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


Margaret Atwood

  Email Quote to Friends   Link to Quote   Create Short URL  Publish Text About This Quote   Share on Facebook, Twitter, and more
  See Recommended Quotes For You

Related

Animals are property. There are laws that supposedly protect animal interests
in being treated ...
GARY L. FRANCIONE
What about the animals?” Ty asked. “Who the hell needs this many dogs anyway?”
“What’...
ABIGAIL ROUX
I opened myself to your silences.
MARGARET ATWOOD
There is increasing social concern about our use of nonhumans for experiments, food, clothing and en...
GARY L. FRANCIONE
I feel bad about it. I love animals. I have no tolerance for animals that people just discard animal...
DARRYL ADAMS
There is nothing intentional about this. She could just not say no. On the other hand, she could not...
KYLE HELD
We do not think clearly about our moral obligations to animals.
GARY L. FRANCIONE
I must be in love with this woman, Sumire realized with a start. No
mistake about it. Ice is co...
HARUKI MURAKAMI
So do all animals react that way to you? I know you said rats steer clear."
"Most do. They see ...
KELLEY ARMSTRONG
I don't care when people honk at me, but when geese do, I get out of the way!
ANIMALS
You know the oxygen masks on airplanes? I don't think there's really any oxygen. I think they're ju...
ANIMALS
Before you criticize someone, walk a mile in their shoes. That way, you'll be a mile from them, and ...
ANIMALS
I always try to cheer myself up by singing when I get sad. Most of the time, it turns out that my v...
ANIMALS
I'm not bored of being quarantined, last night I even struck up a conversation with a spider. Turns ...
ANIMALS
Dogs come when they're called; cats take a message and get back to you later.
ANIMALS
There the wild animals wandered and fed as though they were in a pasture that stretched much farther...
LAURA INGALLS WILDER
I think of animals more as spirits that come and go. They enter our lives at a particular time and t...
JON KATZ
I don't think you realize who you're dealing with."

The man clicked his tongue, "If you w...
SARAH J. MAAS
Do you have a pet?'
Eugenia shook her head. 'I don't know very much about animals.'
'There...
ELOISA JAMES
After I recovered from 'Lioness', I wanted to write something about animals because I really...
TAMORA PIERCE
The only way we could fund a program as big as this one is if we end up, at the end of the year, wit...
IRENE TOWELL
Murphy's face went through several mutations as he spoke, as if small animals were scurrying about j...
PETE HAUTMAN
Hermes smiled. "I knew a boy once ... oh, younger than you by far. A mere baby, really."
Her...
RICK RIORDAN
who did I think we were.
who did I think
I could make you.

this is the oldest m...
MARTY MCCONNELL EMILY KAGAN TRENCHARD
The abortion isn’t what they(conservative pro-life men of 1940s) are thinking
about; they’r...
GRACE PALEY

"There's a perspective there and it's a human being in the
crossroads, in this pinnacle, i...
JARED LETO
... Where did you go?”

“Down below.”

“Ugh,” she said. “I’ve hear...
ANN AGUIRRE
The world is a giant zoo.
The trouble is,
not all of the animals are civilized.
ANTHONY T. HINCKS
And if you have a minute, why don't we go
Talk about it somewhere only we know?
This could...
BIL KEANE
Giraffes are fairytale animals, almost heraldic - as if from the land of fables. They have extremely...
JOANNA LUMLEY
If we were not so single-minded
about keeping our lives moving
and for once could do nothi...
PABLO NERUDA
Elayne could not help herself. Nynaeve wielding her tongue like a needle, Cerandin stubborn as two m...
ROBERT JORDAN
If we did end up in a crisis where things were really tense, this decision about what is coming at y...
HANS KRISTENSEN
We must protect them (animals) and this land. If the animals die, this land dies. If this land dies,...
DIANE VAN DER WESTHUIZEN
Well, look at it another way: why shouldn’t there be cats in a zoo?" I said.

