Top 500 Margaret Atwood Quotes (2025 Update)
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351. “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

352. “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

353. “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

354. “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

355. “How long were you supposed to mourn, and what did they say? Make your life a tribute to the loved one.”

— Margaret Atwood

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

— Margaret Atwood

357. “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

358. “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

359. “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

360. “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

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

— Margaret Atwood

362. “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

363. “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

364. “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

365. “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

366. “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

367. “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

368. “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

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

— Margaret Atwood

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

— Margaret Atwood

371. “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

372. “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

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

— Margaret Atwood

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

— Margaret Atwood

375. “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

376. “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

377. “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

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

— Margaret Atwood

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

— Margaret Atwood

380. “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

381. “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

382. “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

383. “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

384. “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

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

— Margaret Atwood

386. “Your hand is a warm stone I hold between two words.”

— Margaret Atwood

387. “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

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

— Margaret Atwood

389. “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

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

— Margaret Atwood

391. “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

392. “The truly fearless think of themselves as normal.”

— Margaret Atwood

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

— Margaret Atwood

394. “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

395. “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

396. “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

397. “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

398. “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

399. “The freezing rain sifts down, handfuls of shining rice thrown by some unseen celebrant. Wherever it hits, it crystallizes into a granulated coating of ice.”

— Margaret Atwood

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

— Margaret Atwood