Top 500 Margaret Atwood Quotes (2025 Update)
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301. “In Paradise there are no stories, because there are no journeys.”

— Margaret Atwood

Featured in: Quotes About Stories

302. “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

303. “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

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

— Margaret Atwood

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

— Margaret Atwood

306. “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

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

— Margaret Atwood

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

— Margaret Atwood

309. “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

310. “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

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

— Margaret Atwood

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

— Margaret Atwood

313. “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

314. “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

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

— Margaret Atwood

316. “What a lost person needs is a map of the territory, with his own position marked on it so he can see where he is in relation to everything else.”

— Margaret Atwood

317. “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

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

— Margaret Atwood

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

— Margaret Atwood

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

— Margaret Atwood

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

— Margaret Atwood

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

— Margaret Atwood

323. “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

324. “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

325. “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

Featured in: Real Quotes, Book Quotes, Reading Quotes

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

— Margaret Atwood

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

— Margaret Atwood

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

— Margaret Atwood

329. “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

330. “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

Featured in: Reading Quotes

331. “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

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

— Margaret Atwood

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

— Margaret Atwood

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

— Margaret Atwood

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

— Margaret Atwood

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

— Margaret Atwood

337. “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

Featured in: Book Quotes

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

— Margaret Atwood

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

— Margaret Atwood

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

— Margaret Atwood

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

— Margaret Atwood

342. “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

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

— Margaret Atwood

344. “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

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

— Margaret Atwood

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

— Margaret Atwood

347. “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

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

— Margaret Atwood

349. “Yelling is a form of publishing.”

— Margaret Atwood

350. “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