Top 500 Margaret Atwood Quotes (2023 Update)
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401. “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

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

— Margaret Atwood

403. “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

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

— Margaret Atwood

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

— Margaret Atwood

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

— Margaret Atwood

407. “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

408. “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

409. “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

410. “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

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

— Margaret Atwood

412. “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

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

— Margaret Atwood

414. “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

415. “The adult female body was one big booby trap as far as I could tell. If there was a hole, something was bound to be shoved into it and something else was bound to come out, and that went for any kind of hole: a hole in a wall, a hole in a mountain, a hole in the ground. There were so many things that could be done to it or go wrong with it, this adult female body, that I was left feeling I would be better off without it.”

— Margaret Atwood

416. “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

417. “He stops, looks up at this window, and I can see the white oblong of his face. We look at each other. I have no rose to toss, he has no lute. But it’s the same kind of hunger.”

— Margaret Atwood

418. “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

419. “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

420. “For the heart was both key and lock, and he who could master the hearts of men and learn their secrets was well on the way to mastering the Fates and controlling the thread of his own destiny.”

— Margaret Atwood

421. “Modesty is invisibility, said Aunt Lydia. Never forget it. To be seen-to be seen-is to be-her voice trembled-penetrated. What you must be, girls, is impenetrable.”

— Margaret Atwood

422. “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

423. “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

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

— Margaret Atwood

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

— Margaret Atwood

426. “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

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

— Margaret Atwood

428. “Why is it he feels some line has been crossed, some boundary transgressed? How much is too much, how far is too far?”

— Margaret Atwood

429. “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

430. “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

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. “I always thought eating was a ridiculous activity anyway. I’d get out of it myself if I could, though you’ve got to do it to stay alive, they tell me.”

— Margaret Atwood

433. “I walk away from him. It’s enormously pleasing to me, this walking away. It’s like being able to make people appear and vanish, at will.”

— Margaret Atwood

434. “People need such stories, because however dark, a darkness with voices in it is better than a silent void.”

— Margaret Atwood

435. “Eating is our earliest metaphor, preceding our consciousness of gender difference, race, nationality, and language. We eat before we talk.”

— Margaret Atwood

436. “For Adam was first formed, then Eve. ‘And Adam was not deceived, but the woman being deceived in the transgression.”

— Margaret Atwood

437. “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

438. “What fabrications they are, mothers. Scarecrows, wax dolls for us to stick pins into, crude diagrams. We deny them an existence of their own, we make them up to suit ourselves – our own hungers, our own wishes, our own deficiencies.”

— Margaret Atwood

439. “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

440. “I have failed once again to fulfill the expectations of others, which have become my own.”

— Margaret Atwood

441. “Vanity is becoming a nuisance, I can see why women give it up, eventually. But I’m not ready for that yet.”

— Margaret Atwood

442. “If there were no emptiness, there would be no life.”

— Margaret Atwood

443. “Not so her eyes, which were the flat hostile blue of a midsummer sky in bright sunlight, a blue that shuts you out.”

— Margaret Atwood

444. “What a moron I was to think you were sweet and innocent, when it turns out you were actually college-educated the whole time!”

— Margaret Atwood

445. “Ah men, why do you want all this attention? I can write poems for myself, make love to a doorknob if absolutely necessary. What do you have to offer me I can’t find otherwise except humiliation? Which I no longer need.”

— Margaret Atwood

446. “Human understanding is fallible, and we see through a glass, darkly. Any religion is a shadow of God. But the shadows of God are not God.”

— Margaret Atwood

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

— Margaret Atwood

448. “Old lovers go the way of old photographs, bleaching out gradually as in a slow bath of acid: first the moles and pimples, then the shadings. Then the faces themselves, until nothing remains but the general outlines.”

— Margaret Atwood

449. “One and one and one and one doesn’t equal four. Each one remains unique, there is no way of joining them together. They cannot be exchanged, one for the other. They cannot replace each other.”

— Margaret Atwood

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

— Margaret Atwood