Top 500 Margaret Atwood Quotes (2025 Update)
Page 3 of 10

101. “Time is not a line but a dimension, like the dimensions of space. If you can bend space you can bend time also, and if you knew enough and could move faster than light you could travel backwards in time and exist in two places at once.”

— Margaret Atwood

102. “But maybe, underneath, she loves him too much. Maybe it’s her excessive love that pushes him away.”

— Margaret Atwood

103. “To live in prison is to live without mirrors. To live without mirrors is to live without the self.”

— Margaret Atwood

104. “If you’re put on a pedestal, you’re supposed to behave yourself like a pedestal type of person. Pedestals actually have a limited circumference. Not much room to move around.”

— Margaret Atwood

105. “An eye for an eye only leads to more blindness.”

— Margaret Atwood

106. “We yearned for the future. How did we learn it, that talent for insatiability?”

— Margaret Atwood

107. “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.”

— Margaret Atwood

108. “Truly amazing, what people can get used to, as long as there are a few compensations.”

— Margaret Atwood

109. “A truth should exist, it should not be used like this. If I love you is that a fact or a weapon?”

— Margaret Atwood

110. “The use of “religion” as an excuse to repress the freedom of expression and to deny human rights is not confined to any country or time.”

— Margaret Atwood

111. “Oppression involves a failure of the imagination: the failure to imagine the full humanity of other human beings.”

— Margaret Atwood

112. “For if the world treats you well, Sir, you come to believe you are deserving of it.”

— Margaret Atwood

113. “A fist is more than the sum of its fingers.”

— Margaret Atwood

114. “I grew up in the north woods of Canada. You had to know certain things about survival. Wilderness survival courses weren’t very formalized when I was growing up, but I was taught certain things about what to do if I got lost in the woods.”

— Margaret Atwood

115. “I myself have 12 hats, and each one represents a different personality. Why just be yourself?”

— Margaret Atwood

116. “When we’re young, we like happy endings. When we’re a little older, we think happy endings are unrealistic and so we prefer bad but credible endings. When we’re older still, we realize happy endings aren’t so bad after all.”

— Margaret Atwood

117. “There’s always something to occupy the inquiring mind.”

— Margaret Atwood

118. “If your not annoying somebody, you’re not alive.”

— Margaret Atwood

119. “My good intentions are completely lethal.”

— Margaret Atwood

120. “We understand more than we know.”

— Margaret Atwood

121. “When things are really dismal, you can laugh, or you can cave in completely.”

— Margaret Atwood

122. “The liver is evil and must be punished.”

— Margaret Atwood

123. “A hot wind was blowing around my head, the strands of my hair lifting and swirling in it, like ink spilled in water.”

— Margaret Atwood

124. “You are a woman with a man inside watching a woman. You are your own voyeur.”

— Margaret Atwood

125. “No matter how much you’ve been warned, Death always comes without knocking. Why now? is the cry. Why so soon? It’s the cry of a child being called home at dusk.”

— Margaret Atwood

126. “And yet it disturbs me to learn I have hurt someone unintentionally. I want all my hurts to be intentional.”

— Margaret Atwood

127. “The facts of this world seen clearly are seen through tears.”

— Margaret Atwood

128. “Myths can’t be translated as they did in their ancient soil. We can only find our own meaning in our own time.”

— Margaret Atwood

129. “In my dreams of this city I am always lost.”

— Margaret Atwood

130. “Come away with me, he said, we will live on a desert island. I said, I am a desert island. It was not what he had in mind.”

— Margaret Atwood

131. “Neither of us says the word love, not once. It would be tempting fate; it would be romance, bad luck.”

— Margaret Atwood

132. “Her speeches were about the sanctity of the home, about how women should stay home. Serena Joy didn’t do this herself, she made speeches instead, but she presented this failure of hers as a sacrifice she was making for the good of all.”

— Margaret Atwood

133. “Fool, he tells himself. She’s not here. She was never here. It was imagination and wishful thinking, nothing but that. Resign yourself. He can’t resign himself.”

— Margaret Atwood

134. “But nothing is more opaque than absolute transparency.”

— Margaret Atwood

135. “Time is not a line but a dimension, like the dimensions of space.”

— Margaret Atwood

136. “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

137. “Toast is me. I am toast.”

— Margaret Atwood

138. “There’s something to be said for hunger: at least it lets you know you’re still alive.”

— Margaret Atwood

139. “Does feminist mean large unpleasant person who’ll shout at you or someone who believes women are human beings. To me it’s the latter, so I sign up.”

— Margaret Atwood

140. “A suicide is both a rebuke to the living and a puzzle that defies them to solve it. Like a poem, suicide is finished and refuses to answer questions as to its final cause.”

— Margaret Atwood

141. “A language is everything you do.”

— Margaret Atwood

142. “We’ve learned to see the world in gasps.”

— Margaret Atwood

143. “How shrunk, how dwindled, in our times Creation’s mighty seed – For Man has broke the Fellowship With murder, lust, and greed.”

— Margaret Atwood

144. “No reply is in itself a reply.”

— Margaret Atwood

145. “Where do the words go when we have said them?”

— Margaret Atwood

146. “I wanted to forget the past, but it refused to forget me; it waited for sleep, then cornered me.”

— Margaret Atwood

147. “This above all, to refuse to be a victim.”

— Margaret Atwood

148. “Where do you draw the line, between love and greed? We never did know, we always wanted more. We want to take it all in, for one last time, we want to eat the world with our eyes.”

— Margaret Atwood

149. “What you don’t know won’t hurt you. A dubious maxim: sometimes what you don’t know can hurt you very much.”

— Margaret Atwood

150. “Which of us can resist the temptation of being thought indispensable?”

— Margaret Atwood