Top 500 Margaret Atwood Quotes (2024 Update)
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301. “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

302. “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

303. “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

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

— Margaret Atwood

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

— Margaret Atwood

306. “I spent much of my childhood in northern Quebec, and often there was no radio, no television – there wasn’t a lot to entertain us. When it rained, I stayed inside reading, writing, drawing.”

— Margaret Atwood

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

— Margaret Atwood

308. “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

309. “So, the book is not ‘anti-religion.’ It is against the use of religion as a front for tyranny; which is a different thing altogether.”

— Margaret Atwood

310. “For every rule there is always an exception: this too can be depended upon.”

— Margaret Atwood

311. “The thing about delirium is you think it’s great, but it actually isn’t.”

— Margaret Atwood

312. “The people in the chaos cannot learn. They cannot understand what they are doing to the sea and the sky and the plants and the animals. They cannot understand that they are killing them, and that they will end by killing themselves. And there are so many of them, and each one of them is doing part of the killing, whether they know it or not. And when.”

— Margaret Atwood

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

— Margaret Atwood

314. “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

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

— Margaret Atwood

316. “Publishers are in business to make money, and if your books do well they don’t care if you are male, female, or an elephant.”

— Margaret Atwood

317. “The written word is so much like evidence – like something that can be used against you later.”

— Margaret Atwood

318. “Nothing is more difficult than to understand the dead, I’ve found; but nothing is more dangerous than to ignore them.”

— Margaret Atwood

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

— Margaret Atwood

320. “I became a poet at the age of sixteen. I did not intend to do it. It was not my fault.”

— Margaret Atwood

321. “Perhaps its not the world that is soundless but we who are deaf.”

— Margaret Atwood

322. “Keep steady, I told myself. Don’t share too much about yourself, it will be used against you. Listen carefully. Save all clues. Don’t show fear.”

— Margaret Atwood

323. “Genres aren’t closed boxes. Stuff flows back and forth across the borders all the time.”

— Margaret Atwood

324. “The truth is seldom welcome, especially at dinner.”

— Margaret Atwood

325. “I suppose these deadlines we set for ourselves are really a way of saying we appreciate time, and want to use all of it.”

— Margaret Atwood

326. “Being edited is like falling face down into a threshing machine.”

— Margaret Atwood

327. “All observations of life are harsh, because life is. I lament that fact, but I cannot change it.”

— Margaret Atwood

328. “As with all knowledge, once you knew it, you couldn’t imagine how it was that you hadn’t known it before.”

— Margaret Atwood

329. “And how easily a hand becomes a fist.”

— Margaret Atwood

330. “It was hard to believe. The entire government, gone like that. How did they get in, how did it happen? That was when they suspended the Constitution.”

— Margaret Atwood

331. “Yelling is a form of publishing.”

— Margaret Atwood

332. “If you want what’s in the package you should at least know how to get the string off, is what I say.”

— Margaret Atwood

333. “Having experienced both, I am not sure which is worse: intense feeling, or the absence of it.”

— Margaret Atwood

334. “I write as if I’ve lived a lot of things I haven’t lived.”

— Margaret Atwood

335. “A ratio of failures is built into the process of writing. The wastebasket has evolved for a reason.”

— Margaret Atwood

336. “The threat to the planet is us. It’s actually not a threat to the planet – it’s a threat to us.”

— Margaret Atwood

337. “It’s somewhat daunting to reflect that Hell is – possibly – the place where you are stuck in your own personal narrative for ever, and Heaven is – possibly – the place where you can ditch it, and take up wisdom instead.”

— Margaret Atwood

338. “Shiny new toes make you feel all fresh and sparkling: if someone wants to suck your toes, those toes should be worth sucking.”

— Margaret Atwood

339. “It’s better that way, and I am a great proponent of better. In the absence of best.”

— Margaret Atwood

340. “Stick a shovel into the ground almost anywhere and some horrible thing or other will come to light. Good for trade, we thrive on bones; without them there’d be no stories.”

— Margaret Atwood

341. “This is the forgotten possibility: he might have gone insane. Crazy, loony. Bushed, the trappers call it when you stay in the forest by yourself too long. And if insane, perhaps not dead: none of the rules would be the same.”

— Margaret Atwood

342. “One by one I could handle them, but if they combined into a mob of three I would have trouble. Divide and conquer would be my motto.”

— Margaret Atwood

343. “I felt that would be the best way to live, in a floating house carrying everything you needed with you and some other people you liked; when you wanted to move somewhere else it would be easy.”

— Margaret Atwood

344. “Is anything wrong, dear? the old joke went. No, why? You moved. Just don’t move.”

— Margaret Atwood

345. “It’s like Janine, though, to take it upon herself, to decide the baby’s flaws were due to her alone. But people will do anything rather than admit that their lives have no meaning. No use, that is. No plot.”

— Margaret Atwood

346. “I admired my mother in some ways, although things between us were never easy. She expected too much from me, I felt. She expected me to vindicate her life for her, and the choices she’d made. I didn’t want to live my life on her terms. I didn’t want to be the model offspring, the incarnation of her ideas. We used to fight about that. I am not your justification for existence, I said to her once.”

— Margaret Atwood

347. “And she finds it difficult to believe – that a person would love her even when she isn’t trying. Trying to figure out what other people need, trying to be worthy.”

— Margaret Atwood

348. “I believe in the resistance as I believe there can be no light without shadow; or rather, no shadow unless there is also light.”

— Margaret Atwood

349. “One person alone is not a full person: we exist in relation to others.”

— Margaret Atwood

350. “Why should the other ones in this play get a second chance at life, but not him? Why’s he have to suffer so much for being what he is? It’s like he’s, you know, black or Native or something. Five strikes against him from Day One. He never asked to get born.”

— Margaret Atwood