Top 500 Margaret Atwood Quotes (2026 Update)
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201. “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

202. “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

203. “As human beings, we are always torn between individual freedom and the ability of choose our actions, and the need for at least enough social structure so that anarchy, chaos, and warlordery – or the war of all against all – can be avoided.”

— Margaret Atwood

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

— Margaret Atwood

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

— Margaret Atwood

206. “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

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

— Margaret Atwood

208. “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

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

— Margaret Atwood

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

— Margaret Atwood

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

— Margaret Atwood

Featured in: Book Quotes

212. “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

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

— Margaret Atwood

214. “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

Featured in: Quotes About Stories

215. “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

216. “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

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

Featured in: Real Quotes, Quotes About Stories

218. “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

219. “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

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

— Margaret Atwood

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

— Margaret Atwood

222. “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

223. “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

224. “Snowman wakes before dawn.”

— Margaret Atwood

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

— Margaret Atwood

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

— Margaret Atwood

227. “To want is to have a weakness.”

— Margaret Atwood

228. “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

Featured in: Real Quotes

229. “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

230. “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

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

— Margaret Atwood

232. “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

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

— Margaret Atwood

234. “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

235. “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

236. “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

237. “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

238. “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

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

— Margaret Atwood

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

— Margaret Atwood

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

— Margaret Atwood

242. “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

243. “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

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

— Margaret Atwood

245. “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

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

— Margaret Atwood

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

— Margaret Atwood

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

— Margaret Atwood

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

— Margaret Atwood

250. “Love’s never a fair trade.”

— Margaret Atwood