Margaret Eleanor Atwood CC OOnt CH FRSC is a Canadian poet, novelist, literary critic, essayist, teacher, environmental activist, and inventor. Since 1961, she has published 18 books of poetry, 18 novels, 11 books of non-fiction, nine collections of short fiction, eight children’s books, and two graphic novels, as well as a number of small press editions of both poetry and fiction. Atwood has won numerous awards and honors for her writing, including two Booker Prizes, the Arthur C. Clarke Award, the Governor General’s Award, the Franz Kafka Prize, Princess of Asturias Awards, and the National Book Critics and PEN Center USA Lifetime Achievement Awards. A number of her works have been adapted for film and television. These Margaret Atwood quotes will motivate you.
Best Margaret Atwood Quotes
1. “You may not be able to alter reality, but you can alter your attitude towards it, and this, paradoxically, alters reality. Try it and see.” ~ Margaret Atwood
2. “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.” ~ Margaret Atwood
3. “Water does not resist. Water flows. When you plunge your hand into it, all you feel is a caress. Water is not a solid wall, it will not stop you. But water always goes where it wants to go, and nothing in the end can stand against it. Water is patient. Dripping water wears away a stone. Remember that, my child. Remember you are half water. If you can’t go through an obstacle, go around it. Water does.” ~ Margaret Atwood
4. “In the end, we’ll all become stories.” ~ Margaret Atwood
5. “Men are afraid that women will laugh at them. Women are afraid that men will kill them.” ~ Margaret Atwood
6. “Inside the peach, there is a stone.” ~ Margaret Atwood
7. “Without the light, no chance; without the dark, no dance.” ~ Margaret Atwood
8. “A voice is a human gift; it should be cherished and used, to utter fully human speech as possible. Powerlessness and silence go together.” ~ Margaret Atwood
9. “So much better to travel than to arrive.” ~ Margaret Atwood
10. “poetry is where the language is renewed.” ~ Margaret Atwood
11. “The fabric of democracy is always fragile everywhere because it depends on the will of citizens to protect it, and when they become scared, when it becomes dangerous for them to defend it, it can go very quickly.” ~ Margaret Atwood
12. “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.” ~ Margaret Atwood
13. “If your not annoying somebody, you’re not alive.” ~ Margaret Atwood
14. “Reality simply consists of different points of view.” ~ Margaret Atwood
15. “Good writing takes place at intersections, at what you might call knots, at places where the society is snarled or knotted up.” ~ Margaret Atwood
16. “The desire to be loved is the last illusion. Give it up and you will be free.” ~ Margaret Atwood quotes
17. “Oppression involves a failure of the imagination: the failure to imagine the full humanity of other human beings.” ~ Margaret Atwood
18. “Anybody who writes a book is an optimist. First of all, they think they’re going to finish it. Second, they think somebody’s going to publish it. Third, they think somebody’s going to read it. Fourth, they think somebody’s going to like it. How optimistic is that?” ~ Margaret Atwood
19. “Potential has a shelf life.” ~ Margaret Atwood
20. “I exist in two places, here and where you are.” ~ Margaret Atwood
21. “Where do the words go when we have said them?” ~ Margaret Atwood
22. “If we were all on trial for our thoughts, we would all be hanged.” ~ Margaret Atwood
23. “Time is not a line but a dimension, like the dimensions of space.” ~ Margaret Atwood
24. “You can only be jealous of someone who has something you think you ought to have yourself.” ~ Margaret Atwood
25. “Touch comes before sight, before speech. It is the first language and the last, and it always tells the truth.” ~ Margaret Atwood
26. “Another belief of mine; that everyone else my age is an adult, whereas I am merely in disguise.” ~ Margaret Atwood
27. “I read for pleasure and that is the moment I learn the most.” ~ Margaret Atwood
28. “You can think clearly only with your clothes on.” ~ Margaret Atwood
29. “Men and women are not “equal” if “equal” means “exactly the same.” Our many puzzlements and indeed unhappinesses come from trying to figure out what the differences really mean, or should mean, or should not mean.” ~ Margaret Atwood
30. “The Eskimos had fifty-two names for snow because it was important to them: there ought to be as many for love.” ~ Margaret Atwood
31. “Lose your temper and you lose the fight.” ~ Margaret Atwood
32. “Which of us can resist the temptation of being thought indispensable?” ~ Margaret Atwood
33. “We still think of a powerful man as a born leader and a powerful woman as an anomaly.” ~ Margaret Atwood
