Top 500 Margaret Atwood Quotes (2025 Update)
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251. “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

252. “I’m a fool, to confuse this with goodness. I am not good. I know too much to be good. I know myself. I know myself to be vengeful, greedy, secretive and sly.”

— Margaret Atwood

253. “As all historians know, the past is a great darkness, and filled with echoes.”

— Margaret Atwood

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

— Margaret Atwood

255. “Blank pages inspire me with terror.”

— Margaret Atwood

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

— Margaret Atwood

257. “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

258. “Science fiction is filled with Martians and space travel to other planets, and things like that.”

— Margaret Atwood

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

— Margaret Atwood

260. “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

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

— Margaret Atwood

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

— Margaret Atwood

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

— Margaret Atwood

264. “She had no images of this love. She could offer no anecdotes. It was a belief rather than a memory.”

— Margaret Atwood

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

— Margaret Atwood

266. “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

267. “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

268. “As soon as you have a language that has a past tense and a future tense you’re going to say, ‘Where did we come from, what happens next?’ The ability to remember the past helps us plan the future.”

— Margaret Atwood

269. “Axiom: you are a sea. Your eye- lids curve over chaos My hands where they touch you, create small inhabited islands soon you will be all earth: a known land, a country.”

— Margaret Atwood

270. “I would rather dance as a ballerina, though faultily, than as a flawless clown.”

— Margaret Atwood

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

— Margaret Atwood

272. “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

273. “I admit I relish it, this lick of dissipation.”

— Margaret Atwood

274. “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

275. “As an artist your first loyalty is to your art. Unless this is the case, you’re going to be a second-rate artist.”

— Margaret Atwood

276. “Wars happen because the ones who start them think they can win.”

— Margaret Atwood

277. “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

278. “Even an obvious fabrication is some comfort when you have few others.”

— Margaret Atwood

279. “The only way you can write the truth is to assume that what you set down will never be read.”

— Margaret Atwood

280. “He was deciding whether to cut her throat or love her forever.”

— Margaret Atwood

281. “We have been shark to one another, but also lifeboat.”

— Margaret Atwood

282. “We lived, as usual by ignoring. Ignoring isn’t the same as ignorance, you have to work at it.”

— Margaret Atwood

283. “I’ve never understood why people consider youth a time of freedom and joy. It’s probably because they have forgotten their own.”

— Margaret Atwood

284. “As God contains all good things, He must also contain a sense of playfulness – a gift he has shared with Creatures other than ourselves, as witness the tricks Crows play, and the sportiveness of Squirrels, and the frolicking of Kittens.”

— Margaret Atwood

285. “You might ‘write from the heart,’ but you’d better polish with your brain.”

— Margaret Atwood

286. “In Paradise there are no stories, because there are no journeys.”

— Margaret Atwood

287. “Sons branch out, but one woman leads to another.”

— Margaret Atwood

288. “Publishing a book is like stuffing a note into a bottle and hurling it into the sea.”

— Margaret Atwood

289. “A lot of being a poet consists of willed ignorance. If you woke up from your trance and realized the nature of the life-threatening and dignity-destroying precipice you were walking along, you would switch into actuarial sciences immediately.”

— Margaret Atwood

290. “But I began then to think of time as having a shape, something you could see, like a series of liquid transparencies, one laid on top of another.”

— Margaret Atwood

291. “I did not know how to paint or even what to paint, but I knew I had to begin.”

— Margaret Atwood

292. “I could end this with a moral, as if this were a fable about animals, though no fables are really about animals.”

— Margaret Atwood

293. “There is never only one, of anyone.”

— Margaret Atwood

294. “Nevertheless, blood is thicker than water, as anyone knows who has tasted both.”

— Margaret Atwood

295. “Nature is an expert in cost-benefit analysis,′ she says. ‘Although she does her accounting a little differently. As for debts, she always collects in the long run...”

— Margaret Atwood

296. “It’s good to have small goals that can be easily attained.”

— Margaret Atwood

297. “To take that risk, to offer life and remain alive, open yourself like this and become whole.”

— Margaret Atwood

298. “At the very least we want a witness. We can’t stand the idea of our own voices falling silent finally, like a radio running down.”

— Margaret Atwood

299. “How old do you have to get before wisdom descends like a plastic bag over your head and you learn to keep your big mouth shut? Maybe never. Maybe you get more frivolous with age.”

— Margaret Atwood

300. “Saved by childbearing, I think. What did we suppose would save us, in the time before?”

— Margaret Atwood