Top 500 Margaret Atwood Quotes (2023 Update)
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351. “Your hand is a warm stone I hold between two words.”

— Margaret Atwood

352. “Our problem right now is that we’re so specialized that if the lights go out, there are a huge number of people who are not going to know what to do. But within every dystopia there’s a little utopia.”

— Margaret Atwood

353. “When did the body first set out on its own adventures? Snowman thinks; after having ditched its old travelling companions, the mind and the soul, for whom it had once been considered a mere corrupt vessel or else a puppet acting out their dramas for them, or else bad company, leading the other two astray.”

— Margaret Atwood

354. “If a stranger taps you on the ass and says, “How’s the little lady today!” you will probably cringe. But if he’s an American, he’s only being friendly.”

— Margaret Atwood

355. “If you get hungry enough, they say, you start eating your own heart.”

— Margaret Atwood

356. “There remains a mirror, on the hall wall. If I turn my head so that the white wings framing my face direct my vision towards it, I can see it as I go down the stairs, round, convex, a pier-glass, like the eye of a fish, and myself in it like a distorted shadow, a parody of something, some fairytale figure in a red cloak, descending towards a moment of carelessness that is the same as danger. A Sister, dipped in blood.”

— Margaret Atwood

357. “Every month there is a moon, gigantic, round, heavy, an omen. IT transits, pauses, continues on and passes out of sight, and I see despair coming towards me like famine. To feel that empty, again, again. I listen to my heart, wave upon wave, salty and red, continuing on and on, marking time.”

— Margaret Atwood

358. “I’m a refugee from the past, and like other refugees I go over the customs and habits of being I’ve left or been forced to leave behind me, and it all seems just as quaint, from here, and I am just as obsessive about it.”

— Margaret Atwood

359. “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.”

— Margaret Atwood

360. “Suddenly revenge is so close he can actually taste it. It tastes like steak, rare.”

— Margaret Atwood

361. “Money was the only measure of worth, for everyone, they got no respect as mothers.”

— Margaret Atwood

362. “Some bioengineering is good, especially if it results in plants that are more drought-resistant or perennial food crops.”

— Margaret Atwood

363. “One person alone is not a full person: we exist in relation to others. I was one person: I risked becoming no person.”

— Margaret Atwood

364. “He wanted me to play Scrabble with him, and kiss him as if I meant it. This is one of the most bizarre things that’s happened to me, ever. Context is all.”

— Margaret Atwood

365. “Red all over the cupboard, mirth rhymes with birth, oh to die of laughter.”

— Margaret Atwood

366. “A home filled with nothing but yourself. It’s heavy, that lightness. It’s crushing, that emptiness.”

— Margaret Atwood

367. “Speculative fiction encompasses that which we could actually do. Sci-fi is that which we’re probably not going to see.”

— Margaret Atwood

368. “If someone wants to suck your toes, those toes should be worth sucking.”

— Margaret Atwood

369. “The threshold of a new house is a lonely place.”

— Margaret Atwood

370. “All I can hear now is the sound of my own heart, opening and closing, opening and closing, opening.”

— Margaret Atwood

371. “To feel that empty, again, again. I listen to my heart, wave upon wave, salty and red, continuing on and on, marking time.”

— Margaret Atwood

372. “I don’t want her to be like me. Give in, go along, save her skin. That is what it comes down to. I want gallantry from her, swashbuckling, heroism, single-handed combat. Something I lack.”

— Margaret Atwood

373. “Tonight I have a little surprise for you,” he says. He laughs; it’s more like a snigger. I notice that everything this evening is little. He wishes to diminish things, myself included.”

— Margaret Atwood

374. “I sit in the chair and think about the word chair. It can also mean the leader of a meeting. It can also mean a mode of execution. It is the first syllable in charity. It is the French word for flesh. None of these facts has any connection with the others. These are the kinds of litanies I use, to compose myself.”

— Margaret Atwood

375. “I don’t want a man around, what use are they except for ten seconds’ worth of half babies.”

— Margaret Atwood

376. “But a chair, sunlight, flowers: these are not to be dismissed. I am alive, I live, I breathe, I put my hand out, unfolded, into the sunlight.”

