Top 500 Margaret Atwood Quotes (2023 Update)
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451. “She knows herself to be at the mercy of events, and she knows by now that events have no mercy.”

— Margaret Atwood

452. “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

453. “There are five different prayers: for health, wealth, a death, a birth, a sin. You pick the one you want, punch in the number, then punch in your own number so your account will be debited, and punch in the number of times you want the prayer repeated.”

— Margaret Atwood

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

— Margaret Atwood

455. “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

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

— Margaret Atwood

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

— Margaret Atwood

458. “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

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

— Margaret Atwood

460. “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

461. “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

462. “Before the Civil War, Canada was at the top of the underground railroad. If you made it into Canada, you were safe unless someone came and hauled you back. That was also true during the Vietnam War for draft resisters.”

— Margaret Atwood

463. “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

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

— Margaret Atwood

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

— Margaret Atwood

466. “Fear is a powerful stimulant.”

— Margaret Atwood

467. “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

468. “Happiness is a garden walled with glass: there’s no way in or out.”

— Margaret Atwood

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

— Margaret Atwood

470. “One of the gravestones in the cemetery near the earliest church has an anchor on it and an hourglass, and the words In Hope. In Hope. Why did they put that above a dead person? Was it the corpse hoping, or those still alive?”

— Margaret Atwood

471. “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

472. “I hunger to commit the act of touch.”

— Margaret Atwood

473. “Anyway, maybe there weren’t any solutions. Human society, corpses and rubble. It never learned, it made the same cretinous mistakes over and over, trading short-term gain for long-term pain.”

— Margaret Atwood

474. “Love was like a steamroller. There was no avoiding it; it went over you and you came out flat.”

— Margaret Atwood

475. “And consider: it is loss to which everything flows, absence in which everything flowers.”

— Margaret Atwood

476. “At moments like this I envy those who have found a safe haven in which to bestow their hearts; or perhaps I envy them for having a heart to bestow. I often feel that I myself am without one, and possess in its stead merely a heart shaped stone.”

— Margaret Atwood

477. “We do not know how we’d behave. But a lot of people facing fascism didn’t become fascists. I don’t happen to believe that we are all monsters.”

— Margaret Atwood

478. “Beginnings are sudden, but also insidious. They creep up on you sideways, they keep to the shadows, they lurk unrecognized. Then, later, they spring.”

— Margaret Atwood

479. “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

480. “I want to keep on living, in any form. I resign my body freely, to the uses of others. They.”

— Margaret Atwood

481. “Still, I wanted to believe; indeed I longed to; and, in the end, how much of belief comes from longing?”

— Margaret Atwood

482. “There were the garden shears, the knitting needles; the world is full of weapons if you’re looking for them. I should have paid attention.”

— Margaret Atwood

483. “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

484. “The animals have no need for speech, why talk when you are a word.”

— Margaret Atwood

485. “Gardening is not a rational act. What matters is the immersion of the hands in the earth, that ancient ceremony of which the Pope kissingthe tarmac is merely a pallid vestigial remnant.”

— Margaret Atwood

486. “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

487. “The young habitually mistake lust for love, they’re infested with idealism of all kinds.”

— Margaret Atwood

488. “What we share may be a lot like a traffic accident but we get one another. We are survivors of each other. We have been shark to one another, but also lifeboat. That counts for something.”

— Margaret Atwood

489. “I wish I had a pig ball.”

— Margaret Atwood

490. “For drinking Life there are two cups: The No Cup is bitter, the Yes Cup is yummy – Now, which one would you rather have in your tummy?”

— Margaret Atwood

491. “You will always have partial points of view, and you’ll always have the story behind the story that hasn’t come out yet. And any form of journalism you’re involved with is going to be up against a biased viewpoint and partial knowledge.”

— Margaret Atwood

492. “All fat women look the same; they all look 42.”

— Margaret Atwood

493. “A prison does not only lock its inmates inside, it keeps all others out. Her strongest prison is of her own construction.”

— Margaret Atwood

494. “I’m a fool, to confuse this with goodness. I am not good. I know too much to be good. I know myself. I know myself to be vengeful, greedy, secretive and sly.”

— Margaret Atwood

495. “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

496. “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

497. “The tension between her lack of control and her attempt to suppress it is horrible. It’s like a fart in church.”

— Margaret Atwood

498. “Time rises and rises, and when it reaches the level of your eyes you drown.”

— Margaret Atwood

499. “I tell myself it doesn’t matter, your name is like your telephone number, useful only to others; but what I tell myself is wrong, it does matter.”

— Margaret Atwood

500. “He’d developed a strangely tender feeling towards such words, as if they were children abandoned in the woods and it was his duty to rescue them.”

— Margaret Atwood