"They’re...
HARUKI MURAKAMI
You've got people who have animals who want to know about (getting their) animals cross-country. Peo...
JANET MILLER
One of the main arguments that I make is that although almost everyone accepts that it is morally wr...
GARY L. FRANCIONE
Here’s something I bet you don’t know:
every time someone writes a story about a dragon CATHERYNNE M. VALENTE
When the sun shines, plants are happy.
When plants grow, animals are happy.
When animals f...
MATSHONA DHLIWAYO
We were tracking this project really early
on, and it really was about the material itself for ...
DAVID GALE
When you write about animals, of course, you are really writing about the people who love and live w...
JON KATZ
I used to see dolphins as cute,
Smart and funny sea animals.
I know now that they're ast...
ANA CLAUDIA ANTUNES
Mankind are animals that makes bargains, no other animal does this.
ADAM SMITH
I don't have a whole lot to say about this one. That was a team that was hungry. . . . Sometimes, th...
RAJA BELL
It wasn't exactly like talking, but it went something like this: Could you give us a ride north, Per...
RICK RIORDAN
I go on Wikipedia and alter pages of animals with fake facts that I've made up about those anima...
KURT BRAUNOHLER
My name is Jasmine Lewis, and this is my story. It’s a cautionary tale about money, sex, and power...
TERESA LO
My Sunday school teachers had turned Bible narrative into children's fables. They talked about Noah ...
DONALD MILLER
People who are 'ready' give off a different vibe than people who aren't. Animals can smell fear; may...
HUGH MACLEOD
You know, sometimes the world seems like a pretty mean place.'

'That's why animals are s...
BILL WATTERSON
The more I thought about it, I didn't know if the children could be in danger or other animals or pe...
LAURA HAMMER
The Road Not Taken

Two roads diverged in a yellow wood,
And sorry I could not travel...
ROBERT FROST
If I hadn't liked Logan before, I would now at how he is handling all of this. he chuckles as we rea...
L.A. FIORE
One of the reasons people and animals share such a close relationship is that people have always lea...
ARI BERK & CAROLYN DUNN
The Seven Commandments:
Whatever goes upon two legs is an enemy.
Whatever goes upon four l...
GEORGE ORWELL
I think there is just a vein of humanity that really loves animals and really loves to read about th...
SARA GRUEN
No, Margaret Atwood writes literature, whereas I write fiction. I'm from the American Midwest, so li...
STELLA ATRIUM
They all went to Bobbi and tried to reason
They told him because of the cold winter,
it w...
ELISE ICTEN
I have come to your group for somewhere to belong,
I promise I shall adapt before too long, ELISE ICTEN
I think it's a very emotional issue because animals can't speak for themselves. These are people who...
ELAINE HICKS
I want to write something
so simply
about love
or about pain
that even
...
MARY OLIVER
We have major concerns about stocking animals for hunting. This practice should be banned.
HEIDI PRESCOTT
Tohru: "Call a doctor, or a vet, or something! Mr. Postman! It's terrible! You see?! They're animals...
NATSUKI TAKAYA
As a general rule, people in this country don't know much about dairy cows. My job is to teach them ...
MIKE REEVES
I like animals, I really do, but some animals are just meant to be eaten.
EMMANUELLE VAUGIER
They had a big problem afterwards with animals that were not identified in any way. They had no way ...
FRANK BRANCHINI
One in All
All in One--
If only this is realized,
No more worry about your not being ...
EDWARD CONZE
Um, thanks,” Jackson told her. “And your name is…?”

“I’m Margaret, Margaret V...
REBECCA MCNUTT
You think Bernadette Maguire killed him?”
“Uh… no. She’s, like I said, she’s old.”<...
DEREK LANDY
They're in a situation that's not really ideal for animals of this type.
JEFF SWANAGAN
But though I might fill the world with dragons I never had the slighest real doubt that heroes ought...
G.K. CHESTERTON
You wanted to live," he says.

"You say that like it's a good thing. A virtue."