— Margaret Atwood

377. “How easy it is to invent a humanity, for anyone at all. What an available temptation.”

— Margaret Atwood

378. “But if you happen to be a man, sometime in the future, and you’ve made it this far, please remember: you will never be subjected to the temptation of feeling you must forgive, a man, as a woman.”

— Margaret Atwood

379. “You say, The sensed absence of God and the sensed presence amount to much the same thing, only in reverse.”

— Margaret Atwood

380. “I’ve become swollen with power, true, but also nebulous with it – formless, shape-shifting. I am everywhere and nowhere: even in the minds of the Commanders I cast an unsettling shadow. How can I regain myself? How to shrink back to my normal size, the size of an ordinary woman?”

— Margaret Atwood

381. “It’s an event, a small defiance of rule, so small as to be undetectable, but such moments are the rewards I hold out for myself, like the candy I hoarded, as a child, at the back of a drawer. Such moments are possibilities, tiny peepholes.”

— Margaret Atwood

382. “I know why there is no glass, in front of the watercolor picture of blue irises, and why the window opens only partly and why the glass in it is shatter-proof. It isn’t running away they’re afraid of. We wouldn’t get far. It’s those other escapes, the ones you can open in yourself, given a cutting edge.”

— Margaret Atwood

383. “Starlet sex scandal. Giant squid involved.”

— Margaret Atwood

384. “The young ones are often the most dangerous, the most fanatical, the jumpiest with their guns. They haven’t yet learned about existence through time.”

— Margaret Atwood

385. “As human beings, we are always torn between individual freedom and the ability of choose our actions, and the need for at least enough social structure so that anarchy, chaos, and warlordery – or the war of all against all – can be avoided.”

— Margaret Atwood

386. “Our big mistake was teaching them to read. We won’t make that mistake again.”

— Margaret Atwood

387. “The fact is that blank pages inspire me with terror. What will I put on them? Will it be good enough? Will I have to throw it out?”

— Margaret Atwood

388. “Happy endings are best achieved by keeping the right doors locked.”

— Margaret Atwood

389. “He doesn’t know which is worse, a past he can’t regain or a present that will destroy him if he looks at it too clearly. Then there’s the future. Sheer vertigo.”

— Margaret Atwood

390. “All fathers are invisible in daytime; daytime is ruled by mothers and fathers come out at night. Darkness brings home fathers, with their real, unspeakable power. There is more to fathers than meets the eye.”

— Margaret Atwood

391. “All stories are about wolves. All worth repeating, that is. Anything else is sentimental drivel.”

— Margaret Atwood

392. “Sometimes I wish she would just shut up and let me walk in peace. But I’m ravenous for news, any kind of news; even if it’s false news, it must mean something.”

— Margaret Atwood

393. “There is something subversive about this garden of Serena’s, a sense of buried things bursting upwards, wordlessly, into the light, as if to point, to say: Whatever is silenced will clamor to be heard, though silently.”

— Margaret Atwood

394. “But most hearts say, I want, I want, I want, I want. My heart is more duplicitous, though no twin as I once thought. It says, I want, I don’t want, I want, and then a pause. It forces me to listen...”

— Margaret Atwood

395. “Inside the peach, there is a stone.”

— Margaret Atwood

396. “But I was the daughter of a Naiad. Behave like water, I told myself. Don’t try to oppose them. When they try to grasp you, slip through their fingers. Flow around them.”

— Margaret Atwood

397. “There were stories in the newspapers, of course, corpses in ditches or the woods, bludgeoned to death or mutilated, interfered with, as they used to say, but they were about other women, and the men who did such things were other men. None of them were the men we knew.”

— Margaret Atwood

398. “It was after the catastrophe, when they shot the president and machine-gunned the Congress and the army declared a state of emergency. They blamed it on the Islamic fanatics, at the time. Keep calm, they said on television. Everything is under control.”

— Margaret Atwood

399. “You can think clearly only with your clothes on.”

— Margaret Atwood

400. “I intend to get out of here. It can’t last forever. Others have thought such things, in bad times before this, and they were always right, they did get out one way or another, and it didn’t last forever. Although for them it may have lasted all the forever they had.”

— Margaret Atwood