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Margaret Atwood Quotes - Page 32

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And yes, I know it's you; and that is what we will come to, sooner or later, when it's even darker than it is now, when the snow is colder, when it's darkest and coldest and candles are no longer any use to us and the

And yes, I know it's you; and that is what we will come to, sooner or later, when it's even darker than it is now, when the snow is colder, when it's darkest and coldest and candles are no longer any use to us and the visibility is zero: yes. It's still you. It's still you.

Margaret Atwood
Zero, Snow, Use
Margaret Atwood (2015). “Morning in the Burned House”, p.136, Houghton Mifflin Harcourt

I have long since decided if you wait for the perfect time to write, you'll never write. There is no time that isn't flawed somehow.

Margaret Atwood
Writing, Long, Perfect

The road to death is a lonely highway, and longer than it apears, even when it leads straight down from the scaffold, by way of a rope; and it's a dark road, with never any moon shining on it, to light your way.

Margaret Atwood
Death, Lonely, Dark
Margaret Atwood (2011). “Alias Grace: A Novel”, p.258, Anchor

The weapons that were once outside sharpening themselves on war are now indoors there, in the fortress, fragile in glass cases; Why is it (I'm thinking of the careful moulding round the stonework archways) that in this time, such elaborate defences keep things that are no longer (much) worth defending?

Margaret Atwood
War, Thinking, Glasses
Margaret Atwood (1987). “Selected Poems: 1965-1975”, p.20, Houghton Mifflin Harcourt

There is something powerful in the whispering of obscenities, about those in power. There's something delightful about it, something naughty, secretive, forbidden, thrilling. It's like a spell, of sorts. It deflates them, reduces them to the common denominator where they can be dealt.

Margaret Atwood
Powerful, Naughty, Whispering
FaceBook post by Margaret Atwood from Jan 26, 2012

oil paints...the look of licked lips.

Margaret Atwood
Oil, Looks, Lips

As God contains all good things, He must also contain a sense of playfulness -- a gift he has shared with Creatures other than ourselves, as witness the tricks Crows play, and the sportiveness of Squirrels, and the frolicking of Kittens.

Margaret Atwood
Squirrels, Play, Crow

His father was self-made, but his mother was constructed by others, and such edifices are notoriously fragile.

Margaret Atwood
Mother, Father, Self
Margaret Atwood (2011). “Alias Grace: A Novel”, p.56, Anchor

You can't help what you feel, but you can help how you behave

Margaret Atwood
Helping, Feels, Behave
Margaret Atwood (1986). “The Handmaid's Tale”, p.192, Houghton Mifflin Harcourt

I have periods now, like normal girls; I too am among the knowing, I too can sit out volleyball games and go to the nurse's for aspirin and waddle along the halls with a pad like a flattened rabbit tail wadded between my legs, sopping with liver-colored blood.

Margaret Atwood
Girl, Volleyball, Blood
Margaret Atwood (1988). “Cat's eye”, Doubleday, 1989

Publishing a book is like stuffing a note into a bottle and hurling it into the sea.

Margaret Atwood
Book, Sea, Bottles

Plato said that poets should be excluded from the ideal republic because they are such liars. I am a poet, and I affirm that this is true. About no subject are poets tempted to lie so much as about their own lives; I know one of them who has floated at least five versions of his autobiography, none of them true. I of course - being also a novelist - am a much more truthful person than that. But since poets lie, how can you believe me?

Margaret Atwood
Plato, Liars, Lying
"Margaret Atwood : Writing Philosophy". Waterstone's Poetry Lecture, Delivered At Hay On Wye, canpoetry.library.utoronto.ca. June 1995.

Maybe sadness was a kind of hunger, she thought. Maybe the two went together.

Margaret Atwood
Sadness, Two, Together
Margaret Atwood (2010). “The Year Of The Flood”, p.211, Hachette UK

I am not your justification for existence.

Margaret Atwood
Existence, Justification
Margaret Atwood (1986). “The Handmaid's Tale”, p.122, Houghton Mifflin Harcourt

I became a poet at the age of sixteen. I did not intend to do it. It was not my fault.

Margaret Atwood
Age, Sixteen, Faults
"Margaret Atwood: Writing Philosophy". Margaret Atwood's Waterstone's poetry lecture at Hay On Wye in Wales, canpoetry.library.utoronto.ca. June 1995.

Happiness is a garden walled with glass: there's no way in or out.

Margaret Atwood
Garden, Glasses, Way
Margaret Atwood (2007). “The Blind Assassin: A Novel”, p.518, Anchor

All writers must go from now to once a upon a time; all must go from here to there; all must descend to where the stories are kept; all must take care not to be captured and held immobile by the past.

Margaret Atwood
Past, Stories, Care
Margaret Atwood (2002). “Negotiating with the Dead: A Writer on Writing”, p.178, Cambridge University Press

Writers and books are cheap dates, especially when you compare the cost of a book with a ticket to the opera - or an NHL game.

Margaret Atwood
Book, Nhl, Games

The one good thing to be said about announcing yourself as a writer in the colonial Canadian fifties is that nobody told me I couldn't do it because I was a girl. They simply found the entire proposition ridiculous. Writers were dead and English, or else extremely elderly and American; they were not sixteen years old and Canadian.

Margaret Atwood
Girl, Elderly, Years
"Writing Philosophy". Waterstone's Poetry Lecture, Delivered at Hay on Wye. Wales, canpoetry.library.utoronto.ca. June 1995.

What a lost person needs is a map of the territory, with his own position marked on it so he can see where he is in relation to everything else.

Margaret Atwood
Territory, Needs, Maps
"Survival: A Thematic Guide to Canadian Literature". Book by Margaret Atwood, 1972.

A reader can never tell if it's a real thimble or an imaginary thimble, because by the time you're reading it, they're the same. It's a thimble. It's in the book.

Margaret Atwood
Real, Book, Reading
"Double bluff". Interview with Katharine Viner, www.theguardian.com. September 26, 2000.

A ratio of failures is built into the process of writing. The wastebasket has evolved for a reason. Think of it as the altar of the Muse Oblivion, to whom you sacrifice your botched first drafts, the tokens of your human imperfection.

Margaret Atwood
Writing, Sacrifice, Thinking
Margaret Atwood (2006). “Writing with Intent: Essays, Reviews, Personal Prose: 1983-2005”, p.107, Basic Books

Optimism means better than reality; pessimism means worse than reality. I'm a realist.

Margaret Atwood
Optimistic, Mean, Reality
FaceBook post by Margaret Atwood from Jul 21, 2016

Anything that suffers and dies instead of us is Christ; if they didn't kill birds and fish they would have killed us. The animals die that we may live, they are substitute people, hunters in the fall killing the deer, that is Christ also. And we eat them, out of cans or otherwise; we are eaters of death, dead Christ-flesh resurrecting inside us, granting us life. Canned Spam, canned Jesus, even the plants must be Christ.

Margaret Atwood
Jesus, Fall, Animal

The cat jumps up on the bed and tries to get onto my head. It's his way of telling whether or not i'm dead. If i'm not, he wants to be scratched; if i am - he'll think of something

Margaret Atwood
Cat, Thinking, Trying
Margaret Atwood (2015). “Morning in the Burned House”, p.22, Houghton Mifflin Harcourt

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