Top 500 Margaret Atwood Quotes (2023 Update)
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301. “I became a poet at the age of sixteen. I did not intend to do it. It was not my fault.”

— Margaret Atwood

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

— Margaret Atwood

303. “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

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

— Margaret Atwood

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

— Margaret Atwood

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

— Margaret Atwood

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

— Margaret Atwood

308. “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

309. “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

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

— Margaret Atwood

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

— Margaret Atwood

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

— Margaret Atwood

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

— Margaret Atwood

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

— Margaret Atwood

315. “Yelling is a form of publishing.”

— Margaret Atwood

316. “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

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

— Margaret Atwood

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

— Margaret Atwood

319. “Malum quidem nullum esse sine aliquo bono, Tin noted in the journal he was sporadically keeping then. Every cloud has a silver lining.”

— Margaret Atwood

320. “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

321. “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

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

— Margaret Atwood

323. “The liver is evil and must be punished.”

— Margaret Atwood

324. “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

325. “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

326. “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

327. “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

328. “Every night when I go to bed I think, In the morning I will wake up in my own house and things will be back the way they were. It hasn’t happened this morning, either.”

— Margaret Atwood

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

— Margaret Atwood

330. “We are two-legged wombs, that’s all: sacred vessels, ambulatory chalices.”

— Margaret Atwood

331. “The way love feels is always only approximate. I would like to be without shame. I would like to be shameless. I would like to be ignorant. Then I would not know how ignorant I was.”

— Margaret Atwood

332. “Those years were just an anomaly, historically speaking, the Commander said, just a fluke. All we’ve done is return things to Nature’s norm.”

— Margaret Atwood

333. “What breaks in daybreak? Is it the night? Is it the sun, cracked in two by the horizon like an egg, spilling out light?”

— Margaret Atwood

334. “A man is just a woman’s strategy for making other women.”

— Margaret Atwood

335. “He manages to appear puzzled, as if he can’t quite remember how we all got in here. As if we are something he inherited, like a Victorian pump organ, and he hasn’t figured out what to do with us. What we are worth.”

— Margaret Atwood

336. “I don’t want a man around, what use are they except for ten seconds’ worth of half babies. A man is just a woman’s strategy for making other women.”

— Margaret Atwood

337. “I stand on the corner, pretending I am a tree.”

— Margaret Atwood

338. “But some people can’t tell where it hurts. They can’t calm down. They can’t ever stop howling.”

— Margaret Atwood

339. “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

340. “The central symbol for Canada-and this based on numerous instances of its occurrence in both English and French Canadian literature-is undoubtedly Survival, la Survivance.”

— Margaret Atwood

341. “Her speeches were about the sanctity of the home, about how women should stay home. Serena Joy didn’t do this herself, she made speeches instead, but she presented this failure of hers as a sacrifice she was making for the good of all.”

— Margaret Atwood

342. “When demons are required someone will always be found to supply the part, and whether you step forward or are pushed is all the same in the end.”

— Margaret Atwood

343. “I am not your justification for existence.”

— Margaret Atwood

344. “I want to be held and told my name. I want to be valued, in ways that I am not; I want to be more than valuable. I repeat my former name; remind myself of what I once could do, how others saw me. I want to steal something.”

— Margaret Atwood

345. “Nothing takes place in the bed but sleep; or no sleep. I try not to think too much. Like other things now, thought must be rationed. There’s a lot that doesn’t bear thinking about. Thinking can hurt your chances, and I intend to last.”

— Margaret Atwood

346. “Women can’t add, he once said, jokingly. When I asked him what he meant, he said, For them, one and one and one and one don’t make four. What do they make? I said, expecting five or three. Just one and one and one and one, he said.”

— Margaret Atwood

347. “So much for endings. Beginnings are always more fun. True connoisseurs, however, are known to favor the stretch in between, since it’s the hardest to do anything with. That’s about all that can be said for plots, which anyway are just one thing after another, a what and a what and a what.”

— Margaret Atwood

348. “But also I’m hungry. This is monstrous, but nevertheless it’s true. Death makes me hungry. Maybe it’s because I’ve been emptied; or maybe it’s the body’s way of seeing to it that I remain alive, continue to repeat its bedrock prayer: I am, I am. I am, still. I want to go to bed, make love, right now. I think of the word relish. I could eat a horse.”

— Margaret Atwood

349. “I almost gasp: he’s said a forbidden word. Sterile. There is no such thing as a sterile man anymore, not officially. There are only women who are fruitful and women who are barren, that’s the law.”

— Margaret Atwood

350. “A movie about the past is not the same as the past.”

— Margaret Atwood