Top 500 Margaret Atwood Quotes (2025 Update)
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451. “What can a woman do when scandalous gossip travels the world? If she defends herself, she sounds guilty. So I waited some more.”

— Margaret Atwood

452. “They seemed to be able to choose. We seemed to be able to choose, then. We were a society dying of too much choice.”

— Margaret Atwood

453. “Perhaps he’s reached that state of intoxication which power is said to inspire, the state in which you believe you are indispensable and can therefore do anything, absolutely anything you feel like, anything at all.”

— Margaret Atwood

454. “I am certain that a Sewing Machine would relieve as much human suffering as a hundred Lunatic Asylums, and possibly a good deal more.”

— Margaret Atwood

455. “But remember that forgiveness too is a power. To beg for it is a power, and to withhold or bestow it is a power, perhaps the greatest.”

— Margaret Atwood

456. “Winter is not so dangerous. I need hardness, cold, rigidity; not this heaviness, as if I’m a melon on a stem, this liquid ripeness.”

— Margaret Atwood

457. “Whoever said that light was life and darkness nothing? For some of us mythologies are different.”

— Margaret Atwood

458. “Cleverness is a quality a man likes to have in his wife as long as she is some distance away from him. Up close, he’ll take kindness any day of the week, if there’s nothing more alluring to be had.”

— Margaret Atwood

459. “Modesty is invisibility, said Aunt Lydia. Never forget it. To be seen-to be seen-is to be-her voice trembled-penetrated. What you must be, girls, is impenetrable.”

— Margaret Atwood

460. “The beauty is an illusion, and also a warning: there’s a dark side to beauty, as with poisonous butterflies.”

— Margaret Atwood

461. “The pen between my fingers is sensuous, alive almost, I can feel its power, the power of the words it contains.”

— Margaret Atwood

462. “He stops, looks up at this window, and I can see the white oblong of his face. We look at each other. I have no rose to toss, he has no lute. But it’s the same kind of hunger.”

— Margaret Atwood

463. “I walk away from him. It’s enormously pleasing to me, this walking away. It’s like being able to make people appear and vanish, at will.”

— Margaret Atwood

464. “While I read, the Commander sits and watches me doing it, without speaking but also without taking his eyes off me. This watching is a curiously sexual act, and I feel undressed while he does it.”

— Margaret Atwood

465. “For the heart was both key and lock, and he who could master the hearts of men and learn their secrets was well on the way to mastering the Fates and controlling the thread of his own destiny.”

— Margaret Atwood

466. “Why is it he feels some line has been crossed, some boundary transgressed? How much is too much, how far is too far?”

— Margaret Atwood

467. “I knew what love was supposed to be: obsession with undertones of nausea.”

— Margaret Atwood

468. “Eating is our earliest metaphor, preceding our consciousness of gender difference, race, nationality, and language. We eat before we talk.”

— Margaret Atwood

469. “I’m sorry there is so much pain in this story. I’m sorry it’s in fragments, like a body caught in crossfire or pulled apart by force. But there is nothing I can do to change it.”

— Margaret Atwood

470. “Kill what you can’t save what you can’t eat throw out what you can’t throw out bury What you can’t bury give away what you can’t give away you must carry with you, it is always heavier than you thought.”

— Margaret Atwood

471. “People need such stories, because however dark, a darkness with voices in it is better than a silent void.”

— Margaret Atwood

472. “If there were no emptiness, there would be no life.”

— Margaret Atwood

473. “Vanity is becoming a nuisance, I can see why women give it up, eventually. But I’m not ready for that yet.”

— Margaret Atwood

474. “Anaesthesia, that’s one technique: if it hurts, invent a different pain.”

— Margaret Atwood

475. “Not so her eyes, which were the flat hostile blue of a midsummer sky in bright sunlight, a blue that shuts you out.”

— Margaret Atwood

476. “Human understanding is fallible, and we see through a glass, darkly. Any religion is a shadow of God. But the shadows of God are not God.”

