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Margaret Atwood Quotes about Running

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The world is being run by people my age, men my age, with falling-out hair and health worries, and it frightens me. When the leaders were older than me I could believe in their wisdom, I could believe they had

The world is being run by people my age, men my age, with falling-out hair and health worries, and it frightens me. When the leaders were older than me I could believe in their wisdom, I could believe they had transcended rage and malice and the need to be loved. Now I know better. I look at the faces in newspapers, in magazines, and wonder: what greeds, what furies drive them on?

Margaret Atwood
Running, Believe, Fall
Margaret Atwood (1989). “Cat's Eye”, Bantam

We're facing growing climate change, more floods, more droughts, more crisis on a planetary level, and the systems we put in place in the twentieth century are just not going to work. We've run out of stuff. Our big problems are going to be energy supplies and food supplies. This is not a right-left issue.

Margaret Atwood
Running, Issues, Growing
Source: progressive.org

Walking was not fast enough, so we ran. Running was not fast enough, so we galloped. Galloping was not fast enough, so we sailed. Sailing was not fast enough, so we rolled merrily along on long metal tracks. Long metal tracks were not fast enough, so we drove. Driving was not fast enough, so we flew. Flying isn't fast enough for us. We want to get there faster. Get where? Wherever we are not. But a human soul can only go as fast as a man can walk, they used to say. In that case, where are all the souls? Left behind.

Margaret Atwood
Running, Men, Long
Margaret Atwood (2007). “The Tent”, p.89, Anchor

You can wet the rim of a glass and run your finger around the rim and it will make a sound. This is what I feel like: this sound of glass. I feel like the word shatter. I want to be with someone.

Margaret Atwood
Running, Glasses, Sound
Margaret Atwood (1986). “The Handmaid's Tale”, p.103, Houghton Mifflin Harcourt

All stories are about wolves. All worth repeating, that is. Anything else is sentimental drivel. ...Think about it. There's escaping from the wolves, fighting the wolves, capturing the wolves, taming the wolves. Being thrown to the wolves, or throwing others to the wolves so the wolves will eat them instead of you. Running with the wolf pack. Turning into a wolf. Best of all, turning into the head wolf. No other decent stories exist.

Margaret Atwood
Running, Fighting, Thinking
"The Blind Assassin". Book by Margaret Atwood, 2000.

We thought we were running away from the grownups, and now we are the grownups.

Margaret Atwood
Running, Romance, Running Away
Margaret Atwood (1988). “Cat's eye”, Doubleday, 1989

She wasn't ready to settle down, she told her friends. That was one way of putting it. Another was would have been that she had not found anyone to settle down with. There had been several men in her life, but they hadn't been convincing. They'd been somewhat like her table - quickly acquired, brightened up a little, but temporary. The time for that kind of thing was running out, however. She was tired of renting.

Margaret Atwood
Love, Running, Tired

At the very least we want a witness. We can't stand the idea of our own voices falling silent finally, like a radio running down.

Margaret Atwood
Running, Fall, Ideas
Margaret Atwood (2007). “The Blind Assassin: A Novel”, p.95, Anchor

Why is it we want so badly to memorialize ourselves? Even while we're still alive. We wish to assert our existence, like dogs peeing on fire hydrants. We put on display our framed photographs, our parchment diplomas, our silver-plated cups; we monogram our linen, we carve our names on trees, we scrawl them on washroom walls. It's all the same impulse. What do we hope from it? Applause, envy, respect? Or simply attention, of any kind we can get? At the very least we want a witness. We can't stand the idea of our own voices falling silent finally, like a radio running down.

Margaret Atwood
Running, Dog, Wall
Margaret Atwood (2007). “The Blind Assassin: A Novel”, p.95, Anchor

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
Running, Cutting, Given
FaceBook post by Margaret Atwood from Jul 28, 2013

He has to find more and better ways of occupying his time. His time, what a bankrupt idea, as if he's been given a box of time belonging to him alone, stuffed to the brim with hours and minutes that he can spend like money. Trouble is, the box has holes in it and the time is running out, no matter what he does with it.

Margaret Atwood
Running, Ideas, Doe
Margaret Atwood (2004). “Oryx and Crake”, p.40, Anchor

We're facing growing climate change, more floods, more droughts, more crisis on a planetary level, and the systems we put in place in the twentieth century are just not going to work. We've run out of stuff. Our big problems are going to be energy supplies and food supplies. This is not a right-left issue. It's a people issue, and it cuts across all our categories.

Margaret Atwood
Running, Cutting, Issues
"Margaret Atwood Interview". Interview with Matthew Rothschild, progressive.org. December 2, 2010.

The biggest debt is always the government debt; it's always debt that government has run up on your behalf.

Margaret Atwood
Running, Government, Debt
Source: www.macleans.ca

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

I no longer feel I'll be dead by thirty; now it's sixty. I suppose these deadlines we set for ourselves are really a way of saying we appreciate time, and want to use all of it. I'm still writing, I'm still writing poetry, I still can't explain why, and I'm still running out of time.

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

Because you are never here but always there, I forget not you but what you look like You drift down the street in the rain, your face dissolving, changing shape, the colours running together My walls absorb you, breathe you forth again, you resume yourself, I do not recognize you You rest on the bed watching me watching you, we will never know each other any better than we do now

Margaret Atwood
Running, Wall, Rain
Margaret Atwood (1973). “Power politics”, Harper & Row, 1973

Something is unfolding, being revealed to me. I see that there's a whole world of of girls and their doings that has been unknown to me, and that I can be part of without making any effort at all. I don't have to keep up with anyone, run as fast, aim as well, make loud explosive noises, decode messages, die on cue. I don't have to think about whether I do these things well, as well as a boy. All I have to do is sit on the floor and cut frying pans our of the Eaton's Catalogue with embroidery scissors, and say I've done it badly.

Margaret Atwood
Girl, Running, Cutting

I am not running for mayor yet. But if it comes to be true that people cannot voice an opinion unless they have been elected, then we are no longer in a democracy.

Margaret Atwood
Running, Voice, People

Like all twenty-one-year-old poets, I thought I would be dead by thirty, and Sylvia Plath had not set a helpful example. For a while there, you were made to feel that, if a poet and female, you could not really be serious about it unless you'd made at least one suicide attempt. So I felt I was running out of time.

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

I meet a lot of readers who first encountered my work in school. And I can only assume there is another group who would run away very fast if they saw me coming, for exactly the same reason. Reading is individual, and not all tastes are alike.

Margaret Atwood
Running, Reading, School

It's true that there is a rescue thing in people, and not just rescuing the family, which is kind of obvious from a biological point of view. But why is it that some people will jump into a freezing river and swim out to a downed plane for total strangers? What is that about? And it seems to be that it's part of your concept of who you are. That's why some people run into the burning buildings, because if they don't, their concept of who they are will be violated. They wouldn't be who they thought they were.

Margaret Atwood
Running, Rivers, Views
Source: www.macleans.ca

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