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

But there's something missing in them, even the nice ones. It's like they're permanently absent-minded, like that can't quite remember who they are.

Margaret Atwood

Fraternize means to behave like a brother. Luke told me that. He said there was no corresponding word that meant to behave like a sister. Sororize, it would have to be, he said. From the Latin.

Margaret Atwood

... Remember that forgiveness too is a power. To beg for it is a power, and to withold or bestow it is a power, perhaps the greatest.

Margaret Atwood

All you have to do, I tell myself, is keep your mouth shut and look stupid. It shouldn't be that hard.

Margaret Atwood

The night is mine, my own time, to do with it as I will, as long as I am quiet. As long as I don't move. As long as I lie still. The difference between and . Lay is always passive.

Margaret Atwood

A Tennyson garden, heavy with scent, languid; the return of the word swoon.

Margaret Atwood

Now we come to forgiveness. Don't worry about forgiving me right now. There are more important things. For instance: keep the others safe, if they are safe. Don't let them suffer too much. If they have to die, let it be fast. You might even provide a...

Margaret Atwood

We were the people who were not in the papers. We lived in the blank white spaces at the edges of print. It gave us more freedom. We lived in the gaps between the stories.

Margaret Atwood

There is more than one kind of freedom," said Aunt Lydia. "Freedom to and freedom from. In the days of anarchy, it was freedom to. Now you are being given freedom from. Don't underrate it.

Margaret Atwood

There was old sex in the room and loneliness, and expectation, of something without a shape or name. I remember that yearning, and was never the same as the hands that were on us there and then, in the small of the back, or out back, in the parking l...

Margaret Atwood

We yearned for the future. How did we learn it, that talent for insatiability?

Margaret Atwood

You might even provide a Heaven for them. We need You for that. Hell we can make for ourselves.

Margaret Atwood

Truly amazing, what people can get used to, as long as there are a few compensations.

Margaret Atwood

As we know from the study of history, no new system can impose itself upon a previous one without incorporating many of the elements to be found in the latter, as witness the pagan elements in medieval Christianity and the evolution of the Russian "K...

Margaret Atwood

Humanity is so adaptable [...] Truly amazing, what people can get used to, as long as there are a few compensations.

Margaret Atwood

Perhaps he was merely being friendly. Perhaps he saw the look on my face and mistook it for something else. Really what I wanted was the cigarette.

Margaret Atwood

How furious she must be, now that she's been taken at her word.

Margaret Atwood

I would like to be without shame. I would like to be shameless. I would like to be ignorant. Then I would not know how ignorant I was.

Margaret Atwood

Don't let the bastards grind you down.

Margaret Atwood

You can only be jealous of someone who has something you think you ought to have yourself.

Margaret Atwood

I didn't much like it, this grudge-holding against the past.

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