Top 500 Margaret Atwood Quotes (2023 Update)
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201. “They will not let you have peace, they don’t want you to have anything they don’t have themselves.”

— Margaret Atwood

202. “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

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

— Margaret Atwood

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

— Margaret Atwood

205. “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

206. “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

207. “So much better to travel than to arrive.”

— Margaret Atwood

208. “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

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

— Margaret Atwood

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

— Margaret Atwood

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

— Margaret Atwood

212. “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

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

— Margaret Atwood

214. “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

215. “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

216. “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

217. “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

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

— Margaret Atwood

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

— Margaret Atwood

220. “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

221. “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

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

— Margaret Atwood

223. “There were so many things that could be done to it or go wrong with it, this adult female body, that I was left feeling I would be better off without it.”

— Margaret Atwood

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

— Margaret Atwood

225. “Blank pages inspire me with terror.”

— Margaret Atwood

226. “The proper study of Mankind is Everything.”

— Margaret Atwood

227. “One detaches oneself. One describes.”

— Margaret Atwood

228. “This is how the girl who couldn’t speak and the man who couldn’t see fell in love.”

— Margaret Atwood

229. “She doesn’t make speeches anymore. She has become speechless. She stays in her home, but it doesn’t seem to agree with her. How furious she must be, now that she’s been taken at her word.”

— Margaret Atwood

230. “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

231. “Its racist policies, for instance, were firmly rooted in the pre-Gilead period, and racist fears provided some of the emotional fuel that allowed the Gilead takeover to succeed as well as it did. Our.”

— Margaret Atwood

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

— Margaret Atwood

233. “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

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

— Margaret Atwood

235. “If one of the arguments against eating meat is to do with cruelty and animal intelligence, then lab meat avoids that. There’s also the environmental argument for it.”

— Margaret Atwood

236. “Extreme good, extreme evil: the abilities required are similar.”

— Margaret Atwood

237. “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

238. “To go through all that and give birth to a shredder: it wasn’t a fine thought. We didn’t know exactly what would happen to the babies that didn’t get passed, that were declared Unbabies. But we knew they were put somewhere, quickly, away.”

— Margaret Atwood

239. “Lambhood and tigerishness may be found in either gender, and in the same individual at different times.”

— Margaret Atwood

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

— Margaret Atwood

241. “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

242. “Madness is only an amplification of what you already are.”

— Margaret Atwood

243. “I hate to tell you this, but you will never actually go to a galaxy far, far away and encounter Darth Vader. That’s science fiction; it isn’t going to happen.”

— Margaret Atwood

244. “Falling in love, I said. Falling into it, we all did then, one way or another. How could we have made such light of it? Sneered even. As if it was trivial for us, a frill, whim. It was, on the contrary, heavy going.”

— Margaret Atwood

245. “It was true, I took too much for granted; I trusted fate, back then.”

— Margaret Atwood

246. “Thinking can hurt your chances, and I intend to last.”

— Margaret Atwood

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

— Margaret Atwood

248. “Faith is only a word, embroidered.”

— Margaret Atwood

249. “Love’s never a fair trade.”

— Margaret Atwood

250. “Fraternize means to behave like a brother. Luke told me that. He said there was no corresponding word that meant to behave like a sister. Sororize, it would have to be, he said. From the Latin.”

— Margaret Atwood