STEPHANIE KUEHN
The superiority complex of humans is astonishing. We always speak of other animals as if we were not...
J. "CYLO" G.
You know, there’s no pleasure like the joy of being a sexual woman.

You can take your ...
FIONA THRUST
I'm very passionate about animals.
EMMA CAULFIELD
How well she does everything! She reads not as if reading were the highest human activity, but as if...
BORIS PASTERNAK
Dear Anonymous, I've got a secret
I know you can keep it
because you don't really exist....
KRISTEN HENDERSON
I want to be a veterinarian when I grow up, because I really, really like helping animals and being ...
CAROLYN ANDERSON
I am not mad because I'm a woman... I'm mad because you're an asshole.
MARGARET ATWOOD
Mr. Fogg accordingly tasted the dish, but, despite its spiced sauce, found it far from palatable. He...
JULES VERNE
Lovecraft says he knows about tentacles
but that motherfucker never bedded a girl from
We...
DAVE MATTHES
Wow," she breathed.
"I know, right? Hung like a horse."
"If you're really nice-and you liv...
J.R. WARD
Stop thinking, and end your problems.
What difference between yes and no?
What difference ...
LAO TZU
Something about you caught me by surprise
Though I always knew you’d be my demise.
R.S. GREY
And when life's sweet fable ends,
Soul and body part like friends;
No quarrels, murmurs, no ...
RICHARD CRASHAW
this is the 21st century and we need to redefine r/evolution. this planet needs a people’s r/evolu...
ASSATA SHAKUR
My first songs were about animals and shoes. I wrote one song about PF Flyers, and one to my fish.
KATE MICUCCI
Why can't you place a blessing like that on us?" I asked.

"It only works on wild animals....
RICK RIORDAN
SATAN'S LETTER

This is a strange place, and extraordinary place, and interesting. There i...
MARK TWAIN
The assumption that animals are without rights and the illusion that our treatment of them has no mo...
ARTHUR SCHOPENHAUER
Uncle Yuichi: Something's moving up there? Hmm... I don't see anything. It was probably a satelite. ...
INIO ASANO
We should not be surprised that more and more people feel comfortable about consuming animal product...
GARY L. FRANCIONE
Animals add beauty to nature but,we humans treat them as if we are animals by nature.
SRISHTI JAIN
I don't do farm animals.
Can't stand hay in your leathers?
Or wool in my teeth.
J.R. WARD
For a while I was looking forward to having to get another job, ... I had this fantasy about applyin...
FIONA APPLE
Our economic order is tightly woven around the exploitation of animals, and while it may seem easy t...
BOB TORRES
I was always a freak about nature when it came to animals.
ASHLEY PARKS
I really loved animals when I was little - my friend and I had an imaginary vet's office; we wou...
HANNAH MURRAY
Alexander the Great slept with
'The Iliad' beneath his pillow.
Though I’ve never led a...
ROMAN PAYNE
WINTER'S GHOST:
Autumn moon
incautious in the dark river
Winter’s ghost walks
...
TAMARA RENDELL

