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Margaret Atwood Quotes - Page 4

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Myths can't be translated as they did in their ancient soil. We can only find our own meaning in our own time.

Myths can't be translated as they did in their ancient soil. We can only find our own meaning in our own time.

Margaret Atwood
Soil, Ancient, Myth

There is more than one kind of freedom," said Aunt Lydia. "Freedom to and freedom from. In the days of anarchy, it was freedom to. Now you are being given freedom from. Don't underrate it.

Margaret Atwood
Freedom, Aunt, Anarchy
Margaret Atwood (1986). “The Handmaid's Tale”, p.24, Houghton Mifflin Harcourt

Winning intoxicates you, and numbs you to the sufferings of others.

Margaret Atwood
Winning, Numbness, Suffering Of Others
Margaret Atwood (2011). “The Robber Bride”, p.256, Anchor

Debt is part of the human condition. Civilization is based on exchanges - on gifts, trades, loans - and the revenges and insults that come when they are not paid back.

Margaret Atwood
Revenge, Civilization, Debt

Every budding dictatorship begins by muzzling the artists, because they're a mouthy lot and they don't line up and salute very easily.

Margaret Atwood
Artist, Lines, Dictatorship

If I love you, is that a fact or a weapon?

Margaret Atwood
Love, Romantic, Loving Someone
Margaret Atwood (1973). “Power politics”, Harper & Row, 1973

Men and women are not "equal" if "equal" means "exactly the same." Our many puzzlements and indeed unhappinesses come from trying to figure out what the differences really mean, or should mean, or should not mean.

Margaret Atwood
Mean, Men, Differences
"Ask the Author". www.goodreads.com.

When I was 16 I started publishing all kinds of things in school magazines. My main feedback came from my English teacher, Miss Bessie B. Billings, who said, 'I can't understand this at all, dear, so it must be good.

Margaret Atwood
Teacher, Encouragement, School

I myself have 12 hats and each one represents a different personality. Why just be yourself.

Margaret Atwood
Being Yourself, Personality, Different
"A working life: the milliner" by Anna Tims, www.theguardian.com. December 2, 2011.

There's something to be said for hunger: at least it lets you know you're still alive.

Margaret Atwood
Alive, Hunger, Said
Margaret Atwood (2004). “Oryx and Crake”, p.95, Anchor

I don't want to look at something that determines me so completely.

Margaret Atwood
Looks, Want, Handmaids Tale
Margaret Atwood (1986). “The Handmaid's Tale”, p.63, Houghton Mifflin Harcourt

I suppose it's everyone's fate to be reduced to quaintness by those younger than themselves.

Margaret Atwood
Fate
Margaret Atwood (2007). “The Blind Assassin: A Novel”, p.38, Anchor

The society in 'The Handmaid's Tale' is a throwback to the early Puritans whom I studied extensively at Harvard under Perry Miller, to whom the book is dedicated.

Margaret Atwood
Book, Puritan, Harvard

... Remember that forgiveness too is a power. To beg for it is a power, and to withold or bestow it is a power, perhaps the greatest.

Margaret Atwood
Remember

What I need is perspective. The illusion of depth, created by a frame, the arrangement of shapes on a flat surface. Perspective is necessary. Otherwise there are only two dimensions. Otherwise you live with your face squashed up against a wall, everything a huge foreground, of details, close-ups, hairs, the weave of the bedsheet, the molecules of the face. Your own skin like a map, a diagram of futility, criscrossed with tiny roads that lead nowhere. Otherwise you live in the moment. Which is not where I want to be.

Margaret Atwood
Wall, Two, Hair
FaceBook post by Margaret Atwood from Jul 25, 2012

I'm a strict, strict agnostic. It's very different from a casual, 'I don't know.' It's that you cannot present as knowledge something that is not knowledge. You can present it as faith, you can present it as belief, but you can't present it as fact.

Margaret Atwood
Facts, Different, Belief
"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.

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
Hatred, Easier, Clear
Margaret Atwood (1989). “Cat's Eye”, Bantam

There's always something to occupy the inquiring mind.

Margaret Atwood
Mind, Inquiring Minds, Inquiring
Margaret Atwood (1986). “The Handmaid's Tale”, p.221, Houghton Mifflin Harcourt

If you're a woman writer, sometime, somewhere, you will be asked: Do you think of yourself as a writer first, or as a woman first? Look out. Whoever asks this hates and fears both writing and women.

Margaret Atwood
Hate, Writing, Thinking
Margaret Atwood (2009). “Writing with Intent: Essays, Reviews, Personal Prose: 1983-2005”, p.76, Hachette UK

We were the people who were not in the papers. We lived in the blank white spaces at the edges of print. It gave us more freedom. We lived in the gaps between the stories.

Margaret Atwood
Space, White, People
FaceBook post by Margaret Atwood from Jan 20, 2015

Every ending is arbitrary, because the end is where you write The end. A period, a dot of punctuation, a point of stasis. A pinprick in the paper: you could put your eye to it and see through, to the other side, to the beginning of something else. Or, as Tony says to her students, Time is not a solid, like wood, but a fluid, like water or the wind. It doesn't come neatly cut into even-sized length, into decades and centuries. Nevertheless, for our purposes we have to pretend it does. The end of any history is a lie in which we all agree to conspire.

Margaret Atwood
Lying, Eye, Writing

But we still find the world astounding, we can't get enough of it; even as it shrivels, even as its many lights flicker and are extinguished (the tigers, the leopard frogs, the plunging dolphin flukes), flicker and are extinguished, by us, by us, we gaze and gaze. Where do you draw the line, between love and greed? We never did know, we always wanted more. We want to take it all in, for one last time, we want to eat the world with our eyes.

Margaret Atwood
Eye, Light, Greed

Remember that, my child. Remember you are half water. If you can't go through an obstacle, go around it. Water does.

Margaret Atwood
Patience, Children, Remember You
Margaret Atwood (2003). “The Penelopiad”, p.43, Canongate Books

If the national mental illness of the United States is megalomania, that of Canada is paranoid schizophrenia.

Margaret Atwood
United States, Canada, Mental Illness

...we must be a beacon of hope, because if you tell people there's nothing they can do, they will do worse than nothing.

Margaret Atwood
People, Beacons, Can Do
Margaret Atwood (2009). “The Year of the Flood”, p.250, Anchor

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