Top 500 Margaret Atwood Quotes (2025 Update)
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51. “I want everything back, the way it was. But there is no point to it, this wanting.”

— Margaret Atwood

52. “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

53. “I am afraid of falling into hopeless despair, over my wasted life, and I am still not sure how it happened.”

— Margaret Atwood

54. “I tell, therefore you are.”

— Margaret Atwood

55. “Nothing changes instantaneously: in a gradually heating bathtub you’d be boiled to death before you knew it.”

— Margaret Atwood

56. “In the desert there is no sign that says, Thou shalt not eat stones.”

— Margaret Atwood

57. “Remember that, my child. Remember you are half water. If you can’t go through an obstacle, go around it. Water does.”

— Margaret Atwood

58. “We are a society dying, said Aunt Lydia, of too much choice.”

— Margaret Atwood

59. “EXTINCTATHON, Monitored by MaddAddam. Adam named the living animals, MaddAddam names the dead ones. Do you want to play?”

— Margaret Atwood

60. “When we think of the past it’s the beautiful things we pick out. We want to believe it was all like that.”

— Margaret Atwood

61. “Waste not want not. I am not being wasted. Why do I want?”

— Margaret Atwood

62. “The past is a closed door.”

— Margaret Atwood

63. “You need a certain amount of nerve to be a writer, an almost physical nerve, the kind you need to walk a log across a river.”

— Margaret Atwood

64. “We thought we had such problems. How were we to know we were happy?”

— Margaret Atwood

65. “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

66. “The goals of the feminist movement have not been achieved, and those who claim we’re living in a post-feminist era are either sadly mistaken or tired of thinking about the whole subject.”

— Margaret Atwood

67. “Writing is alone, but I don’t think it’s lonely. Ask any writer if they feel lonely when they’re writing their book, and I think they’ll say no.”

— Margaret Atwood

68. “Without the light, no chance; without the dark, no dance.”

— Margaret Atwood

69. “Knowing was a temptation. What you don’t know won’t tempt you.”

— Margaret Atwood

70. “Screw poetry, it’s you I want, your taste, rain on you, mouth on your skin.”

— Margaret Atwood

71. “Another belief of mine; that everyone else my age is an adult, whereas I am merely in disguise.”

— Margaret Atwood

72. “Some people mistakenly think nature is very nice and benevolent and never betrays.”

— Margaret Atwood

73. “I’m a person of whim, and easily distracted. I don’t like multitasking. When I’m doing one thing, I like to do just that thing.”

— Margaret Atwood

74. “Every novel is-at the beginning-the same opening of a door onto a completely unknown space.”

— Margaret Atwood

75. “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

76. “I’m not sure which is worse: intense feeling, or the absence of it.”

— Margaret Atwood

77. “Don’t let the bastards grind you down. I repeat this to myself but it conveys nothing. You might as well say, Don’t let there be air; or Don’t be. I suppose you could say that.”

— Margaret Atwood

78. “The moment of betrayal is the worst, the moment when you know beyond any doubt that you’ve been betrayed: that some other human being has wished you that much evil.”

— Margaret Atwood

79. “Water does not resist. Water flows. When you plunge your hand into it, all you feel is a caress.”

— Margaret Atwood

80. “You’re never going to kill storytelling, because it’s built into the human plan. We come with it.”

— Margaret Atwood

81. “The internet is 95 percent porn and spam.”

— Margaret Atwood

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

— Margaret Atwood

83. “You don’t believe the sky is falling until a chunk of it falls on you.”

— Margaret Atwood

84. “Whatever is silenced will clamor to be heard, though silently.”

— Margaret Atwood

85. “Fear has a smell, as love does.”

— Margaret Atwood

86. “Optimism means better than reality; pessimism means worse than reality. I’m a realist.”

— Margaret Atwood

87. “The reader cannot see into your heart. He will know only what you tell him. Make the blind see your words. Make the hard-hearted feel. Make the deaf hear.”

— Margaret Atwood

88. “Never pray for justice, because you might get some.”

— Margaret Atwood

89. “Nature is to zoos as God is to churches.”

— Margaret Atwood

90. “It doesn’t really matter what “genre” your book is. What matters is that it’s a good book of its kind. Whatever that kind may be.”

— Margaret Atwood

91. “More and more I feel like a letter – deposited here, collected there. But a letter addressed to no one.”

— Margaret Atwood

92. “The society in ‘The Handmaid’s Tale’ is a throwback to the early Puritans whom I studied extensively at Harvard under Perry Miller, to whom the book is dedicated.”

— Margaret Atwood

93. “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

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

— Margaret Atwood

95. “More powerful than God, more evil than the Devil; the poor have it, the rich lack it, and if you eat it you die?”

— Margaret Atwood

96. “You think I’m not a goddess? Try me. This is a torch song. Touch me and you’ll burn.”

— Margaret Atwood

97. “But people will do anything rather than admit that their lives have no meaning. No use, that is. No plot.”

— Margaret Atwood

98. “Don’t misunderstand me. I am not scoffing at goodness, which is far more difficult to explain than evil, and far more complicated. But sometimes it’s hard to put up with.”

— Margaret Atwood

99. “Knowing too much about other people puts you in their power, they have a claim on you, you are forced to understand their reasons for doing things and then you are weakened.”

— Margaret Atwood

100. “Freedom, like everything else, is relative.”

— Margaret Atwood