Margaret Atwood Quotes

“I wonder which is preferable, to walk around all your life swollen up with your own secrets until you burst from the pressure of them, or to have them sucked out of you, every paragraph, every sentence, every word of them, so at the end you're depleted of all that was once as precious to you as hoarded gold, as close to you as your skin - everything that was of the deepest importance to you, everything that made you cringe and wish to conceal, everything that belonged to you alone - and must spend the rest of your days like an empty sack flapping in the wind, an empty sack branded with a bright fluorescent label so that everyone will know what sort of secrets used to be inside you?”
― Margaret Atwood, The Blind Assassin

“Art is long and life is brief and mortality looms.”
― Margaret Atwood, The Robber Bride

“You don't believe the sky is falling until a chunk of it falls on you.”
― Margaret Atwood, The Testaments

“How shrunk, how dwindled, in our times
Creation's mighty seed -
For Man has broke the Fellowship
With murder, lust, and greed.”
― Margaret Atwood

“I made choices, and then, having made them, I had fewer choices.”
― Margaret Atwood, The Testaments

“Now I only need to look
out at them through my sky-blue eyes.
They see their own ill will
staring them in the forehead
and turn tail.

Before, I was not a witch.
But now I am one.”
― Margaret Atwood

“This world is not enough, but it will have to do. You can either hold on or let go.”
― Margaret Atwood, True Stories

“She’s the kind of woman who wants what she doesn’t have and gets what she wants and then despises what she gets.”
― Margaret Atwood, The Robber Bride

“Nobody is any authority of the fucks other people give.”
― Margaret Atwood, The Testaments

“If anyone else told her to lower her voice, Roz would know what to do: scream louder.”
― Margaret Atwood, The Robber Bride

“She had an idea, but it was the wrong idea. It was hardly even an idea, just a white idea balloon with no writing inside it.”
― Margaret Atwood, The Robber Bride

“The thing you don't realize, my dear girl, is that I have been forced by the economic realities to start taking publishing very seriously. For example, it has been brought to my attention that our ability to continue to pay the hordes of people employed by M&S (God knows how many mouths have to be fed) depends directly on the number of copies of your new book [Life Before Man] that we are able to sell between September and Christmas. In past I have been able to treat this whole thing as a fun game. I have never been troubled by the cavalier explanations about lost manuscripts and fuck-ups of various sorts. Now I have learned that this is a deadly serious game. I don't laugh at jokes about the Canadian postal service. I cry. (in a letter to author Margaret Atwood, dated February, 1979)”
― Jack McClelland, Imagining Canadian Literature: The Selected Letters

“I do have a life,' says Charis, blinking wet eyes.

'You have a rich inner life,' says Tony firmly. 'More than most.”
― Margaret Atwood, The Robber Bride

“Was she in any way like us? thinks Tony. Or, to put it the other way around: Are we in any way like her?”
― Margaret Atwood, The Robber Bride

“This above all, to refuse to be a victim. Unless I can do that, I can do nothing. I have to recant, give up the old belief that I am powerless and and because of it nothing I can do will ever hurt anyone. A lie which was always more disastrous than the truth would have been.”
― Margaret Atwood

“Mitch looks in her direction. He can't meet her eyes. It's as if she's semi-invisible, a kind of hovering blur.”
― Margaret Atwood, The Robber Bride

“Roz is telling a story. That's what they will do, increasingly in their lives: tell stories. Tonight their stories will be about Zenia.”
― Margaret Atwood, The Robber Bride

“I sink down into my body as into a swamp, fenland, where only I know the footing. Treacherous ground, my own territory.”
― Margaret Atwood, The Handmaid’s Tale

“I had not been exposed to these kinds of situations, so this event was not trivial to me. Instead it was horrifying. It was also shameful: when a shameful thing is done to you, the shamefulness rubs off on you. You feel dirtied.”
― Margaret Atwood, The Testaments

“There is something powerful in the whispering of obscenities, about those in power. There is something delightful about it, something naughty, secretive, forbidden, thrilling. It's like a spell, of sorts. It deflates them, reduces them to the common denominator where they can be dealt with.”
― Margaret Atwood, The Handmaid's Tale

“There’s a severe and unadorned elegance about her - like a Quaker meeting house - which has its appeal; an appeal which, for him, is aesthetic only. One fords not make love to a minor religious edifice.”
― Margaret Atwood, Alias Grace

“Sono come una stanza dove un tempo accadevano delle cose e adesso non accade nulla, tranne il polline delle gramigne che crescono là, fuori dalla finestra, e che viene soffiato all’interno come polvere sul pavimento.”
― Margaret Atwood, Il racconto dell'Ancella

“A quel tempo aveva i capelli grigi. Non se li tingeva. Perché fingere, diceva, che bisogno ne ho? Non voglio un uomo. A che servono tranne che per quei dieci secondi che corrispondono a mezzo figlio? Un uomo è semplicemente la strategia di una donna per fare altre donne.”
― Margaret Atwood, Il racconto dell'Ancella

“Altri hanno compiuto questo atto di volontà in tempi infelici prima d’ora e hanno sempre avuto ragione, in un modo o nell’altro si sono liberati, la loro infelicità non è durata in eterno, anche se può essere durata tutto il tempo che gli era stato concesso.”
― Margaret Atwood, Il racconto dell'Ancella

“Ma se sei un uomo in un qualsiasi tempo futuro, e ce l’hai fatta sin qui, ti prego ricorda: non sarai mai soggetto alla tentazione del perdono, tu uomo, come lo sarà una donna. È difficile resistere, credimi. Ricorda, però, che anche il perdono è un potere. Chiederlo è un potere, e negarlo o concederlo è un potere, forse il più grande.”
― Margaret Atwood, Il racconto dell'Ancella

“Non ci sono dubbi su chi è il detentore del vero potere.
Ma ci dev’essere qualcosa che lui vuole da me e volere significa avere una debolezza.”
― Margaret Atwood, Il racconto dell'Ancella

“Un topo in un labirinto è libero di andare ovunque, purché resti nel labirinto.”
― Margaret Atwood, Il racconto dell'Ancella

“Ma non ci credo; la speranza sta montando in me, come linfa in un albero, è il sangue che sgorga da una ferita. Abbiamo operato un’apertura.”
― Margaret Atwood, Il racconto dell'Ancella

“Comme Margaret Atwood, je pense que vouloir rencontrer un écrivain parce qu'on aime son livre, c'est comme vouloir rencontrer un canard parce qu'on aime le foie gras.”
― Guillaume Musso, La vie secrète des écrivains

“Cerco di non pensare troppo. Al pari di altre cose, adesso, il pensiero dev’essere razionato. Ci sono pensiero che diventano intollerabili quando ci si sofferma troppo. Il pensare può nuocere, e io sono decisa a resistere.”
― Margaret Atwood