More Margaret Atwood

Heroes need monsters to establish their heroic credentials. You need something scary to overcome.
MARGARET ATWOOD
Optimism means better than reality; pessimism means worse than reality. I'm a realist.
MARGARET ATWOOD
Science and fiction both begin with similar questions: What if? Why? How does it all work? But they ...
MARGARET ATWOOD
A divorce is like an amputation: you survive it, but there's less of you.
MARGARET ATWOOD
If the national mental illness of the United States is megalomania, that of Canada is paranoid schiz...
MARGARET ATWOOD
The Eskimos had fifty-two names for snow because it was important to them: there ought to be as many...
MARGARET ATWOOD
An eye for an eye only leads to more blindness.
MARGARET ATWOOD
If I waited for perfection... I would never write a word.
MARGARET ATWOOD
Sooner or later, I hate to break it to you, you're gonna die, so how do you fill in the space be...
MARGARET ATWOOD
I was once a graduate student in Victorian literature, and I believe as the Victorian novelists did,...
MARGARET ATWOOD
When things are really dismal, you can laugh, or you can cave in completely.
MARGARET ATWOOD
You're never going to kill storytelling, because it's built into the human plan. We come wit...
MARGARET ATWOOD
Reading and writing, like everything else, improve with practice. And, of course, if there are no yo...
MARGARET ATWOOD
Every utopia - let's just stick with the literary ones - faces the same problem: What do you do ...
MARGARET ATWOOD
Don't let the bastards grind you down.
MARGARET ATWOOD
When you can't tell the difference between your own pleasure and your pain then you're an addict.
MARGARET ATWOOD
The beginning of Canadian cultural nationalism was not 'Am I really that oppressed?' but ...
MARGARET ATWOOD
Once upon a time you could wander around one country, then the next and then maybe you'd go to Engla...
MARGARET ATWOOD
They've removed anything you can tie a rope to.
MARGARET ATWOOD
Their mothers had finally caught up to them and been proven right. There were consequences after all...
MARGARET ATWOOD
No one knows what cuases an outer landscape to become an inner one.
MARGARET ATWOOD
The Eskimos had 52 names for snow because it was important to them; there ought to be as many for ...
MARGARET ATWOOD
Why is it that night falls, instead of rising, like the dawn? Yet if you look east, at sunset, you c...
MARGARET ATWOOD
Happiness is a garden walled with glass: there's no way in or out. In Paradise there are no stories,...
MARGARET ATWOOD
Touch comes before sight, before speech. It is the first language and the last, and it always tells ...
MARGARET ATWOOD
Stupidity is the same as evil if you judge by the results.
MARGARET ATWOOD
Longed for him. Got him. Shit.
MARGARET ATWOOD
If you knew what was going to happen, if you knew everything that was going to happen next—if you ...
MARGARET ATWOOD
But who can remember pain, once it’s over? All that remains of it is a shadow, not in the mind eve...
MARGARET ATWOOD
I would like to be the air that inhabits you for a moment only. I would like to be that unnoticed an...
MARGARET ATWOOD
I wonder which is preferable, to walk around all your life swollen up with your own secrets until yo...
MARGARET ATWOOD
If i thought this would never happen again I would die.
But this is wrong, nobody dies from lac...
MARGARET ATWOOD
Hatred would have been easier. With hatred, I would have known what to do. Hatred is clear, metallic...
MARGARET ATWOOD
That was when they suspended the Constitution. They said it would be temporary. There wasn't even an...
MARGARET ATWOOD
There's an epigram tacked to my office bulletin board, pinched from a magazine -- "Wanting to meet a...
MARGARET ATWOOD
We were the people who were not in the papers. We lived in the blank white spaces at the edges of pr...
MARGARET ATWOOD
But remember that forgiveness too is a power. To beg for it is a power, and to withhold or bestow it...
MARGARET ATWOOD
Water does not resist. Water flows. When you plunge your hand into it, all you feel is a caress. Wat...
MARGARET ATWOOD
Popular art is the dream of society; it does not examine itself.
MARGARET ATWOOD
The Eskimos had 52 names for snow because it was important to them; there ought to be as many for lo...
MARGARET ATWOOD
A word after a word after a word is power.
MARGARET ATWOOD
I've never understood why people consider youth a time of freedom and joy. It's probably because the...
MARGARET ATWOOD
She even had a kind of special position among men: she was an exception, she fitted none of the cate...
MARGARET ATWOOD
Men are not to be told anything they might find too painful; the secret depths of human nature, the ...
MARGARET ATWOOD
The basic Female body comes with the following accessories: garter belt, panty-girdle, crinoline, ca...
MARGARET ATWOOD
Never pray for justice, because you might get some.
MARGARET ATWOOD
If I were going to convert to any religion I would probably choose Catholicism because it at least h...
