.

Margaret Atwood

The sun was up, the room already too warm. Light filtered in through the net curtains, hanging suspended in the air, sediment in a pond. My head felt like a sack of pulp. Still in my nightgown, damp from some fright I'd pushed aside like foliage, I p...

Margaret Atwood

He was deciding whether to cut her throat or love her forever.

Margaret Atwood

More powerful than God, more evil than the Devil; the poor have it, the rich lack it, and if you eat it you die?

Margaret Atwood

I'm not senile," I snapped. "If I burn the house down it will be on purpose.

Margaret Atwood

The pile of stones thus marks both an act of deliberate remembrance, and an act of deliberate forgetting. They're fond of paradox in that region.

Margaret Atwood

I thought my heart was pure. We do like to have such good opinions of our own motives when we're about to do something harmful, to someone else.

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