Quotes by Margaret Atwood With Free Shareable Pictures
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In the evenings there's been thunder, a distant bumping and stumbling, like God on a sullen binge.

The objects I chose were designed to hold something, but I didn't fill them up. They remained empty. They were little symbolic shrines to thirst.

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

Don't be married to a line or verse if it can't rhyme, fit the meter, or doesn't fit the outline.

I'm not an activist by nature. I am suspicious of Utopian thinking and equally suspicious of its alternate.

The true story is vicious and multiple and untrue after all. Why do you need it? Don't ever ask for the true story.

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

Human reason is a pin dancing on the head of an angel, so small is it in comparison to the Divine vastness that encircles us.

God is not the voice in the whirlwind, God is the whirlwind.

I'm a fool, to confuse this with goodness. I am not good. I know too much to be good. I know myself. I know myself to be vengeful, greedy, secretive and sly.

Today on the way home, it snows. Big, soft caressing flakes fall onto our skin like cold moths; the air fills with feathers.

The truth, it seems, is not just what you find when you open a door: it is itself a door, which the poet is always on the verge of going through.

Men such as him do not have to clean up the messes they make, but we have to clean up our own messes, and theirs into the bargain.

Every habit he's ever had is still there in his body, lying dormant like flowers in the desert. Given the right conditions, all his old addictions would burst into full and luxuriant bloom.

I felt white, drained of blood, cared for, purified. Peaceful.

No matter how much you've been warned, Death always comes without knocking. Why now? is the cry. Why so soon? It's the cry of a child being called home at dusk.

Alone among the animals, we suffer from the future perfect tense.

How shrunk, how dwindled, in our times
Creation's mighty seed -
For Man has broke the Fellowship
With murder, lust, and greed.

Laughter may instruct but it may also conceal, defending the joker against anger and retaliation: a game is only a game.

There's an epigram tacked to my office bulletin board, pinched from a magazine -- Wanting to meet an author because you like his work is like wanting to meet a duck because you like p té.

Longed for him. Got him. Shit.

What should I take? Something that will not be missed. In the wood at midnight, a magic flower.

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

Why is it that night falls, instead of rising, like the dawn? Yet if you look east, at sunset, you can see night rising, not falling; darkness lifting into the sky, up from the horizon.

What breaks in daybreak? Is it the night? Is it the sun, cracked in two by the horizon like an egg, spilling out light?

What you don't know won't hurt you. A dubious maxim: sometimes what you don't know can hurt you very much.

We understand more than we know.

I would like to be the air that inhabits you for a moment only. I would like to be that unnoticed and that necessary.

So that made me happy but the part that really made me happy was that you wanted me to be happy. That's what Thank you means.

In my dreams of this city I am always lost.

People change, though, especially after they are dead.

The proper study of Mankind is Everything.

Pink is supposed to weaken your enemies, make them go soft on you, which must be why it's used for baby girls. It's a wonder the military hasn't got on to this.

Religious people of any serious kind made her nervous: they were like men in raincoats who might or might not be flashers.

The truth is seldom welcome, especially at dinner.

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

I'm with the spirit of Earth-Day-yet-to-come. Nobody can really predict the future, all you can do is look at trends, and that could change at any moment.

I have periods now, like normal girls; I too am among the knowing, I too can sit out volleyball games and go to the nurse's for aspirin and waddle along the halls with a pad like a flattened rabbit tail wadded between my legs, sopping with liver-colored blood.

Just remember this, when the scream at last has ended and you've turned on the lights: by the rules of the game, I must always lie.

There would be no Sherlock Holmes if it were not for serial publication.

What fabrications they are, mothers. Scarecrows, wax dolls for us to stick pins into, crude diagrams. We deny them an existence of their own, we make them up to suit ourselves -- our own hungers, our own wishes, our own deficiencies.

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

How easy it is to invent a humanity, for anyone at all.

Stupidity is the same as evil if you judge by the results.

A fist is more than the sum of its fingers.

It must have been an endless breathing in: between the wish to know and the wish to praise there was no seam.

I am certain that a Sewing Machine would relieve as much human suffering as a hundred Lunatic Asylums, and possibly a good deal more.

If there were no emptiness, there would be no life.

You can think clearly only with your clothes on.

Our heaven is their hell, said God. I like a balanced universe.

What am I living for and what am I dying for are the same question.

Perfection exacts a price, but it's the imperfect who pay it.

I am afraid of falling into hopeless despair, over my wasted life, and I am still not sure how it happened.

You are as innocent as a bathtub
full of bulleta.

The witch is absolutely necessary.

Maybe none of this is about control...maybe it's about who can do what to whom and be forgiven for it.

You need to give money when someone gives you a knife. So the bad luck won't cut you. I wouldn't like it for you to be cut by the bad luck, Jimmy.

Neither of us says the word love, not once. It would be tempting fate; it would be romance, bad luck.

I grew up amongst biologists.

I stand holding the apple in both hands. It feels precious, like a heavy treasure. I lift it up and smell it. It has such an odour of outdoors on it I want to cry.

For me the experience of writing is really an experience of losing control.... I think it's very much like dreaming or like surfing. You go out there and wait for a wave, and when it comes it takes you somewhere and you don't know where it'll go.

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.

Every Canadian has a complicated relationship with the United States, whereas Americans think of Canada as the place where the weather comes from.

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

A home filled with nothing but yourself. It's heavy, that lightness. It's crushing, that emptiness.

Art is long and life is brief and mortality looms.

And the evening was so beautiful, that it made a pain in my heart, as when you cannot tell wether you are happy or sad; and I thought that if I could have a wish, it would be that nothing would ever change, and we would stay that way forever.

Does feminist mean large unpleasant person who'll shout at you or someone who believes women are human beings. To me it's the latter, so I sign up.

All fathers are invisible in daytime; daytime is ruled by mothers and fathers come out at night. Darkness brings home fathers, with their real, unspeakable power. There is more to fathers than meets the eye.

My family was big on sharing. I guess it was just the way I was brought up. Or maybe, I read those fairy tales in which one good turn elicits another. But in writing, yes, some older writers were kind to me when I was young; although some others were not.