Authors:

Margaret Atwood Quotes - Page 20

All Quotes Age Anarchy Art Attitude Belief Character Childhood Children Choices Church Country Dancing Darkness Democracy Desire Devil Dictatorship Doubt Dying Eating Emptiness Energy Envy Evil Fate Fear Feelings Fighting Film Fun Gardening Giving Grace Graduation Greed Growing Up Hate Heart Heaven Home House Humanity Hunger Hurt Ignorance Inspirational Inspiring Internet Jesus Jimmy Language Leaving Life Literacy Literature Love Luck Lying Morning Myth Nature Pain Past Patience Poetry Prayer Purpose Reading Reality Revenge Romance Running School Science Fiction Silence Skins Sleep Soul Storytelling Study Suffering Survival Teaching Technology Temptation Time Today Trade Truth Understanding Virtue Waiting Wall War Water Wealth Writing
If you DJ reality, that is, if you make a mash-up of actual reality, you're going to end up with something that inevitably people will say, This is feminist. Because you cannot avoid that.

If you DJ reality, that is, if you make a mash-up of actual reality, you're going to end up with something that inevitably people will say, "This is feminist." Because you cannot avoid that.

Margaret Atwood
Reality, People, Feminist
Source: www.chicagotribune.com

Science is a tool, and we invent tools to do things we want. It's a question of how those tools are used by people.

Margaret Atwood
People, Tools, Want
"Margaret Atwood, Speculative Fiction's Apocalyptic Optimist". Interview with Scott Thill, www.wired.com. October 20, 2009.

Communications technology changes possibilities for communication, but that doesn't mean it changes the inherited structure of the brain. So you may think that you're addicted to online reading, but as soon as it isn't available anymore, your brain will pretty immediately adjust to other forms of reading. It's a habit like all habits.

Margaret Atwood
Reading, Communication, Mean

What is it the I'll want from you? Not love: that would be too much to ask. Not forgiveness, which isn't yours to bestow. Only a listener, perhaps; only someone who will see me. Don't prettify me though, whatever else you do: I have no wish to be a decorated skull. But I leave myself in your hands. What choice do I have? By the time you read this last page, that- if anywhere- is the only place I will be.

Margaret Atwood
Hands, Skulls, Choices

The darkness is really out there. It's not something that's in my head, just. It's in my work because it's in the world.

Margaret Atwood
Darkness, World

It was like being in an elevator cut loose at the top. Falling, falling, and not knowing when you will hit.

Margaret Atwood
Fall, Cutting, Knowing
Margaret Atwood (1986). “The Handmaid's Tale”, p.193, Houghton Mifflin Harcourt

These things you did were like prayers; you did them and you hoped they would save you. And for the most part they did. Or something did; you could tell by the fact that you were still alive.

Margaret Atwood
Prayer, Alive, Facts
Margaret Atwood (1986). “The Handmaid's Tale”, p.226, Houghton Mifflin Harcourt

Soon it will be daybreak. Soon the day will break. I can't stop it from breaking in the same way it always does, and then from lying there broken; always the same day, which comes around again like clockwork. It begins with the day before the day before, and then the day before, and then it's the day itself. A Saturday. The breaking day. The day the butcher comes.

Margaret Atwood
Lying, Broken, Doe
Margaret Atwood (2011). “Alias Grace: A Novel”, p.295, Anchor

We've learned to see the world in gasps.

Margaret Atwood
World

I was born in the Ottawa General Hospital right after the Gray Cup Football Game in 1939. Six months later, I was backpacked into the Quebec bush. I grew up in and out of the bush, in and out of Ottawa, Sault Ste. Marie and Toronto.

Margaret Atwood
Football, Games, Six Months
Margaret Atwood (1990). “Margaret Atwood: Conversations”, Princeton, N.J. : Ontario Review Press

Somebody has been a complete ratbag all their life and they've gotten away with it, and they die happy and rich, we so much want to believe that they're going off to the halls of judgment, that their heart will be weighed against the feather of truth, that it will be heavy with sin and it will be eaten by a crocodile. It's almost essential to our well-being to have a fallback position like that. It may appear as if you've gotten away with it, but you'll pay for it later.

Margaret Atwood
Believe, Heart, Essentials
Source: www.macleans.ca

Sometimes reactions can be quite surprising: readers like things that you, the author, feel you've barely gotten away with; or they dislike one of the parts you secretly think is one of your little gems.

Margaret Atwood
Thinking, Littles, Sometimes
"Margaret Atwood Ruins a Marriage, Talks Memes, Politics in Reddit AMA". Interview with Jia Tolentino, jezebel.com. December 30, 2014.

