Margaret Atwood quotes - page 7

You aren't sick & unhappy only alive & stuck with it. (Margaret Atwood)
By telling you anything at all I'm at least believing in you, I believe you're there, I believe you into being. View quote
Margaret Atwood
Kill what you can't save what you can't eat throw out what you can't throw out bury What you can't bury give away what you can't give away you must carry with you, it is always heavier than you thought. View quote
Margaret Atwood
... we must be a beacon of hope, because if you tell people there's nothing they can do, they will do worse than nothing. View quote
Margaret Atwood
There's blood, a taste I remember. It tastes of orange popsicles, penny gumballs, red licorice, gnawed hair, dirty ice. View quote
Margaret Atwood
There is no fool like an educated fool. View quote
Margaret Atwood
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. View quote
Margaret Atwood
Everyone thinks writers must know more about the inside of the human head, but that's wrong. They know less, that's why they write. Trying to find out what everyone else takes for granted. View quote
Margaret Atwood
It's a lifelong failing: she has never been prepared. But how can you have a sense of wonder if you're prepared for everything? Prepared for the sunset. Prepared for the moonrise. Prepared for the ice storm. What a flat existence that would be. View quote
Margaret Atwood
expectation isn't the same as desire. View quote
Margaret Atwood
Maybe I don't really want to know what's going on. Maybe I'd rather not know. Maybe I couldn't bear to know. The Fall was a fall from innocence to knowledge. (Margaret Atwood)
We shouldn't have been so scornful; we should have had compassion. But compassion takes work, and we were young. View quote
Margaret Atwood
Like the trains, she's never on time and always departing. View quote
Margaret Atwood
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. View quote
Margaret Atwood
I walk away from him. It's enormously pleasing to me, this walking away. It's like being able to make people appear and vanish, at will. View quote
Margaret Atwood
Why are we designed to see the world as supremely beautiful just as we're about to be snuffed? Do rabbits feel the same as the fox teeth bite down on their necks? Is it mercy? View quote
Margaret Atwood
He's just a contact of hers, which is not the same as a friend. While she was in the hospital she decided that most of her friends were really just contacts. View quote
Margaret Atwood
She must transform his hands so they will be willing to twist the rope around throats that have been singled out as hers was, throats other than hers. She must marry the hangman or no one, but that is not so bad. Who else is there to marry? View quote
Margaret Atwood
Confess: it's my profession that alarms you. This is why few people ask me to dinner, though Lord knows I don't go out of my way to be scary. View quote
Margaret Atwood
In the interests of research I have walked on many battlefields that once were liquid with pulped men's bodies and spangled with exploded shells and splayed bone. All of them have been green again by the time I got there. Each has inspired a few good quotes in its day. Sad marble angels brood like hens over the grassy nests where nothing hatches. View quote
Margaret Atwood
I'm just as human as you. But it's no use asking me for a final statement. As I say, I deal in tactics. Also statistics: for every year of peace there have been four hundred years of war. (Margaret Atwood)
The one good thing to be said about announcing yourself as a writer in the colonial Canadian fifties is that nobody told me I couldn't do it because I was a girl. They simply found the entire proposition ridiculous. Writers were dead and English, or else extremely elderly and American; they were not sixteen years old and Canadian. It would have been worse if I'd been a boy, though. Never mind the fact that all the really stirring poems I'd read at that time had been about slaughter, mayhem, sex and death - poetry was thought of as existing in the pastel female realm, along with embroidery and flower arranging. If I'd been male I would probably have had to roll around in the mud, in some boring skirmish over whether or not I was a sissy. View quote
Margaret Atwood
When you hear me singing you get the rifle down and the flashlight, aiming for my brain, but you always miss and when you set out the poison I piss on it to warn the others. View quote
Margaret Atwood
My friends, who are both women, tell me their stories, which cannot be believed and which are true. They are horror stories and they have not happened to me, they have not yet happened to me, they have happened to me but we are detached, we watch our unbelief with horror. View quote
Margaret Atwood
Everybody knew. Nobody admitted to knowing. If other people began to discuss it, you tuned them out, because what they were saying was both so obvious and so unthinkable. We are using up the Earth. It is almost gone. View quote
Margaret Atwood