Top 500 Margaret Atwood Quotes (2024 Update)
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401. “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

402. “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

403. “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

404. “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

405. “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

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

— Margaret Atwood

407. “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

408. “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

409. “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

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

— Margaret Atwood

411. “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

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

— Margaret Atwood

413. “Caught in the act, sinfully Scrabbling. Quick, eat those words.”

— Margaret Atwood

414. “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

415. “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

416. “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

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

— Margaret Atwood

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

— Margaret Atwood

419. “Some of our earliest writing, in cuneiform, was about who owes what.”

— Margaret Atwood

420. “To be a man, watched by women. It must be entirely strange. To have them watching him all the time. To have them wondering, What’s he going to do next?”

— Margaret Atwood

421. “If you really want to stay the same age you are now forever and ever, she’d be thinking, try jumping off the roof: death’s a sure-fire method for stopping time.”

— Margaret Atwood

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

— Margaret Atwood

423. “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

424. “If you disagree with your government, that’s political. If you disagree with your government that is approaching theocracy, then you’re evil.”

— Margaret Atwood

425. “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

426. “Fatigue is here, in my body, in my legs and eyes. That is what gets you in the end. Faith is only a word, embroidered.”

— Margaret Atwood

427. “But I’m ravenous for news, any kind of news; even if it’s false news, it must mean something.”

— Margaret Atwood

428. “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

429. “This is the kind of touch they like: folk art, archaic, made by women, in their spare time, from things that have no further use. A return to traditional values. Waste not want not. I am not being wasted. Why do I want?”

— Margaret Atwood

430. “The bell that measures time is ringing.”

— Margaret Atwood

431. “If you want to make God laugh, tell him your plans, as used to be said; though in present day, the idea of God laughing is next door to blasphemy. An ultra-serious fellow, God is now.”

— Margaret Atwood

432. “Moira was like an elevator with open sides. She made us dizzy.”

— Margaret Atwood

433. “The things I believe can’t all be true, though one of them must be. But I believe all of them, all three versions of Luke, at once and the same time. This contradictory way of believing seems to me, right now, the only way I can believe anything. Whatever the truth is, I will be ready for it.”

— Margaret Atwood

434. “But I envy the Commander’s Wife her knitting. It’s good to have small goals that can be easily attained.”

— Margaret Atwood

435. “All right,” I say. I don’t smile. Why tempt her to friendship?”

— Margaret Atwood

436. “They seemed to be able to choose. We seemed to be able to choose, then. We were a society dying of too much choice.”

— Margaret Atwood

437. “Social media is called social media for a reason. It lends itself to sharing rather than horn-tooting.”

— Margaret Atwood

438. “Perhaps he’s reached that state of intoxication which power is said to inspire, the state in which you believe you are indispensable and can therefore do anything, absolutely anything you feel like, anything at all.”

— Margaret Atwood

439. “I planned my death carefully, unlike my life, which meandered along from one thing to another, despite my feeble attempts to control it.”

— Margaret Atwood

440. “What can a woman do when scandalous gossip travels the world? If she defends herself, she sounds guilty. So I waited some more.”

— Margaret Atwood

441. “Here and there are worms, evidence of the fertility of the soil, caught by the sun, half dead; flexible and pink, like lips.”

— Margaret Atwood

442. “Little girls are cute and small only to adults. To one another they are not cute. They are life-sized.”

— Margaret Atwood

443. “Totalitarianisms may crumble from within, as they fail to keep the promises that brought them to power; or they may be attacked from without; or both. There are no sure-fire formulas, since very little in history is inevitable.”

— Margaret Atwood

444. “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.”

— Margaret Atwood

445. “Hatred would have been easier. With hatred, I would have known what to do. Hatred is clear, metallic, one-handed, unwavering; unlike love.”

— Margaret Atwood

446. “Whoever said that light was life and darkness nothing? For some of us mythologies are different.”

— Margaret Atwood

447. “Cleverness is a quality a man likes to have in his wife as long as she is some distance away from him. Up close, he’ll take kindness any day of the week, if there’s nothing more alluring to be had.”

— Margaret Atwood

448. “But maybe boredom is erotic, when women do it, for men.”

— Margaret Atwood

449. “While I read, the Commander sits and watches me doing it, without speaking but also without taking his eyes off me. This watching is a curiously sexual act, and I feel undressed while he does it.”

— Margaret Atwood

450. “I am certain that a Sewing Machine would relieve as much human suffering as a hundred Lunatic Asylums, and possibly a good deal more.”

— Margaret Atwood