Top 500 Margaret Atwood Quotes (2024 Update)
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401. “A home filled with nothing but yourself. It’s heavy, that lightness. It’s crushing, that emptiness.”

— Margaret Atwood

402. “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

403. “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

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

— Margaret Atwood

405. “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

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

— Margaret Atwood

407. “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

408. “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

409. “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

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

— Margaret Atwood

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

— Margaret Atwood

412. “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

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

— Margaret Atwood

414. “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

415. “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

416. “Storytelling is not a luxury to humanity; it’s almost as necessary as bread. We cannot imagine ourselves without it, because the self is a story.”

— Margaret Atwood

417. “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

418. “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

419. “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

420. “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

421. “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

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

— Margaret Atwood

423. “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

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

— Margaret Atwood

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

— Margaret Atwood

426. “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

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

— Margaret Atwood

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

— Margaret Atwood

429. “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

430. “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

431. “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

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

— Margaret Atwood

433. “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

434. “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

435. “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

436. “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

437. “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

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

— Margaret Atwood

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

— Margaret Atwood

440. “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

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

— Margaret Atwood

442. “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

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

— Margaret Atwood

444. “There are five different prayers: for health, wealth, a death, a birth, a sin. You pick the one you want, punch in the number, then punch in your own number so your account will be debited, and punch in the number of times you want the prayer repeated.”

— Margaret Atwood

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

— Margaret Atwood

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

— Margaret Atwood

447. “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

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

— 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. “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