Top 500 Margaret Atwood Quotes (2024 Update)
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151. “Where to start is the problem, because nothing begins when it begins and nothing’s over when it’s over, and everything needs a preface: a preface, a postscript, a chart of simultaneous events.”

— Margaret Atwood

152. “I wish you good writing and good luck. Even if you’ve already done the good writing, you’ll still need the good luck. It’s a shark-filled lagoon out there. Cross your fingers and watch your back.”

— Margaret Atwood

153. “I don’t think I solve problems in my poetry; I think I uncover the problems.”

— Margaret Atwood

154. “It’s a lifelong failing: she has never been prepared. But how can you have a sense of wonder if you’re prepared for everything? Prepared for the sunset. Prepared for the moonrise. Prepared for the ice storm. What a flat existence that would be.”

— Margaret Atwood

155. “No one knows what cuases an outer landscape to become an inner one.”

— Margaret Atwood

156. “I was born in the Ottawa General Hospital right after the Gray Cup Football Game in 1939. Six months later, I was backpacked into the Quebec bush. I grew up in and out of the bush, in and out of Ottawa, Sault Ste. Marie and Toronto.”

— Margaret Atwood

157. “Things musicals taught me: All your problems will go away if you sing about it.”

— Margaret Atwood

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

— Margaret Atwood

159. “I feel like cotton candy: sugar and air. Squeeze me and I’d turn into a small sickly damp wad of weeping pinky-red.”

— Margaret Atwood

160. “Love is the pursuit of shadows...”

— Margaret Atwood

161. “Instead I will say, “Take me to your trees. Take me to your breakfasts, your sunsets, your bad dreams, your shoes, your nouns. Take me to your fingers; take me to your deaths.” These are worth it. These are what I have come for.”

— Margaret Atwood

162. “I wait. I compose myself. My self is a thing I must now compose, as one composes a speech. What I must present is a made thing, not something born.”

— Margaret Atwood

163. “The moon on the breast of the new-fallen snow. The sky is clear but hard to make out, because of the searchlight; but yes, in the obscured sky a moon does float, newly, a wishing moon, a sliver of ancient rock, a goddess, a wink. The moon is a stone and the sky is full of deadly hardware, but oh God, how beautiful anyway.”

— Margaret Atwood

164. “Canada was built on dead beavers.”

— Margaret Atwood

165. “They should have never given us uniforms if they didn’t want us to be an army.”

— Margaret Atwood

166. “His mouth is on me, his hands, I can’t wait and he’s moving, already, love, it’s been so long, I’m alive in my skin, again, arms around him, falling and water softly everywhere, never-ending.”

— Margaret Atwood

167. “But some people can’t tell where it hurts. They can’t calm down. They can’t ever stop howling.”

— Margaret Atwood

168. “It was like being in an elevator cut loose at the top. Falling, falling, and not knowing when you will hit.”

— Margaret Atwood

169. “If I love you, is that a fact or a weapon?”

— Margaret Atwood

170. “Live in the present, make the most of it, it’s all you’ve got.”

— Margaret Atwood

171. “I was sand, I was snow – written on, rewritten, smoothed over.”

— Margaret Atwood

172. “Nothing takes place in the bed but sleep; or no sleep. I try not to think too much. Like other things now, thought must be rationed. There’s a lot that doesn’t bear thinking about. Thinking can hurt your chances, and I intend to last.”

— Margaret Atwood

173. “There’s more than one way to skin a cat, my father used to say; it bothered me, I didn’t see why they would want to skin a cat even one way.”

— Margaret Atwood

174. “I feel like the word shatter.”

— Margaret Atwood

175. “Fallow state, the Gardeners would say. They used that diagnosis for a wide range of conditions, from depression to post-traumatic stress to being permanently stoned. The theory was that while in a Fallow state you were gathering and conserving strength, nourishing yourself through meditation, sending invisible rootlets out into the universe.”

— Margaret Atwood

176. “Our curiosity is supposed to have limits, though these have never been defined exactly.”

— Margaret Atwood

177. “No mother is ever, completely, a child’s idea of what a mother should be, and I suppose it works the other way around as well. But despite everything, we didn’t do too badly by one another, we did as well as most.”

— Margaret Atwood

178. “All I can hope for is a reconstruction: the way love feels is always only approximate.”

— Margaret Atwood

179. “There has to be an “us” because now there is “them”.”

— Margaret Atwood

180. “As for you, she’d say to me, you’re just a backlash. Flash in the pan. History will absolve me. But.”

— Margaret Atwood

181. “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

182. “But my dreaming self refuses to be consoled. It continues to wander, aimless, homeless, alone. It cannot be convinced of its safety by any evidence drawn from my waking life.”

— Margaret Atwood

183. “A divorce is like an amputation: you survive it, but there’s less of you.”

— Margaret Atwood

184. “What will Ofwarren give birth to? A baby, as we all hope? Or something else, an Unbaby, with a pinhead or a snout like a dog’s, or two bodies, or a hole in its heart or no arms, or webbed hands and feet? There’s no telling. They could tell once, with machines, but that is now outlawed. What would be the point of knowing, anyway? You can’t have them taken out; whatever it is must be carried to term.”

— Margaret Atwood

185. “I pray silently: Nolite te bastardes carborundorum. I don’t know what it means, but it sounds right, and it will have to do, because I don’t know what else I can say to God.”

— Margaret Atwood

186. “Ten days after the war ended, my sister Laura drove a car off a bridge.”

— Margaret Atwood

187. “If the national mental illness of the United States is megalomania, that of Canada is paranoid schizophrenia.”

— Margaret Atwood

188. “You can wipe your feet on me, twist my motives around all you like, you can dump millstones on my head and drown me in the river, but you can’t get me out of the story. I’m the plot, babe, and don’t ever forget it.”

— Margaret Atwood

189. “God gave unto the Animals A wisdom past our power to see: Each knows innately how to live, Which we must learn laboriously.”

— Margaret Atwood

190. “If you’re a woman writer, sometime, somewhere, you will be asked: Do you think of yourself as a writer first, or as a woman first? Look out. Whoever asks this hates and fears both writing and women.”

— Margaret Atwood

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

— Margaret Atwood

192. “By telling you anything at all I’m at least believing in you, believe you’re there, I believe you into being. Because I’m telling you this story I will your existence. I tell, therefore you are. So I will go on. So I will myself to go on.”

— Margaret Atwood

193. “Although from you I far must roam, do not be broken hearted. We two, who in the souls are one, are never truly parted.”

— Margaret Atwood

194. “I’ll make you mine, lovers said in old books. They never said, I’ll make you me.”

— Margaret Atwood

195. “If social stability goes pear-shaped, you have a choice between anarchy and dictatorship. Most people will opt for more security, even if they have to give up some personal freedom.”

— Margaret Atwood

196. “Ah men, why do you want all this attention? I can write poems for myself, make love to a doorknob if absolutely necessary. What do you have to offer me I can’t find otherwise except humiliation? Which I no longer need.”

— Margaret Atwood

197. “As they say, history does not repeat itself, but it rhymes.”

— Margaret Atwood

198. “Science and fiction both begin with similar questions: What if? Why? How does it all work? But they focus on different areas of life on earth.”

— Margaret Atwood

199. “Why do men feel threatened by women?”

— Margaret Atwood

200. “The truth, it seems, is not just what you find when you open a door: it is itself a door, which the poet is always on the verge of going through.”

— Margaret Atwood