MARGARET ATWOOD
I hope that people will finally come to realize that there is only one 'race' - the human race - and...
MARGARET ATWOOD
A divorce is like an amputation: you survive it, but there's less of you
MARGARET ATWOOD
Another belief of mine: that everyone else my age is an adult, whereas I am merely in disguise.
MARGARET ATWOOD
War is what happens when language fails.
MARGARET ATWOOD
Miranda nods, because she knows that to be true: noble people don't do things for the money, they si...
MARGARET ATWOOD
Men are afraid that women will laugh at them. Women are afraid that men will kill them.
MARGARET ATWOOD
This is how the girl who couldn't speak and the man who couldn't see fell in love.
MARGARET ATWOOD
I'm a strict, strict agnostic. It's very different from a casual, 'I don't know.'...
MARGARET ATWOOD
Little girls are cute and small only to adults. To one another they are not cute. They are life-size...
MARGARET ATWOOD
Another belief of mine; that everyone else my age is an adult, whereas I am merely in disguise.
MARGARET ATWOOD
A voice is a human gift; it should be cherished and used, to utter fully human speech as possible. P...
MARGARET ATWOOD
I hate to tell you this, but you will never actually go to a galaxy far, far away and encounter Dart...
MARGARET ATWOOD
Religions in general have to rediscover their roots. In Hinduism and the Koran, animals are describe...
MARGARET ATWOOD
The answers you get from literature depend on the questions you pose.
MARGARET ATWOOD
In the spring, at the end of the day, you should smell like dirt.
MARGARET ATWOOD
I grew up with the biologists. I know how they think.
MARGARET ATWOOD
Before the Civil War, Canada was at the top of the underground railroad. If you made it into Canada,...
MARGARET ATWOOD
Sometimes there would be couples, arm in arm—laughing, happy, amorous. Victims of an enormous frau...
MARGARET ATWOOD
I've never bought into any sort of hard and fast, this-box/that-box characterization. People are...
MARGARET ATWOOD
Was this a betrayal, or was it an act of courage? Perhaps both. Neither one involves forethought: su...
MARGARET ATWOOD
The genesis of a poem for me is usually a cluster of words. The only good metaphor I can think of is...
MARGARET ATWOOD
Time is compressed like the fist I close on my knee... I hold inside it the clues and solutions and ...
MARGARET ATWOOD
They spent the first three years of school getting you to pretend stuff and then the rest of it mark...
MARGARET ATWOOD
Beginnings are sudden, but also insidious. They creep up on you sideways, they keep to the shadows, ...
MARGARET ATWOOD
If you're put on a pedestal, you're supposed to behave yourself like a pedestal type of pers...
MARGARET ATWOOD
If you feel that there's the author and then the character, then the book is not working. People...
MARGARET ATWOOD
I don't think of poetry as a 'rational' activity but as an aural one. My poems usually b...
MARGARET ATWOOD
Every aspect of human technology has a dark side, including the bow and arrow.
MARGARET ATWOOD
Vampires get the joy of flying around and living forever, werewolves get the joy of animal spirits. ...
MARGARET ATWOOD
Some people mistakenly think nature is very nice and benevolent and never betrays.
MARGARET ATWOOD
You will always have partial points of view, and you'll always have the story behind the story t...
MARGARET ATWOOD
Canada was built on dead beavers.
MARGARET ATWOOD
How shrunk, how dwindled, in our times
Creation's mighty seed -
For Man has broke the Fell...
MARGARET ATWOOD
She imagines him imagining her. This is her salvation.
In spirit she walks the city, traces its...
MARGARET ATWOOD
You can only be jealous of someone who has something you think you ought to have yourself.
MARGARET ATWOOD
Can I be blamed for wanting a real body, to put my arms around? Without it I too am disembodied. I c...
MARGARET ATWOOD
Gardening is not a rational act.
MARGARET ATWOOD
Second-hand American was spreading over him in patches, like mange or lichen. He was infested, garbl...
MARGARET ATWOOD
وقتی دردپایان می یابد،دیگر در یاد چه کسی می ماند؟ تنها �...
MARGARET ATWOOD
We still think of a powerful man as a born leader and a powerful woman as an anomaly.
MARGARET ATWOOD
If social stability goes pear-shaped, you have a choice between anarchy and dictatorship. Most peopl...
MARGARET ATWOOD
When you're young, you think everything you do is disposable. You move from now to now, crumpling ti...
MARGARET ATWOOD
We understand more than we know.
MARGARET ATWOOD
Nolite te bastardes carborundorum. Don't let the bastards grind you down.
MARGARET ATWOOD
You can examine the whole 19th century from the point of view of who would have maxed out their cred...
MARGARET ATWOOD
You hear doom and gloom about the Internet ruining young people's command of English - that'...
MARGARET ATWOOD
If I pick up a book with spaceships on the cover, I want spaceships. If I see one with dragons, I wa...
MARGARET ATWOOD
Girl Without Hands

