Top 500 Margaret Atwood Quotes (2025 Update)
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301. “Saved by childbearing, I think. What did we suppose would save us, in the time before?”

— Margaret Atwood

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

— Margaret Atwood

303. “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

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

— Margaret Atwood

305. “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

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

— Margaret Atwood

307. “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

308. “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

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

— Margaret Atwood

310. “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

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

— Margaret Atwood

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

— Margaret Atwood

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

— Margaret Atwood

314. “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

315. “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

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

— Margaret Atwood

317. “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

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

— Margaret Atwood

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

— Margaret Atwood

320. “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

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

— Margaret Atwood

322. “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

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

— Margaret Atwood

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

— Margaret Atwood

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

— Margaret Atwood

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

— Margaret Atwood

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

— Margaret Atwood

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

— Margaret Atwood

329. “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

330. “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

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

— Margaret Atwood

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

— Margaret Atwood

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

— Margaret Atwood

334. “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

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

— Margaret Atwood

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

— Margaret Atwood

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

— Margaret Atwood

338. “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

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

— Margaret Atwood

340. “Yelling is a form of publishing.”

— Margaret Atwood

341. “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

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

— Margaret Atwood

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

— Margaret Atwood

344. “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

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

— Margaret Atwood

346. “Why do men feel threatened by women?” I asked a male friend of mine. – – “They are afraid women will laugh at them,” he said. “Undercut their world view.” Then I asked some women students in a quickie poetry seminar I was giving, “Why do women feel threatened by men?” “They’re afraid of being killed,” they said.”

— Margaret Atwood

347. “I feared I might lose my faith. If you’ve never had a faith, you will not understand what that means. You feel as if your best friend is dying, that everything that defined you is being burned away; that you’ll be left all alone.”

— Margaret Atwood

348. “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

349. “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

350. “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