Margaret Atwood quote: "I learned about religion the way most children learned about sex, [in the schoolyard]. . . . They terrified me by telling me there was a dead man in the sky watching everything I did and I retaliated by explaining where babies came from. Some of their mothers phoned mine to complain, though I think I was more upset than they were: they didn't believe me but I believed them."

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

Margaret Atwood

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