Walking through the ruins
on your way to work
that do not lo...
MARGARET ATWOOD
'1984' is not a wonder tale. Not only could it happen, but it has happened, but under differ...
MARGARET ATWOOD
The thing about delirium is you think it's great, but it actually isn't.
MARGARET ATWOOD
We have to rethink our whole energy approach, which is hard to do because we're so dependent on ...
MARGARET ATWOOD
I was warped early by Ray Bradbury and Edgar Allan Poe. I was very fond of Franz Kafka.
MARGARET ATWOOD
A divorce is like an amputation; you survive, but there's less of you.
MARGARET ATWOOD
The truly fearless think of themselves as normal.
MARGARET ATWOOD
Or perhaps she's just softening me up: she's a Baptist, she'd like me to find Jesus, or vice versa, ...
MARGARET ATWOOD
Another belief of mine: that everyone else my age is an adult, whereas I am merely in disguise.
MARGARET ATWOOD
I don't want to see anyone. I lie in the bedroom with the curtains drawn and nothingness washing ove...
MARGARET ATWOOD
When we think of the past it's the beautiful things we pick out. We want to believe it was all like ...
MARGARET ATWOOD
My brother and I were both good at science, and we were both good at English literature. Either one ...
MARGARET ATWOOD
The myth that everyone once read great literature is just a myth.
MARGARET ATWOOD
I was born in the Ottawa General Hospital right after the Gray Cup Football Game in 1939. Six months...
MARGARET ATWOOD
If you're waiting for the perfect moment, you'll never write a thing because it will never a...
MARGARET ATWOOD
Debt is part of the human condition. Civilization is based on exchanges - on gifts, trades, loans - ...
MARGARET ATWOOD
I particularly like Twitter, because it's short and can be very funny and informative. It's ...
MARGARET ATWOOD
I do have a life,' says Charis, blinking wet eyes.