Night falls. Or has fallen. Why is it that night falls, instead of rising, like the dawn? Yet if you look east, at sunset, you can see night rising, not falling; darkness lifting into the sky, up from the horizon, like a black sun behind cloud cover. Like smoke from an unseen fire, a line of fire just below the horizon, brushfire or a burning city. Maybe night falls because it’s heavy, a thick curtain pulled up over the eyes. Wool blanket.

Margaret Atwood
Fall, Sunset, Eye
Margaret Atwood (1986). “The Handmaid's Tale”, p.191, Houghton Mifflin Harcourt

The idea of the chickens with the multiple breasts and thighs came from an urban legend that some fast-food places had developed chickens with four thighs. It wasn't true, but it is a suggestive rumor.

Margaret Atwood
Urban Legends, Ideas, Rumor
"Margaret Atwood Remixes Shakespeare’s “The Tempest” as a Prison Drama". Interview with Maddie Oatman, www.motherjones.com. September, 2016.

There were no men in this painting, but it was about men, the kind who caused women to fall. I did not ascribe any intentions to these men. They were like the weather, they didn't have a mind. They merely drenched you or struck you like lightning and moved on, mindless as blizzards. Or they were like rocks, a line of sharp slippery rocks with jagged edges. You could walk with care along between the rocks, picking your steps, and if you slipped you'd fall and cut yourself, but it was no use blaming the rocks.

Margaret Atwood
Fall, Cutting, Men
Margaret Atwood, Victor-Lévy Beaulieu, Phyllis Aronoff, Howard Scott (1998). “Two Solicitudes: Conversations”, McClelland & Stewart

Nature is an expert in cost-benefit analysis,' she says. 'Although she does her accounting a little differently. As for debts, she always collects in the long run.

Margaret Atwood
Running, Nature, Cost Benefit Analysis
Margaret Atwood (2012). “Payback: Debt and the Shadow Side of Wealth”, p.180, Bloomsbury Publishing

Please don't make the mistake of thinking that 'Oryx and Crake' is anti-science. Science is a way of knowing, and a tool. Like all ways of knowing and tools, it can be turned to bad uses. And it can be bought and sold, and it often is. But it is not in itself bad. Like electricity, it's neutral.

Margaret Atwood
Mistake, Thinking, Often Is

When I was young I believed that "nonfiction" meant "true." But you read a history written in, say, 1920 and a history of the same events written in 1995 and they're very different. There may not be one Truth - there may be several truths - but saying that is not to say that reality doesn't exist.

Margaret Atwood
Reality, Different
Source: www.motherjones.com

I did ... learn an important distinction in graduate school: a speculation about who had syphilis when is gossip if it's about your friends, a plot element if it's about a character in a novel, and scholarship if it's about John Keats.

Margaret Atwood
School, Character, Gossip
Margaret Atwood (1984). “Second words: selected critical prose”, Beacon Press, 1984

The truth, it seems, is not just what you find when you open a door: it is itself a door, which the poet is always on the verge of going through.

Margaret Atwood
Truth, Doors, Poetry
Margaret Atwood (1984). “Second words: selected critical prose”, Beacon Press, 1984

Things written down can cause a great deal of harm. All too often, people don't consider that.

Margaret Atwood
People, Causes, Harm
Margaret Atwood (2007). “The Blind Assassin: A Novel”, p.287, Anchor

Vampires get the joy of flying around and living forever, werewolves get the joy of animal spirits. But zombies, they're not rich, or aristocratic, they shuffle around. They're a group phenomenon, they're not very fast, they're quite sickly. So what's the pleasure of being one?

Margaret Atwood
Animal, Joy, Forever
"Margaret Atwood: 'I have a big following among the biogeeks. 'Finally! Someone understands us!'". Interview with Emma Brockes, www.theguardian.com. August 24, 2013.

If it's all instruction, you get annoyed with it and bored, and you stop reading. If it's all entertainment, you read it quite quickly, your heart going pitty-pat, pitty-pat. But when you finish, that's it. You're not going to think about it much afterward, apart from the odd nightmare. You're not going to read that book again.

Margaret Atwood
Book, Reading, Heart
"Narrative Magazine’s Friday Feature: Margaret Atwood Interview, In Which She Talks About “A Handmaid’s Tale”, “The Year Of The Flood” And Having Fun". Interview with Jo Scott-Coe, www.huffingtonpost.com. August 26, 2011.

If one of the arguments against eating meat is to do with cruelty and animal intelligence, then lab meat avoids that. There's also the environmental argument for it.

Margaret Atwood
Animal, Environmental, Meat

Storytelling is a very old human skill that gives us an evolutionary advantage. If you can tell young people how you kill an emu, acted out in song or dance, or that Uncle George was eaten by a croc over there, don't go there to swim, then those young people don't have to find out by trial and error.

Margaret Atwood
Song, Uncles, Errors

You May Also Like: