Margaret Atwood quotes - page 12

Margaret Atwood is a Canadian novelist, poet, and literary critic, widely recognized for her influential works in contemporary literature. Her novel "The Handmaid's Tale" has become a global classic and inspired many adaptations. She continues to inspire readers worldwide with her thought-provoking exploration of dystopian themes and feminist issues. Here are 547 of her quotes:

I will pass over my flirtation with journalism as a way of making a living, an idea I dropped when I discovered that in the fifties - unlike now - female journalists always ended up writing the obituaries and the ladies' page. But how was I to make a living? There was not a roaring market in poetry, there, then. I thought of running away and being a waitress, which I later tried, but got very tired and thin; there's nothing like clearing away other people's mushed-up dinners to make you lose your appetite.

Margaret Atwood

We tend to think of Freud as a great innovator, but the truth is that he himself rested, like a ship on an iceberg, on a huge body of theory and knowledge which had accumulated before his time. Even the famous Unconscious had made its appearance at least seven decades earlier. As for such supposedly modern phenomena as multiple personalities, the vogue for them began in the first half of the nineteenth century; and the first case in which the perpetrator of a murder pleaded amnesia, and got off, was in the eighteen eighties.

Margaret Atwood

She has been condemned to death by hanging. A man may escape this death by becoming the hangman, a woman by marrying the hangman. But at the present time there is no hangman; thus there is no escape. There is only a death, indefinitely postponed. This is not fantasy, it is history.

Margaret Atwood

What Elizabethan playwrights learned from the Greek classics was not theories of insanity, but dramatic practice - that is, madness is a dandy theatrical element. It focuses the audience's attention and increases suspense, since you never know what a mad person may get up to next; and Shakespeare himself makes use of it in many forms. In King Lear, there's a scene in which one man pretending to be mad, another who has really gone mad, and a third who has probably always been a little addled, are brought together for purposes of comparison, irony, pathos, and tour de force acting. In Hamlet, there are two variations - Hamlet himself, who assumes madness, and Ophelia, who really does go winsomely bonkers. In MacBeth, it's Lady MacBeth who snaps.

Margaret Atwood

I plunged in, and set up a Twitter account. My first problem was that there were already two Margaret Atwoods on Twitter, one of them with my picture. This grew; I gave commands; then all other Margaret Atwoods stopped together. I like to think they were sent to a nunnery, but in any case they disappeared. The Twitterpolice had got them. I felt a bit guilty.

Margaret Atwood

Adam named the living animals, MaddAddam names the dead ones.

Margaret Atwood

That old standby of melodrama, the rich uncle shoved into the bin so the greedy relatives could get their hands on his estate, had a sound basis in fact. The Victorians cleaned up the straw and the chains of the old Bedlam-like institutions of the eighteenth century, but they didn't always clean up the practices. Patients were drugged, starved, drained of vast quantities of blood, beaten up, swung from ropes, immersed in cold water and whirled around in the air upside-down, all in the belief that it would improve their mental states. Ask yourself whether this is likely to have been true.

Margaret Atwood

He had that faint sick look in his eyes, as if he wanted to give her something, charity for instance.

Margaret Atwood

As for my birth month, a detail of much interest to poets, obsessed as they are with symbolic systems of all kinds: I was not pleased, during my childhood, to have been born in November, as there wasn't much inspiration for birthday party motifs. February children got hearts, May ones flowers, but what was there for me? A cake surrounded by withered leaves? November was a drab, dark and wet month, lacking even snow; its only noteworthy festival was Remembrance Day. But in adult life I discovered that November was, astrologically speaking, the month of sex, death and regeneration, and that November First was the Day of the Dead. It still wouldn't have been much good for birthday parties, but it was just fine for poetry, which tends to revolve a good deal around sex and death, with regeneration optional.

Margaret Atwood

After I wrote Handmaid's Tale, people came up to me and asked why weren't there any protests. And I said, "You don't understand totalitarianism.” A real totalitarianism doesn't fool around with protests in the streets.

Margaret Atwood

You must cultivate poverty of spirit. Blessed are the meek. She didn't go on to say anything about inheriting the earth.

Margaret Atwood

NOTES: Jean Cololère, a drummer in the colonial troops at Québec, was imprisoned for duelling in 1751. In the cell next to his was Françoise Laurent, who had been sentenced to hang for stealing. Except for letters of pardon, the only way at the time for someone under sentence of death to escape hanging was, for a man, to become a hangman, or, for a woman, to marry one. Françoise persuaded Cololère to apply for the vacant (and undesirable) post of executioner, and also to marry her. -Condensed from the Dictionary of Canadian Biography, Volume III, 1741-1770.

Margaret Atwood

If I roll my eyes and mutter, if I clutch at my heart and scream in horror like a third-rate actress chewing up a mad scene, I do it in private and nobody sees but the bathroom mirror.

Margaret Atwood

In order to avoid her death, her particular death, with wrung neck and swollen tongue, she must marry the hangman.

Margaret Atwood

Furthermore, I believe that in order to have civil and human rights for women there have to be civil and human rights, period ...

Margaret Atwood

. . . 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.

Margaret Atwood

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

Margaret Atwood

We shouldn't be saying 'Save the planet'; we should be saying: 'Save viable conditions in which people can live.' That's what we're dealing with here.

Margaret Atwood

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.

Margaret Atwood

A ratio of failures is built into the process of writing. The wastebasket has evolved for a reason.

Margaret Atwood

For years I wanted to be older, and now I am.

Margaret Atwood

The thing about delirium is you think it's great, but it actually isn't.

Margaret Atwood