'You have a rich inner life,' says Ton...
MARGARET ATWOOD
Night falls. Or has fallen. Why is it that night falls, instead of rising, like the dawn?
MARGARET ATWOOD
No mother is ever, completely, a child's idea of what a mother should be, and I suppose it works the...
MARGARET ATWOOD
We were the people who were not in the papers. We lived in the blank white spaces at the edges of pr...
MARGARET ATWOOD
But despite everything, we didn't do badly by one another, we did as well as most. I wish she were h...
MARGARET ATWOOD
But people will do anything rather than admit that their lives have no meaning. No use, that is. No ...
MARGARET ATWOOD
Better never means better for everyone... It always means worse, for some.
MARGARET ATWOOD
Our problem right now is that we're so specialized that if the lights go out, there are a huge n...
MARGARET ATWOOD
There's always something to occupy the inquiring mind.
MARGARET ATWOOD
Social media is called social media for a reason. It lends itself to sharing rather than horn-tootin...
MARGARET ATWOOD
Love blurs your vision; but after it recedes, you can see more clearly than ever. It's like the tide...
MARGARET ATWOOD
Romance takes place in the middle distance. Romance is looking in at yourself through a window cloud...
MARGARET ATWOOD
Modesty is invisibility...Never forget it. To be seen—to be seen—is to be...penetrated. W...
MARGARET ATWOOD
In theory I can do almost anything; certainly I have been told how. In practice I do as little as po...
MARGARET ATWOOD
Male fantasies, male fantasies, is everything run by male fantasies? Up on a pedestal or down on you...
MARGARET ATWOOD
Sauve qui peut. To survive
we’d all turn thief

