Quotes by Margaret Atwood With Free Shareable Pictures
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I wish you good writing and good luck. Even if you've already done the good writing, you'll still need the good luck. It's a shark-filled lagoon out there. Cross your fingers and watch your back.

I'm interested in the Gothic novel because it's very much a woman's form. Why is there such a wide readership for books that essentially say, 'Your husband is trying to kill you'?

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

Romance takes place in the middle distance. Romance is looking in at yourself through a window clouded with dew. Romance means leaving things out: where life grunts and shuffles, romance only sighs.

Writing poetry is a state of free float.

We slept in what had once been the gymnasium.

Nothing changes instantaneously: in a gradually heating bathtub you'd be boiled to death before you knew it.

The moment of betrayal is the worst, the moment when you know beyond any doubt that you've been betrayed: that some other human being has wished you that much evil.

We lived in the gaps between the stories.

Whatever is silenced will clamor to be heard, though silently.

Better never means better for everyone... It always means worse, for some.

Waste not want not. I am not being wasted. Why do I want?

Maybe the life I think I'm living is a paranoid delusion...Sanity is a valuable possession; I hoard it the way people once hoarded money. I save it, so I will have enough, when the time comes.

It's rather useless to write a gripping narrative with nothing in it but climate change because novels are always about people even if they purport to be about rabbits or robots.

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

Thy only authentic ending is the one provided here: John and Mary die, John and Mary die, John and Mary die.

When we're young, we like happy endings. When we're a little older, we think happy endings are unrealistic and so we prefer bad but credible endings. When we're older still, we realize happy endings aren't so bad after all.

Homelessness is a nationality now.

Stick a shovel into the ground almost anywhere and some horrible thing or other will come to light. Good for trade, we thrive on bones; without them there'd be no stories.

Where do you draw the line, between love and greed? We never did know, we always wanted more. We want to take it all in, for one last time, we want to eat the world with our eyes.

I reach out in love, my hands are guns,
my good intentions are completely lethal.

Forced to chose between one irascible tyrant and another, Laura had chosen the one which was greater, and also further away.

Ten days after the war ended, my sister Laura drove a car off a bridge.

I feel despised there, for having so little money; also for once having had so much. I never actually had it, of course. Father had it, and then Richard. But money was imputed to me, the same way crimes are imputed to those who've simply been present at them.

As human beings, we are always torn between individual freedom and the ability of choose our actions, and the need for at least enough social structure so that anarchy, chaos, and warlordery -- or the war of all against all -- can be avoided.

We battled in secret, undeclared, and after a while I no longer fought back because I never won. The only defense was flight, invisibility.

I was horrified in high school by the fate of the hanged maids at the end of the Odyssey; it seemed unfair to me, even then.

But what is a memorial, when you come right down to it, but a commemoration of wounds endured? Endured, and resented. Without memory, there can be no revenge.

What a moron I was to think you were sweet and innocent, when it turns out you were actually college-educated the whole time!

Always good to take a look at the long list for the Mann Booker, for the Commonwealth. It gives you an overview.There is so much going on all over the world that it's impossible for one person to keep up. And I can't.

Debt is not just a money thing. It's about owing and being owed. Money is just one thing you can exchange. You can exchange good deeds, you can exchange revenge, you can exchange murders.

Nobody wanted to be sexless, but nobody wanted to be nothing but sex.

Science fiction went through a period that was mostly object-oriented or inventions for distant galaxies.But when we cracked the genetic DNA code, opened the big Pandora's box, and it really did become possible to produce chimeras, my ears shot up.

I'm a refugee from the past, and like other refugees I go over the customs and habits of being I've left or been forced to leave behind me, and it all seems just as quaint, from here, and I am just as obsessive about it.

I follow suit, said the lion,
vacating his coat of arms
and movie logos; and the eagle said,
Get me off this flag.

I could end this with a moral,
as if this were a fable about animals,
though no fables are really about animals.

Powerlessness and silence go together.

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.

Repeat reading for me shares a few things with hot-water bottles and thumbsucking: comfort, familiarity, the recurrence of the expected.

Much latitude is given by those in power to professionals who can relieve them of pain. The doctors, the dentists, the lawyers, the accountants: in the new world of Gilead, as in the old, their sins are frequently forgiven them.

A lot of being a poet consists of willed ignorance. If you woke up from your trance and realized the nature of the life-threatening and dignity-destroying precipice you were walking along, you would switch into actuarial sciences immediately.

A suicide is both a rebuke to the living and a puzzle that defies them to solve it. Like a poem, suicide is finished and refuses to answer questions as to its final cause.

I beliebe in the resistance as I believe there can be no light without shadow; or rather, no shadow unless there is also light.

I took care not to react. It's a skill, not reacting.

How old do you have to get before wisdom descends like a plastic bag over your head and you learn to keep your big mouth shut? Maybe never. Maybe you get more frivolous with age.

Everything is post these days, as if we're all just a footnote to something earlier that was real enough to have a name of its own.

The ancestral voices were prophesying war because ancestral voices never shut up, and they hate to be wrong, and war is a sure thing, sooner or later.

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.

There's nothing like a shovel full of dirt to encourage literacy.

Science is not something that exists apart from human beings. It's one of the things we do as human beings, and we always have done science and technology in some form.

Anyway, maybe there weren't any solutions. Human society, corpses and rubble. It never learned, it made the same cretinous mistakes over and over, trading short-term gain for long-term pain.

Beginnings are sudden, but also insidious. They creep up on you sideways, they keep to the shadows, they lurk unrecognized. Then, later, they spring.

Even an obvious fabrication is some comfort when you have few others.

Without the protection of surliness and levity, all children would be crushed by the past--the past of others, loaded onto their shoulders. Selfishness is their saving grace.

An unearned income encourages self-pity in those already prone to it.

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.

Farewells can be shattering, but returns are surely worse. Solid flesh can never live up to the bright shadow cast by its absence.

I am rather saddened at the end of a book. I think most writers find this. It's like a friend departing on a voyage.

We are silent, considering shortfalls. There's not much time left, for us to become what we once intended. Jon had potential, but it's not a word that can be used comfortably any more. Potential has a shelf-life.

Potential has a shelf life.

I'm not senile, I snapped. If I burn the house down it will be on purpose.

Once a month I wake in the night, slippery with terror. I'm afraid, not because there's someone in the room, in the dark, in the bed, but because there isn't. I'm afraid of the emptiness, which lies beside me like a corpse.

Where to start is the problem, because nothing begins when it begins and nothing's over when it's over, and everything needs a preface: a preface, a postscript, a chart of simultaneous events.

These things sneak up on him for no reason, these flashes of irrational happiness. It's probably a vitamin deficiency.

I began to forget myself in the middle of sentences.

Every budding dictatorship begins by muzzling the artists, because they're a mouthy lot and they don't line up and salute very easily.

I feel buried.

A hot wind was blowing around my head, the strands of my hair lifting and swirling in it, like ink spilled in water.

If a god showed up every time you put a quarter in the prayer slot it wouldn't be God, it would be a puppet that you could control by doing that...that would make the deity subservient to you. So it wouldn't be a deity would it?

Writing is very improvisational. It's like trying to fix a broken sewing machine with safety pins and rubber bands. A lot of tinkering.

If someone wants to suck your toes, those toes should be worth sucking.

About no subject are poets tempted to lie so much as about their own lives.