Top 500 Margaret Atwood Quotes (2026 Update)
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401. “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

402. “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

403. “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

404. “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

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

— Margaret Atwood

406. “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

407. “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

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

— Margaret Atwood

409. “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

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

— Margaret Atwood

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

— Margaret Atwood

412. “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

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

— Margaret Atwood

414. “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

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

— Margaret Atwood

416. “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

417. “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

418. “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

419. “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

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

— Margaret Atwood

421. “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

422. “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

423. “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

424. “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

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

— Margaret Atwood

426. “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

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

— Margaret Atwood

428. “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

429. “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

430. “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

431. “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

432. “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

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

— Margaret Atwood

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

— Margaret Atwood

Featured in: Quotes About Stories

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

— Margaret Atwood

436. “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

437. “The beauty is an illusion, and also a warning: there’s a dark side to beauty, as with poisonous butterflies.”

— Margaret Atwood

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

— Margaret Atwood

439. “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

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

— Margaret Atwood

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

— Margaret Atwood

442. “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

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

— Margaret Atwood

444. “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

445. “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

446. “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

447. “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 subject to the temptation or feeling you must forgive, a man, as a woman. It’s difficult to resist, believe me. But remember that forgiveness too is a power. To beg for it is a power, and to withhold or bestow it is a power, perhaps the greatest.”

— Margaret Atwood

448. “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

449. “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

450. “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