Top 500 Margaret Atwood Quotes (2023 Update)
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251. “As all historians know, the past is a great darkness, and filled with echoes.”

— Margaret Atwood

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

— Margaret Atwood

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

— Margaret Atwood

254. “Where to start is the problem, because nothing begins when it begins and nothing’s over when it’s over, and everything needs a preface: a preface, a postscript, a chart of simultaneous events.”

— Margaret Atwood

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

— Margaret Atwood

256. “It’s a lifelong failing: she has never been prepared. But how can you have a sense of wonder if you’re prepared for everything? Prepared for the sunset. Prepared for the moonrise. Prepared for the ice storm. What a flat existence that would be.”

— Margaret Atwood

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

— Margaret Atwood

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

— Margaret Atwood

259. “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

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

— Margaret Atwood

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

— Margaret Atwood

262. “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

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

— Margaret Atwood

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

— Margaret Atwood

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

— Margaret Atwood

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

— Margaret Atwood

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

— Margaret Atwood

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

— Margaret Atwood

269. “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

270. “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

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

— Margaret Atwood

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

— Margaret Atwood

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

— Margaret Atwood

274. “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

275. “This above all, to refuse to be a victim. Unless I can do that, I can do nothing. I have to recant, give up the old belief that I am powerless and and because of it nothing I can do will ever hurt anyone. A lie which was always more disastrous than the truth would have been.”

— Margaret Atwood

276. “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

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

— Margaret Atwood

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

— Margaret Atwood

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

— Margaret Atwood

280. “I was born in the Ottawa General Hospital right after the Gray Cup Football Game in 1939. Six months later, I was backpacked into the Quebec bush. I grew up in and out of the bush, in and out of Ottawa, Sault Ste. Marie and Toronto.”

— Margaret Atwood

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

— Margaret Atwood

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

— Margaret Atwood

283. “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

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

— Margaret Atwood

285. “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

286. “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

287. “You need a certain amount of nerve to be a writer.”

— Margaret Atwood

288. “It’s evening, one of those gray water-color washes, like liquid dust.”

— Margaret Atwood

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

— Margaret Atwood

290. “Debt is part of the human condition. Civilization is based on exchanges – on gifts, trades, loans – and the revenges and insults that come when they are not paid back.”

— Margaret Atwood

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

— Margaret Atwood

292. “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

293. “There’s nothing like drawing a thing to make you really see it.”

— Margaret Atwood

294. “If writing novels – and reading them – have any redeeming social value, it’s probably that they force you to imagine what it’s like to be somebody else. Which increasingly is something we all need to know.”

— Margaret Atwood

295. “A reader can never tell if it’s a real thimble or an imaginary thimble, because by the time you’re reading it, they’re the same. It’s a thimble. It’s in the book.”

— Margaret Atwood

296. “The body is so easily damaged, so easily disposed of, water and chemicals is all it is, hardly more to it than a jellyfish drying on sand.”

— Margaret Atwood

297. “Don’t cry anymore, she tells herself. Just do one thing at a time. Get from hour to hour and day to day like a frog jumping on lily pads.”

— Margaret Atwood

298. “How easy it is, treachery. You just slide into it.”

— Margaret Atwood

299. “There are some virtues to not saying what you think all the time.”

— Margaret Atwood

300. “The ability to concoct plausible lies is a talent not to be underestimated.”

— Margaret Atwood