Top 500 Margaret Atwood Quotes (2025 Update)
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201. “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

202. “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

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

— Margaret Atwood

204. “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

205. “Hunger is a powerful reorganizer of the conscience.”

— Margaret Atwood

206. “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

207. “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

208. “It’s clear, it’s fresh, like a mint candy.”

— Margaret Atwood

209. “I began to forget myself in the middle of sentences.”

— Margaret Atwood

210. “Happy as a clam, is what my mother says for happy. I am happy as a clam: hard-shelled, firmly closed.”

— Margaret Atwood

211. “Then I find I’m not ashamed after all. I enjoy the power; power of a dog bone, passive but there.”

— Margaret Atwood

212. “Snowman wakes before dawn.”

— Margaret Atwood

213. “I used to think of my body as an instrument, of pleasure, or a means of transportation, or an implement for the accomplishment of my will.”

— Margaret Atwood

214. “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

215. “To want is to have a weakness.”

— Margaret Atwood

216. “Malum quidem nullum esse sine aliquo bono, Tin noted in the journal he was sporadically keeping then. Every cloud has a silver lining.”

— Margaret Atwood

217. “There’s the story, then there’s the real story, then there’s the story of how the story came to be told. Then there’s what you leave out of the story. Which is part of the story too.”

— Margaret Atwood

218. “People use technology only to mean digital technology. Technology is actually everything we make.”

— Margaret Atwood

219. “Better not to invent her in her absence. Better to wait until she’s actually here. Then he can make her up as she goes along.”

— Margaret Atwood

220. “This is what I miss, Cordelia: not something that’s gone, but something that will never happen. Two old women giggling over their tea.”

— Margaret Atwood

221. “Imagine a famine. Now imagine a piece of bread. Both of these things are real but you happen to be in the same room with only one of them. Put yourself into a different room, that’s what the mind is for.”

— Margaret Atwood

222. “I wish this story were different. I wish it were more civilized. I wish it showed me in a better light, if not happier, then at least more active, less hesitant, less distracted by trivia. I wish it had more shape. I wish it were about love, or about sudden realizations important to one’s life, or even about sunsets, birds, rainstorms, or snow.”

— Margaret Atwood

223. “I think of her as a woman for whom every act is done for show, is acting rather than a real act. She does such things to look good, I think. She’s out to make the best of it.”

— Margaret Atwood

224. “Good writing takes place at intersections, at what you might call knots, at places where the society is snarled or knotted up.”

— Margaret Atwood

225. “Happiness is a garden walled with glass: there’s no way in or out. In Paradise there are no stories, because there are no journeys. It’s loss and regret and misery and yearning that drive the story forward, along its twisted road.”

— Margaret Atwood

226. “Writing of the narrative kind, and perhaps all writing, is motivated deep down, by a fear or and fascination with mortality – by a desire to make the risky trip to the underworld and to bring something or someone back from the dead.”

— Margaret Atwood

227. “They will not let you have peace, they don’t want you to have anything they don’t have themselves.”

— Margaret Atwood

228. “Death is a beautiful woman, with wings and one breast almost bare; or is that Victory? I can’t remember. They.”

— Margaret Atwood

229. “A ratio of failures is built into the process of writing. The wastebasket has evolved for a reason. Think of it as the altar of the Muse Oblivion, to whom you sacrifice your botched first drafts, the tokens of your human imperfection.”

— Margaret Atwood

230. “How easy it is to invent a humanity, for anyone at all.”

— Margaret Atwood

231. “She who weeps when the sun’s in sky, Will never pile the platter high.”

— Margaret Atwood

232. “Then sail, my fine lady, on the billowing wave – The water below is as dark as the grave, And maybe you’ll sink in your little blue boat – It’s hope, and hope only, that keeps us afloat.”

— Margaret Atwood

233. “Farewells can be shattering, but returns are surely worse. Solid flesh can never live up to the bright shadow cast by its absence.”

— Margaret Atwood

234. “You young people don’t appreciate things, she’d say. You don’t know what we had to go through, just to get you where you are. Look at him, slicing up the carrots. Don’t you know how many women’s lives, how many women’s bodies, the tanks had to roll over just to get that far?”

— Margaret Atwood

235. “Every Canadian has a complicated relationship with the United States, whereas Americans think of Canada as the place where the weather comes from.”

— Margaret Atwood

236. “You refuse to own yourself, you permit others to do it for you.”

— Margaret Atwood

237. “I’ve learned quite a lot, over the years, by avoiding what I was supposed to be learning.”

— Margaret Atwood

238. “How furious she must be, now that she’s been taken at her word.”

— Margaret Atwood

239. “Messy love is better than none, I guess. I am no authority on sane living.”

— Margaret Atwood

240. “I am alive, I live, I breathe, I put my hand out, unfolded, into the sunlight.”

— Margaret Atwood

241. “Time in dreams is frozen. You can never get away from where you’ve been.”

— Margaret Atwood

242. “Love’s never a fair trade.”

— Margaret Atwood

243. “I see that there will be no end to imperfection, or to doing things the wrong way. Even if you grow up, no matter how hard you scrub, whatever you do, there will always be some other stain or spot on your face or stupid act, somebody frowning.”

— Margaret Atwood

244. “The sands of time are quicksands, said Adam One. So much can sink into them without a trace. And what a blessing when those things that sink away are needless worries.”

— Margaret Atwood

245. “This is what I feel like: this sound of glass. I feel like the work shatter. I want to be with someone.”

— Margaret Atwood

246. “I’m a strict, strict agnostic. It’s very different from a casual, ‘I don’t know.’ It’s that you cannot present as knowledge something that is not knowledge. You can present it as faith, you can present it as belief, but you can’t present it as fact.”

— Margaret Atwood

247. “Knowledge is power only as long as you keep your mouth shut.”

— Margaret Atwood

248. “Pen Is Envy, Aunt Lydia would say, quoting another Center motto, warning us away from such objects.”

— Margaret Atwood

249. “Monkey brains, had been Crake’s opinion. Monkey paws, monkey curiosity, the desire to take apart, turn inside out, smell, fondle, measure, improve, trash, discard – all hooked up to monkey brains, an advanced model of monkey brains but monkey brains all the same. Crake had no very high opinion of human ingenuity, despite the large amount of it he himself possessed.”

— Margaret Atwood

250. “You’d be surprised how quickly the mind goes soggy in the absence of other people. One person alone is not a full person: we exist in relation to others. I was one person: I risked becoming no person.”

— Margaret Atwood