Margaret Atwood Quotes

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

Touch comes before sight, before speech. It is the first language and the last, and it always tells the truth.

How could I be sleeping with this particular man.... Surely only true love could justify my lack of taste.

If we were all on trial for our thoughts, we would all be hanged.

The Eskimos had fifty-two names for snow because it was important to them: there ought to be as many for love.

The world is being run by people my age, men my age, with falling-out hair and health worries, and it frightens me. When the leaders were older than me I could believe in their wisdom, I could believe they had transcended rage and malice and the need to be loved. Now I know better. I look at the faces in newspapers, in magazines, and wonder: what greeds, what furies drive them on?

We thought we were running away from the grownups, and now we are the grownups.

Never pray for justice, because you might get some.

There's the story, then there's the real story, then there's the story of how the story came to be told. Then there's what you leave out of the story. Which is part of the story too.

I hope that people will finally come to realize that there is only one 'race' - the human race - and that we are all members of it.

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

Where do the words go when we have said them?

Little girls are cute and small only to adults. To one another they are not cute. They are life-sized.

A voice is a human gift; it should be cherished and used, to utter fully human speech as possible. Powerlessness and silence go together.

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.

I've never understood why people consider youth a time of freedom and joy. It's probably because they have forgotten their own.

If I were going to convert to any religion I would probably choose Catholicism because it at least has female saints and the Virgin Mary.

The truly fearless think of themselves as normal.

For years I wanted to be older, and now I am.

No one knows what cuases an outer landscape to become an inner one.

Canada was built on dead beavers.

Their mothers had finally caught up to them and been proven right. There were consequences after all but they were the consequences to things you didn't even know you'd done.

Gardening is not a rational act.

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

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

Does feminist mean large unpleasant person who'll shout at you or someone who believes women are human beings. To me it's the latter, so I sign up

Popular art is the dream of society; it does not examine itself.

Time is compressed like the fist I close on my knee... I hold inside it the clues and solutions and the power for what I must do now.