Margaret Atwood Quotes - Page 5

• Margaret Atwood / Poet

I was kidnapped by literature at a young age and never wanted to be ransomed.

• Margaret Atwood / Poet

The desire to be loved is the last illusion. Give it up and you will be free.

• Margaret Atwood / Poet

As all historians know, the past is a great darkness, and filled with echoes.

• Margaret Atwood / Poet

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

• Margaret Atwood / Poet

I did not know how to paint or even what to paint, but I knew I had to begin.

• Margaret Atwood / Poet

Every aspect of human technology has a dark side, including the bow and arrow.

• Margaret Atwood / Poet

The future of narrative? Built in, part of the human template. Not going away.

• Margaret Atwood / Poet

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

• Margaret Atwood / Poet

We yearned for the future. How did we learn it, that talent for insatiability?

• Margaret Atwood / Poet

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

• Margaret Atwood / Poet

Things musicals taught me: All your problems will go away if you sing about it.

• Margaret Atwood / Poet

I would rather dance as a ballerina, though faultily, than as a flawless clown.

• Margaret Atwood / Poet

Nevertheless, blood is thicker than water, as anyone knows who has tasted both.

• Margaret Atwood / Poet

Is anything wrong, dear? the old joke went. No, why? You moved. Just don't move.

• Margaret Atwood / Poet

Show me a character totally without anxieties and I will show you a boring book.

• Margaret Atwood / Poet

The sands of time are quicksands ... so much can sink into them without a trace.

• Margaret Atwood / Poet

I'll make you mine, lovers said in old books. They never said, I'll make you me.

• Margaret Atwood / Poet

Though as he'd say, what is 'belief' but a willingness to suspend the negatives?

• Margaret Atwood / Poet

Our biggest moral debt is to the environment. Take-take-take, nothing given back.

• Margaret Atwood / Poet

Some people mistakenly think nature is very nice and benevolent and never betrays.

• Margaret Atwood / Poet

I want everything back, the way it was. But there is no point to it, this wanting.

• Margaret Atwood / Poet

There were a lot of gods. Gods always come in handy, they justify almost anything.

• Margaret Atwood / Poet

This is how the girl who couldn't speak and the man who couldn't see fell in love.

• Margaret Atwood / Poet

I would not change [my past work] anymore than I would airbrush a photo of myself.

• Margaret Atwood / Poet

Love is giving, marriage is buying and selling. You can't put love into a contract.

• Margaret Atwood / Poet

For if the world treats you well, Sir, you come to believe you are deserving of it.

• Margaret Atwood / Poet

People dressed in a certain kind of clothing are never wrong. Also they never fart.

• Margaret Atwood / Poet

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

• Margaret Atwood / Poet

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

• Margaret Atwood / Poet

Science fiction, to me, has not only things that wouldn't happen, but other planets.

• Margaret Atwood / Poet

Marshall McLuhan is absolutely right, we are always looking in the rear view mirror.

• Margaret Atwood / Poet

But the adjectives change,” said Jimmy. “Nothing’s worse than last year’s adjectives.

• Margaret Atwood / Poet

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

• Margaret Atwood / Poet

Truly amazing, what people can get used to, as long as there are a few compensations.

• Margaret Atwood / Poet

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

• Margaret Atwood / Poet

I learned to read very early so I could read the comics, which I then started to draw.

• Margaret Atwood / Poet

All I can hope for is a reconstruction: the way love feels is always only approximate.

• Margaret Atwood / Poet

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

• Margaret Atwood / Poet

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

• Margaret Atwood / Poet

I am not a saint or a cripple, I am not a wound; now I will see whether I am a coward.

• Margaret Atwood / Poet

The act of making a photograph is less a question of what is being looked at than how.

• Margaret Atwood / Poet

Genres aren't closed boxes. Stuff flows back and forth across the borders all the time.

• Margaret Atwood / Poet

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

• Margaret Atwood / Poet

I was warped early by Ray Bradbury and Edgar Allan Poe. I was very fond of Franz Kafka.

• Margaret Atwood / Poet

I never say I'm an "ist" of any kind unless I know how the other person is defining it.

• Margaret Atwood / Poet

And consider: it is loss to which everything flows, absence in which everything flowers

• Margaret Atwood / Poet

The story as told in The Odyssey doesn't hold water. There are too many inconsistencies.

• Margaret Atwood / Poet

Because I am a mother, I am capable of being shocked: as I never was when I was not one.

• Margaret Atwood / Poet

I have a big following among the biogeeks of this world. Nobody ever puts them in books.

• Margaret Atwood / Poet

The young habitually mistake lust for love, they're infested with idealism of all kinds.