— Margaret Atwood

477. “For Adam was first formed, then Eve. ‘And Adam was not deceived, but the woman being deceived in the transgression.”

— Margaret Atwood

478. “I always thought eating was a ridiculous activity anyway. I’d get out of it myself if I could, though you’ve got to do it to stay alive, they tell me.”

— Margaret Atwood

479. “What fabrications they are, mothers. Scarecrows, wax dolls for us to stick pins into, crude diagrams. We deny them an existence of their own, we make them up to suit ourselves – our own hungers, our own wishes, our own deficiencies.”

— Margaret Atwood

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

— Margaret Atwood

481. “But if you happen to be a man, sometime in the future, and you’ve made it this far, please remember: you will never be subject to the temptation or feeling you must forgive, a man, as a woman. It’s difficult to resist, believe me. But remember that forgiveness too is a power. To beg for it is a power, and to withhold or bestow it is a power, perhaps the greatest.”

— Margaret Atwood

482. “You can mean more than one. You can mean thousands. I’m not in any immediate danger, I’ll say to you. I’ll pretend you can hear me. But it’s no good, because I know you can’t.”

— Margaret Atwood

483. “There’s a difference between describing and evoking something. You can describe something and be quite clinical about it. To evoke it, you call it up in the reader. That’s what writers do when they’re good.”

— Margaret Atwood

484. “Sanity is a valuable possesion; I hoard it the way people once hoarded money. I save it, so I will have enough, when the time comes.”

— Margaret Atwood

485. “I have failed once again to fulfill the expectations of others, which have become my own.”

— Margaret Atwood

486. “Old lovers go the way of old photographs, bleaching out gradually as in a slow bath of acid: first the moles and pimples, then the shadings. Then the faces themselves, until nothing remains but the general outlines.”

— Margaret Atwood

487. “One and one and one and one doesn’t equal four. Each one remains unique, there is no way of joining them together. They cannot be exchanged, one for the other. They cannot replace each other.”

— Margaret Atwood

488. “Buttered, I lie on my single bed, flat, like a piece of toast. I.”

— Margaret Atwood

489. “We are survivors, of each other. We have been shark to one another, but also lifeboat. That counts for something.”

— Margaret Atwood

490. “I’ve learned to do without a lot of things. If you have a lot of things, said Aunt Lydia, you get too attached to this material world and you forget about spiritual values. You must cultivate poverty of spirit. Blessed are the meek.”

— Margaret Atwood

491. “I am a blank, here, between parentheses. Between other people.”

— Margaret Atwood

492. “Because you may think a bed is a peaceful thing, Sir, and to you it may mean rest and comfort and a good night’s sleep. But it isn’t so for everyone; and there are many dangerous things that may take place in a bed.”

— Margaret Atwood

493. “Fear is a powerful stimulant.”

— Margaret Atwood

494. “What a moron I was to think you were sweet and innocent, when it turns out you were actually college-educated the whole time!”

— Margaret Atwood

495. “Temptation comes next. At the Center, temptation was anything much more than eating and sleeping. Knowing was a temptation. What you don’t know won’t tempt you, Aunt Lydia used to say. Maybe.”

— Margaret Atwood

496. “I lie flat, the damp air above me like a lid. Like earth. I wish it would rain. Better still, a thunderstorm, black clouds, lightning, ear-splitting sound.”

— Margaret Atwood

497. “Love is giving, marriage is buying and selling. You can’t put love into a contract.”

— Margaret Atwood

498. “Watch out for art, Crake used to say. As soon as they start doing art, we’re in trouble. Symbolic thinking of any kind would signal downfall, in Crake’s view. Next they’d be inventing idols, and funerals, and grave goods, and the afterlife, and sin, and Linear B, and kings, and then slavery and war.”

— Margaret Atwood

499. “It is my contention that the process of reading is part of the process of writing, the necessary completion without which writing can hardly be said to exist.”

— Margaret Atwood

500. “These things sneak up on him for no reason, these flashes of irrational happiness. It’s probably a vitamin deficiency.”

— Margaret Atwood