Top 500 Margaret Atwood Quotes (2025 Update)

1. “In the end, we’ll all become stories.”

— Margaret Atwood

Featured in: Deep Quotes About Life, Fiction Quotes, Storytelling Quotes, Meaning of Life Quotes, Creative Quotes

2. “A word after a word after a word is power.”

— Margaret Atwood

Featured in: Quotes About Books And Reading, Creativity Quotes, Fiction Quotes, Communication Quotes, Reading Quotes

3. “Don’t let the bastards grind you down.”

— Margaret Atwood

4. “I exist in two places, here and where you are.”

— Margaret Atwood

5. “War is what happens when language fails.”

— Margaret Atwood

Featured in: Quotes About War

6. “The desire to be loved is the last illusion. Give it up and you will be free.”

— Margaret Atwood

7. “Life’s not fair; why should I be?”

— Margaret Atwood

Featured in: Demotivational Quotes

8. “Men are afraid that women will laugh at them. Women are afraid that men will kill them.”

— Margaret Atwood

Featured in: International Women's Day Quotes, Quotes About Laughing

9. “I have long since decided if you wait for the perfect time to write, you’ll never write. There is no time that isn’t flawed somehow.”

— Margaret Atwood

10. “Literature is not only a mirror; it is a map, a geography of the mind.”

— Margaret Atwood

11. “Reality simply consists of different points of view.”

— Margaret Atwood

12. “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

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

— Margaret Atwood

Featured in: Valentine's Day Quotes

14. “I would like to be the air that inhabits you for a moment only. I would like to be that unnoticed and that necessary.”

— Margaret Atwood

Featured in: Sleep Quotes

15. “Don’t wait until you’re ‘in the mood.’ Get into the mood by writing.”

— Margaret Atwood

16. “A rat in a maze is free to go anywhere, as long as it stays inside the maze.”

— Margaret Atwood

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

— Margaret Atwood

Featured in: Reading Quotes

18. “If I waited for perfection, I would never write a word.”

— Margaret Atwood

19. “Powerlessness and silence go together.”

— Margaret Atwood

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

— Margaret Atwood

21. “Nobody dies from lack of sex. It’s lack of love we die from.”

— Margaret Atwood

22. “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

23. “Now that I am dead, I know everything.”

— Margaret Atwood

24. “Menopause. A pause while you reconsider men.”

— Margaret Atwood

25. “I read for pleasure and that is the moment I learn the most.”

— Margaret Atwood

26. “What you don’t know won’t hurt you.”

— Margaret Atwood

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

— Margaret Atwood

28. “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

29. “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

30. “Ordinary, said Aunt Lydia, is what you are used to. This may not seem ordinary to you now, but after a time it will. It will become ordinary.”

— Margaret Atwood

31. “Potential has a shelf life.”

— Margaret Atwood

32. “You fit into me like a hook into an eye a fish hook an open eye.”

— Margaret Atwood

33. “In the spring, at the end of the day, you should smell like dirt.”

— Margaret Atwood

34. “Every utopia – let’s just stick with the literary ones – faces the same problem: What do you do with the people who don’t fit in?”

— Margaret Atwood

35. “The best way of keeping a secret is to pretend there isn’t one.”

— Margaret Atwood

36. “Lose your temper and you lose the fight.”

— Margaret Atwood

37. “Sooner or later, I hate to break it to you, you’re gonna die, so how do you fill in the space between here and there? It’s yours. Seize your space.”

— Margaret Atwood

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

— Margaret Atwood

39. “Stupidity is the same as evil if you judge by the results.”

— Margaret Atwood

40. “After everything that’s happened, how can the world still be so beautiful? Because it is.”

— Margaret Atwood

41. “Every aspect of human technology has a dark side, including the bow and arrow.”

— Margaret Atwood

42. “Ignoring isn’t the same as ignorance, you have to work at it.”

— Margaret Atwood

43. “I think calling it climate change is rather limiting. I would rather call it the everything change.”

— Margaret Atwood

44. “If you’re waiting for the perfect moment, you’ll never write a thing because it will never arrive. I have no routine. I have no foolproof anything. There’s nothing foolproof.”

— Margaret Atwood

45. “Perhaps I write for no one. Perhaps for the same person children are writing for when they scrawl their names in the snow.”

— Margaret Atwood

46. “You can’t help what you feel, but you can help how you behave.”

— Margaret Atwood

47. “There is no fool like an educated fool...”

— Margaret Atwood

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

— Margaret Atwood

49. “God is not the voice in the whirlwind, God is the whirlwind.”

— Margaret Atwood

50. “The road to death is a lonely highway, and longer than it apears, even when it leads straight down from the scaffold, by way of a rope; and it’s a dark road, with never any moon shining on it, to light your way.”

— Margaret Atwood

Featured in: Lonely Quotes