Canadian novelist, poet, and literary critic (1939- )
Farewells can be shattering, but returns are surely worse. Solid flesh can never live up to the bright shadow cast by its absence.
MARGARET ATWOOD
The Blind Assassin
In an age that persecutes deviants, you can yet lose your life for being the possessor of a dangerous or unacceptable story. Words are powerful, which means that words can also be fatal.
MARGARET ATWOOD
address at the Jaipur Literature Festival, January 21, 2016
I knew what love was supposed to be: obsession with undertones of nausea.
MARGARET ATWOOD
Cat's Eye
Love blurs your vision; but after it recedes, you can see more clearly than ever. It's like the tide going out, revealing whatever's been thrown away and sunk: broken bottles, old gloves, rusting pop cans, nibbled fishbodies, bones.
MARGARET ATWOOD
Cat's Eye
But who can remember pain, once it's over? All that remains of it is a shadow, not in the mind even, in the flesh. Pain marks you, but too deep to see. Out of sight, out of mind.
MARGARET ATWOOD
The Handmaid's Tale
Change, we were sure, was for the better always. We were revisionists; what we revised was ourselves.
MARGARET ATWOOD
The Handmaid's Tale
You can think clearly only with your clothes on.
MARGARET ATWOOD
The Handmaid's Tale
The Human moral keyboard is limited ... there's nothing you can play on it that hasn't been played before. And, my dear Friends, I am sorry to say this, but it has its lower notes.
MARGARET ATWOOD
The Year of the Flood
The Eskimo has fifty-two names for snow because it is important to them; there ought to be as many for love.
MARGARET ATWOOD
Surfacing
As God contains all good things, He must also contain a sense of playfulness -- a gift he has shared with Creatures other than ourselves, as witness the tricks Crows play, and the sportiveness of Squirrels, and the frolicking of Kittens.
MARGARET ATWOOD
The Year of the Flood
Potential has a shelf life.
MARGARET ATWOOD
Cat's Eye
Hunger is a powerful reorganizer of the conscience.
MARGARET ATWOOD
The Year of the Flood
You can only be jealous of someone who has something you think you ought to have yourself.
MARGARET ATWOOD
The Handmaid's Tale
What am I living for and what am I dying for are the same question.
MARGARET ATWOOD
The Year of the Flood
No mother is ever, completely, a child's idea of what a mother should be, and I suppose it works the other way around as well.
MARGARET ATWOOD
The Handmaid's Tale
I would rather dance as a ballerina, though faultily, than as a flawless clown.
MARGARET ATWOOD
Lady Oracle
But remember that forgiveness too is a power. To beg for it is a power, and to withhold or bestow it is a power, perhaps the greatest.
MARGARET ATWOOD
The Handmaid's Tale
No luck was dumb because luck was just another name for miracle.
MARGARET ATWOOD
The Year of the Flood
Confronted by too much emptiness ... the brain invents. Loneliness creates company as thirst creates water. How many sailors have been wrecked in pursuit of islands that were merely a shimmering?
MARGARET ATWOOD
The Year of the Flood
What is needed for really good tyranny is an unquestionable idea or authority. Political disagreement is political disagreement. But political disagreement with a theocracy is heresy.
MARGARET ATWOOD
Moving Targets: Writing with Intent