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Margaret Atwood Quotes about Heart

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I want, I don’t want. How can one live with such a heart?

I want, I don’t want. How can one live with such a heart?

Margaret Atwood
Heart, Want
Margaret Atwood (2012). “Selected Poems II: 1976 - 1986”, p.16, Houghton Mifflin Harcourt

If you get hungry enough, they say, you start eating your own heart.

Margaret Atwood
Heart, Eating, Hungry
Margaret Atwood (2007). “The Blind Assassin: A Novel”, p.329, Anchor

Home is where the heart is, I thought now, gathering myself together in Betty's Luncheonette. I had no heart any more, it had been broken; or not broken, it simply wasn't there any more. It had been scooped neatly out of me like the yolk from a hard-boiled egg, leaving the rest of me bloodless and congealed and hollow. I'm heartless, I thought. Therefore I'm homeless.

Margaret Atwood
Home, Heart, Eggs
Margaret Atwood (2007). “The Blind Assassin: A Novel”, p.447, Anchor

Why does the mind do such things? Turn on us, rend us, dig the claws in. If you get hungry enough, they say, you start eating your own heart. Maybe it's much the same.

Margaret Atwood
Life, Heart, Mind
Margaret Atwood (2007). “The Blind Assassin: A Novel”, p.329, Anchor

Well. Then we had the irises, rising beautiful and cool on their tall stalks, like blown glass, like pastel water momentarily frozen in a splash, light blue, light mauve, and the darker ones, velvet and purple, black cat's ears in the sun, indigo shadow, and the bleeding hearts, so female in shape it was a surprise they'd not long since been rooted out. 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
Beautiful, Cat, Heart
Margaret Atwood (1986). “The Handmaid's Tale”, p.153, Houghton Mifflin Harcourt

The reader cannot see into your heart. He will know only what you tell him. Make the blind see your words. Make the hard-hearted feel. Make the deaf hear.

Margaret Atwood
Writing, Heart, Blind

At moments like this I envy those who have found a safe haven in which to bestow their hearts; or perhaps I envy them for having a heart to bestow. I often feel that I myself am without one, and possess in its stead merely a heart shaped stone.

Margaret Atwood
Heart, Safe Haven, Envy
Margaret Atwood (2011). “Alias Grace: A Novel”, p.131, Anchor

They are hypocrites, they think the Church is a cage to keep God in, so he will stay locked up there and not go wandering about the earth during the week, poking his nose into their business, and looking in the depths and darkness and doubleness of their hearts, and their lack of true charity; and they believed they need only be bothered about him on Sundays when they have their best clothes on and their faces straight, and their hands washed and their gloves on, and their stories all prepared.

Margaret Atwood
Love, Hypocrite, Heart
Margaret Atwood (2011). “Alias Grace: A Novel”, p.254, Anchor

The heart of Jesus glowed, because it was holy. Holy things glowed in general.

Margaret Atwood
Jesus, Heart, Holy
Margaret Atwood (2011). “The Robber Bride”, p.447, Anchor

You might 'write from the heart,' but you'd better polish with your brain.

Margaret Atwood
Writing, Heart, Brain

Foreignness is all around. Only in the heart of the heart of the country, namely the heart of the United States, can you avoid such a thing. In the center of an empire, you can think of your experience as universal. Outside the empire or on the fringes of the empire, you cannot.

Margaret Atwood
Country, Heart, Thinking

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

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.

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
Heart, Want, Twins
Margaret Atwood (1987). “Selected Poems II: Poems Selected & New 1976-1986”, p.5, Houghton Mifflin Harcourt

Some days I do appreciate things more, eggs, flowers, but then I decide I'm only having an attack of sentimentality, my brain going pastel Technicolor, like a beautiful-sunset greeting cards they used to make so many of in California. High-gloss hearts. The danger is grayout.

Margaret Atwood
Beautiful, Flower, Heart
Margaret Atwood (1986). “The Handmaid's Tale”, p.200, Houghton Mifflin Harcourt

Amazing how the heart clutches at anything familiar, whimpering Mine!Mine!

Margaret Atwood
Heart, Familiar, Clutch
Margaret Atwood (2014). “The MaddAddam Trilogy Bundle: The Year of the Flood; Oryx & Crake; MaddAddam”, p.742, Anchor

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