Margaret Atwood Quotes

Water does not resist. Water flows. When you plunge your hand into it, all you feel is a caress. Water is not a solid wall, it will not stop you. But water always goes where it wants to go, and nothing in the end can stand against it. Water is patient. Dripping water wears away a stone. Remember that, my child. Remember you are half water. If you can't go through an obstacle, go around it. Water does.

But nothing is more opaque than absolute transparency.

I hope that people will finally come to realize that there is only one 'race' - the human race - and that we are all members of it.

Men are afraid that women will laugh at them. Women are afraid that men will kill them.

Canada was built on dead beavers.

I don't want to see anyone. I lie in the bedroom with the curtains drawn and nothingness washing over me like a sluggish wave. Whatever is happening to me is my own fault. I have done something wrong, something so huge I can't even see it, something that's drowning me. I am inadequate and stupid, without worth. I might as well be dead.

A divorce is like an amputation: you survive it, but there's less of you.

We still think of a powerful man as a born leader and a powerful woman as an anomaly.

You can only be jealous of someone who has something you think you ought to have yourself.

Nature is to zoos as God is to churches.

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

Another belief of mine; that everyone else my age is an adult, whereas I am merely in disguise.

You think I'm not a goddess? Try me. This is a torch song. Touch me and you'll burn.

In the spring, at the end of the day, you should smell like dirt.

Some of our earliest writing, in cuneiform, was about who owes what.

The body is so easily damaged, so easily disposed of, water and chemicals is all it is, hardly more to it than a jellyfish drying on sand.

There's the story, then there's the real story, then there's the story of how the story came to be told. Then there's what you leave out of the story. Which is part of the story too.

Men are not to be told anything they might find too painful; the secret depths of human nature, the sordid physicalities, might overwhelm or damage them. For instance, men often faint at the sight of their own blood, to which they are not accustomed. For this reason you should never stand behind one in the line at the Red Cross donor clinic.

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.

In view of the fading animals the proliferation of sewers and fears the sea clogging, the air nearing extinction we should be kind, we should take warning, we should forgive each other Instead we are opposite, we touch as though attacking, the gifts we bring even in good faith maybe warp in our hands to implements, to manoeuvres

A voice is a human gift; it should be cherished and used, to utter fully human speech as possible. Powerlessness and silence go together.

The answers you get from literature depend on the questions you pose.

The Eskimos had fifty-two names for snow because it was important to them: there ought to be as many for love.

Touch comes before sight, before speech. It is the first language and the last, and it always tells the truth.

Everyone thinks writers must know more about the inside of the human head, but that's wrong. They know less, that's why they write. Trying to find out what everyone else takes for granted.

In the end, we'll all become stories.

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.

Nobody dies from lack of sex. It's lack of love we die from.

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

Water does not resist. Water flows. When you plunge your hand into it, all you feel is a caress.

Little girls are cute and small only to adults. To one another they are not cute. They are life-sized.

Good writing takes place at intersections, at what you might call knots, at places where the society is snarled or knotted up.

Our problem right now is that we're so specialized that if the lights go out, there are a huge number of people who are not going to know what to do. But within every dystopia there's a little utopia.

I feel like cotton candy: sugar and air. Squeeze me and I’d turn into a small sickly damp wad of weeping pinky-red.

The trickle-down theory of economics has it that it's good for rich people to get even richer because some of their wealth will trickle own, through their no doubt lavish spending, upon those who stand below them on the economic ladder. Notice that the metaphor is not that of a gushing waterfall but of a leaking tap: even the most optimistic endorsers of this concept do not picture very much real flow, as their language reveals" pg. 102.

Oppression involves a failure of the imagination: the failure to imagine the full humanity of other human beings.

Happy as a clam, is what my mother says for happy. I am happy as a clam: hard-shelled, firmly closed.

It's a feature of our age that if you write a work of fiction, everyone assumes that the people and events in it are disguised biography — but if you write your biography, it's equally assumed you're lying your head off.

Where do the words go when we have said them?

The fabric of democracy is always fragile everywhere because it depends on the will of citizens to protect it, and when they become scared, when it becomes dangerous for them to defend it, it can go very quickly.

If you disagree with your government, that's political. If you disagree with your government that is approaching theocracy, then you're evil.

Inside the peach, there is a stone.

And yet it disturbs me to learn I have hurt someone unintentionally. I want all my hurts to be intentional.

If your not annoying somebody, you're not alive.

One of the gravestones in the cemetery near the earliest church has an anchor on it and an hourglass, and the words In Hope. In Hope. Why did they put that above a dead person? Was it the corpse hoping, or those still alive?

But I began then to think of time as having a shape, something you could see, like a series of liquid transparencies, one laid on top of another.

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.

Hatred would have been easier. With hatred, I would have known what to do. Hatred is clear, metallic, one-handed, unwavering; unlike love.

If we were all on trial for our thoughts, we would all be hanged.

A fist is more than the sum of its fingers.