34. “Like the trains, she’s never on time and always departing.” ~ Margaret Atwood
35. “And yet it disturbs me to learn I have hurt someone unintentionally. I want all my hurts to be intentional.” ~ Margaret Atwood
36. “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
37. “In the spring, at the end of the day, you should smell like dirt.” ~ Margaret Atwood
38. “Maybe I don’t really want to know what’s going on. Maybe I’d rather not know. Maybe I couldn’t bear to know. The Fall was a fall from innocence to knowledge.” ~ Margaret Atwood
39. “The trickle-down theory of economics has it that it’s good for rich people to get even richer because some of their wealth will trickle own, through their no doubt lavish spending, upon those who stand below them on the economic ladder. Notice that the metaphor is not that of a gushing waterfall but of a leaking tap: even the most optimistic endorsers of this concept do not picture very much real flow, as their language reveals” pg. 102.” ~ Margaret Atwood
40. “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
41. “I’m not sure which is worse: intense feeling, or the absence of it.” ~ Margaret Atwood
42. “Better never means better for everyone… It always means worse, for some.” ~ Margaret Atwood
43. “Ah men, why do you want all this attention? I can write poems for myself, make love to a doorknob if absolutely necessary. What do you have to offer me I can’t find otherwise except humiliation? Which I no longer need.” ~ Margaret Atwood
44. “There is no fool like an educated fool.” ~ Margaret Atwood
45. “Things musicals taught me: All your problems will go away if you sing about it.” ~ Margaret Atwood
46. “Little girls are cute and small only to adults. To one another they are not cute. They are life-sized.” ~ Margaret Atwood
47. “All it takes,” said Crake, “is the elimination of one generation. One generation of anything. Beetles, trees, microbes, scientists, speakers of French, whatever. Break the link in time between one generation and the next, and it’s game over forever.” ~ Margaret Atwood
48. “The astrologers would tell that the U.S. is ruled by fire and Canada is ruled by water. Short version: You pep us up, we cool you down.” ~ Margaret Atwood
49. “I’ve never understood why people consider youth a time of freedom and joy. It’s probably because they have forgotten their own.” ~ Margaret Atwood
50. “Everyone thinks writers must know more about the inside of the human head, but that’s wrong. They know less, that’s why they write. Trying to find out what everyone else takes for granted.” ~ Margaret Atwood
51. “Powerlessness and silence go together.” ~ Margaret Atwood
52. “There’s always something to occupy the inquiring mind.” ~ Margaret Atwood
53. “Home is where the heart is, I thought now, gathering myself together in Betty’s Luncheonette. I had no heart any more, it had been broken; or not broken, it simply wasn’t there any more. It had been scooped neatly out of me like the yolk from a hard-boiled egg, leaving the rest of me bloodless and congealed and hollow. I’m heartless, I thought. Therefore I’m homeless.” ~ Margaret Atwood
54. “If you get hungry enough, they say, you start eating your own heart.” ~ Margaret Atwood
55. “Stupidity is the same as evil if you judge by the results.” ~ Margaret Atwood
56. “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?” ~ Margaret Atwood
57. “I wanted to forget the past, but it refused to forget me; it waited for sleep, then cornered me.” ~ Margaret Atwood
58. “If he wants to be an asshole, it’s a free country. Millions before him have made the same life choice.” ~ Margaret Atwood
59. “Hatred would have been easier. With hatred, I would have known what to do. Hatred is clear, metallic, one-handed, unwavering; unlike love.” ~ Margaret Atwood
60. “It is better to hope than to mope!” ~ Margaret Atwood
61. “Time has not stood still. It has washed over me, washed me away, as if I’m nothing more than a woman of sand, left by a careless child too near the water.” ~ Margaret Atwood
62. “It’s a feature of our age that if you write a work of fiction, everyone assumes that the people and events in it are disguised biography — but if you write your biography, it’s equally assumed you’re lying your head off.” ~ Margaret Atwood
63. “There were a lot of gods. Gods always come in handy, they justify almost anything.” ~ Margaret Atwood
64. “Ignoring isn’t the same as ignorance, you have to work at it.” ~ Margaret Atwood
65. “Happiness is a garden walled with glass: there’s no way in or out. In Paradise there are no stories, because there are no journeys. It’s loss and regret and misery and yearning that drive the story forward, along its twisted road.” ~ Margaret Atwood