and rascal, or so says the fox,
MARGARET ATWOOD
Science fiction is filled with Martians and space travel to other planets, and things like that.
MARGARET ATWOOD
But how can you have a sense of wonder if you’re prepared for everything?
MARGARET ATWOOD
Our generation in the west was lucky: we had readymade gateways. We had books, paper, teachers, scho...
MARGARET ATWOOD
A home filled with nothing but yourself. It's heavy, that lightness. It's crushing, that emptiness.
MARGARET ATWOOD
The problem with meditating is I generally go to sleep, and that's because I'm doing it wron...
MARGARET ATWOOD
She finds this objectivity of hers, this clarity, almost more depressing than she can bear, not beca...
MARGARET ATWOOD
Fatigue is here, in my body, in my legs and eyes. That is what gets you in the end. Faith is only a ...
MARGARET ATWOOD
Many believed what they were told: that the welfare of the entire kingdom depended on their selfless...
MARGARET ATWOOD
She did understand, or at least she understood that she was supposed to understand. She understood, ...
MARGARET ATWOOD
When I am writing fiction, I believe I am much better organized, more methodical - one has to be whe...
MARGARET ATWOOD
We do like to have such good opinions of our own motives when we're about to do something harmful, t...
MARGARET ATWOOD
Love blurs your vision; but after it recedes, you can see more clearly than ever. It's like the tide...
MARGARET ATWOOD
I guess that's how they were able to do it, in the way they did, all at once, without anyone knowing...
MARGARET ATWOOD
Night falls. Or has fallen. Why is it that night falls, instead of rising, like the dawn? Yet if you...
MARGARET ATWOOD
What fabrications they are, mothers. Scarecrows, wax dolls for us to stick pins into, crude diagrams...
MARGARET ATWOOD
There is something powerful in the whispering of obscenities, about those in power. There's somethin...
MARGARET ATWOOD
I believe that everyone else my age is an adult whereas I am merely in disguise.
MARGARET ATWOOD
How could I have been so ignorant? she thinks. So stupid, so unseeing, so given over to carelessness...
MARGARET ATWOOD
The society in 'The Handmaid's Tale' is a throwback to the early Puritans whom I studied...
MARGARET ATWOOD
You could tell 'The Handmaid's Tale' from a male point of view. People have mistakenly f...
MARGARET ATWOOD
Glenn used to say the reason you can't really imagine yourself being dead was that as soon as you sa...
MARGARET ATWOOD
You want the truth, of course. You want me to put two and two together. But two and two doesn’t ne...
MARGARET ATWOOD
But in the end, back she comes. There's no use resisting. She goes to him for amnesia, for oblivion....
MARGARET ATWOOD
When you're unhinged, things make their way out of you that should be kept inside, and other things ...
MARGARET ATWOOD
Why is it we want so badly to memorialize ourselves? Even while we're still alive. We wish to assert...
MARGARET ATWOOD
It wasn't so easy though, ending the war. A war is a huge fire; the ashes from it drift far, and set...
MARGARET ATWOOD
The young habitually mistake lust for love, they're infested with idealism of all kinds.
MARGARET ATWOOD
I'm not senile," I snapped. "If I burn the house down it will be on purpose.
MARGARET ATWOOD
She knows herself to be at the mercy of events, and she knows by now that events have no mercy.
MARGARET ATWOOD
Why does the mind do such things? Turn on us, rend us, dig the claws in. If you get hungry enough, t...
MARGARET ATWOOD
Why is it we want so badly to memorialize ourselves? Even while we're still alive. We wish to assert...
MARGARET ATWOOD
Home is where the heart is, I thought now, gathering myself together in Betty's Luncheonette. I had ...
MARGARET ATWOOD
Should is a futile word. It's about what didn't happen. It belongs in a parallel universe. It...
MARGARET ATWOOD
What is it the I'll want from you? Not love: that would be too much to ask. Not forgiveness, which i...
MARGARET ATWOOD
There were a lot of gods. Gods always come in handy, they justify almost anything.
MARGARET ATWOOD
Women have curious ways of hurting someone else. They hurt themselves instead; or else they do it so...
MARGARET ATWOOD
Farewells can be shattering, but returns are surely worse. Solid flesh can never live up to the brig...
MARGARET ATWOOD
The only way you can write the truth is to assume that what you set down will never be read. Not by ...
MARGARET ATWOOD
There would be no Sherlock Holmes if it were not for serial publication.
MARGARET ATWOOD
The best way of keeping a secret is to pretend there isn't one.
MARGARET ATWOOD
Anybody who writes a book is an optimist. First of all, they think they're going to finish it. Secon...
MARGARET ATWOOD
Ignoring isn’t the same as ignorance, you have to work at it.
MARGARET ATWOOD
We thought we had such problems. How were we to know we were happy?
MARGARET ATWOOD
The moment of betrayal is the worst, the moment when you know beyond any doubt that you've been betr...
MARGARET ATWOOD
Put yourself in a different room, that's what the mind is for.
MARGARET ATWOOD
The answers you get from literature depend on the questions you pose
MARGARET ATWOOD
I think of this as a democratizing device.
MARGARET ATWOOD
I'm curious. If someone says 'Don't open that door', I'm right there!
MARGARET ATWOOD
The main thing is to keep yourself awake [on writing]
MARGARET ATWOOD
For years I wanted to be older, and now I am.
MARGARET ATWOOD
He's very in depth, on the dark side. He's interested in structure and how things work. After readin...
MARGARET ATWOOD
The Orange prize has been pivotal in the careers of many women writers - it's given them that extra ...
MARGARET ATWOOD
Just think of it as a very, very long pen.
MARGARET ATWOOD
Because I am a mother, I am capable of being shocked; as I never was when I was not one
MARGARET ATWOOD
This above all, to refuse to be a victim.
MARGARET ATWOOD
We thought we were running away from the grownups, and now we are the grownups.
MARGARET ATWOOD
A ratio of failures is built into the process of writing. The wastebasket has evolved for a reason.
MARGARET ATWOOD
Does feminist mean large unpleasant person who'll shout at you or someone who believes women are hum...
MARGARET ATWOOD
They all disowned their parents long ago, the way you are supposed to
MARGARET ATWOOD
You need a certain amount of nerve to be a writer.
MARGARET ATWOOD
Foreignness is all around. Only in the heart of the heart of the country, namely the heart of the Un...
MARGARET ATWOOD
Any death is stupid from the viewpoint of whoever is undergoing it, Adam One used to say, because no...
MARGARET ATWOOD
Also I could hear Amanda’s voice: Why are you being so weak? Love’s never a fair trade. So Jimmy...
MARGARET ATWOOD
I lie on the floor, washed by nothing and hanging on. I cry at night. I am afraid of hearing voices,...
MARGARET ATWOOD
Life is warped. I'm just in sync.
MARGARET ATWOOD
I thought everyone would be familiar with this figure: if I'd studied a thing in school I assumed it...
MARGARET ATWOOD
We were revisionists; what we revised was ourselves.
MARGARET ATWOOD
My parents are like younger, urchinlike brothers and sisters whose faces are dirty and who blurt out...
MARGARET ATWOOD
Now we come to forgiveness. Don't worry about forgiving me right now. There are more important thing...
MARGARET ATWOOD
Our heaven is their hell, said God. I like a balanced universe.
MARGARET ATWOOD
Human tool-makers always make tools that will help us get what we want, and what we want hasn't chan...
MARGARET ATWOOD
She doesn't think it's a good idea to know the future, because you can hardly ever change it, so why...
MARGARET ATWOOD
The possibility of injury or death was a strong attraction: as the online world became more and more...
MARGARET ATWOOD