Top 893 Quotes & Sayings by Margaret Atwood
Explore popular quotes and sayings by a Canadian novelist Margaret Atwood.
Last updated on April 13, 2025.
Sooner or later, I hate to break it to you, you're gonna die, so how do you fill in the space between here and there? It's yours. Seize your space.
If you're put on a pedestal, you're supposed to behave yourself like a pedestal type of person. Pedestals actually have a limited circumference. Not much room to move around.
Optimism means better than reality; pessimism means worse than reality. I'm a realist.
Reading and writing, like everything else, improve with practice. And, of course, if there are no young readers and writers, there will shortly be no older ones. Literacy will be dead, and democracy - which many believe goes hand in hand with it - will be dead as well.
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.
We still think of a powerful man as a born leader and a powerful woman as an anomaly.
If social stability goes pear-shaped, you have a choice between anarchy and dictatorship. Most people will opt for more security, even if they have to give up some personal freedom.
Myths can't be translated as they did in their ancient soil. We can only find our own meaning in our own time.
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.
The genesis of a poem for me is usually a cluster of words. The only good metaphor I can think of is a scientific one: dipping a thread into a supersaturated solution to induce crystal formation. I don't think I solve problems in my poetry; I think I uncover the problems.
Every aspect of human technology has a dark side, including the bow and arrow.
If the national mental illness of the United States is megalomania, that of Canada is paranoid schizophrenia.
People use technology only to mean digital technology. Technology is actually everything we make.
There may not be one Truth - there may be several truths - but saying that is not to say that reality doesn't exist.
All fiction is about people, unless it's about rabbits pretending to be people. It's all essentially characters in action, which means characters moving through time and changes taking place, and that's what we call 'the plot'.
When things are really dismal, you can laugh, or you can cave in completely.
You will always have partial points of view, and you'll always have the story behind the story that hasn't come out yet. And any form of journalism you're involved with is going to be up against a biased viewpoint and partial knowledge.
Victorian literature was my subject at Harvard.
I've never understood why people consider youth a time of freedom and joy. It's probably because they have forgotten their own.
Heroes need monsters to establish their heroic credentials. You need something scary to overcome.
Never pray for justice, because you might get some.
I was warped early by Ray Bradbury and Edgar Allan Poe. I was very fond of Franz Kafka.
Another belief of mine; that everyone else my age is an adult, whereas I am merely in disguise.
You're never going to kill storytelling, because it's built into the human plan. We come with it.
Speculative fiction encompasses that which we could actually do. Sci-fi is that which we're probably not going to see.
War is what happens when language fails.
I think every age lives in a blend of technology so there's always older ones mixed in with newer ones, and when the new technology goes down, the immediate fallback position is either that technology just before that or one several technologies back.
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.
The answers you get from literature depend on the questions you pose.
Before the Civil War, Canada was at the top of the underground railroad. If you made it into Canada, you were safe unless someone came and hauled you back. That was also true during the Vietnam War for draft resisters.
If I waited for perfection... I would never write a word.
Reality simply consists of different points of view.
I was once a graduate student in Victorian literature, and I believe as the Victorian novelists did, that a novel isn't simply a vehicle for private expression, but that it also exists for social examination. I firmly believe this.
A word after a word after a word is power.
Gardening is not a rational act.
I don't think of poetry as a 'rational' activity but as an aural one. My poems usually begin with words or phrases which appeal more because of their sound than their meaning, and the movement and phrasing of a poem are very important to me.
Communications technology changes possibilities for communication, but that doesn't mean it changes the inherited structure of the brain. So you may think that you're addicted to online reading, but as soon as it isn't available anymore, your brain will pretty immediately adjust to other forms of reading. It's a habit like all habits.
We thought we were running away from the grownups, and now we are the grownups.
Canada was built on dead beavers.
A divorce is like an amputation: you survive it, but there's less of you.
The beginning of Canadian cultural nationalism was not 'Am I really that oppressed?' but 'Am I really that boring?'
Genres aren't closed boxes. Stuff flows back and forth across the borders all the time.
A reader can never tell if it's a real thimble or an imaginary thimble, because by the time you're reading it, they're the same. It's a thimble. It's in the book.
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.
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 Eskimos had fifty-two names for snow because it was important to them: there ought to be as many for love.
Science is a tool, and we invent tools to do things we want. It's a question of how those tools are used by people.
The thing about delirium is you think it's great, but it actually isn't.
Reading and writing are connected. I learned to read very early so I could read the comics, which I then started to draw.
An eye for an eye only leads to more blindness.
Their mothers had finally caught up to them and been proven right. There were consequences after all but they were the consequences to things you didn't even know you'd done.
Little girls are cute and small only to adults. To one another they are not cute. They are life-sized.
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.
If I were going to convert to any religion I would probably choose Catholicism because it at least has female saints and the Virgin Mary.
Time is compressed like the fist I close on my knee... I hold inside it the clues and solutions and the power for what I must do now.
In the spring, at the end of the day, you should smell like dirt.
This above all, to refuse to be a victim.
Vampires get the joy of flying around and living forever, werewolves get the joy of animal spirits. But zombies, they're not rich, or aristocratic, they shuffle around. They're a group phenomenon, they're not very fast, they're quite sickly. So what's the pleasure of being one?
Every utopia - let's just stick with the literary ones - faces the same problem: What do you do with the people who don't fit in?
Like many modern poets, I tend to conceal rhymes by placing them in the middle of lines, and to avoid immediate alliteration and assonance in favor of echoes placed later in the poems.
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