Top 500 Margaret Atwood Quotes (2024 Update)
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251. “Blank pages inspire me with terror.”

— Margaret Atwood

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

— Margaret Atwood

253. “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

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

— Margaret Atwood

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

— Margaret Atwood

256. “Love’s never a fair trade.”

— Margaret Atwood

257. “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

258. “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

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

— Margaret Atwood

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

— Margaret Atwood

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

— Margaret Atwood

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

— Margaret Atwood

263. “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

264. “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

265. “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

266. “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

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

— Margaret Atwood

268. “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

269. “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

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

— Margaret Atwood

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

— Margaret Atwood

272. “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

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

— Margaret Atwood

274. “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

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

— Margaret Atwood

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

— Margaret Atwood

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

— Margaret Atwood

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

— Margaret Atwood

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

— Margaret Atwood

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

— Margaret Atwood

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

— 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. “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

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

— Margaret Atwood

285. “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

286. “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

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

— Margaret Atwood

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

— Margaret Atwood

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

— Margaret Atwood

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

— Margaret Atwood

291. “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

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

— Margaret Atwood

293. “Marshall McLuhan is absolutely right, we are always looking in the rear view mirror.”

— Margaret Atwood

294. “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

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

— Margaret Atwood

296. “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

297. “Don’t eat anything you aren’t prepared to kill. Don’t kill anything you aren’t prepared to eat.”

— Margaret Atwood

298. “I didn’t much like it, this grudge-holding against the past.”

— Margaret Atwood

299. “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

300. “Writing poetry is a state of free float.”

— Margaret Atwood