Margaret Atwood quotes - page 14

Time is not a thing that passes ... it's a sea on which you float. (Margaret Atwood)
You can't help what you feel, but you can help how you behave. View quote
Margaret Atwood
The story as told in The Odyssey doesn't hold water. There are too many inconsistencies. View quote
Margaret Atwood
Remember,' she'd tell her staff, 'every customer wants to feel like a princess, and princesses are selfish and overbearing. View quote
Margaret Atwood
I always thought eating was a ridiculous activity anyway. I'd get out of it myself if I could, though you've got to do it to stay alive, they tell me. View quote
Margaret Atwood
I'll make you mine, lovers said in old books. They never said, I'll make you me. View quote
Margaret Atwood
I've learned quite a lot, over the years, by avoiding what I was supposed to be learning. View quote
Margaret Atwood
God is a good listener. He doesn't interrupt. View quote
Margaret Atwood
She goes to the newsreels, in the movie theatres. She reads the papers. She knows herself to be at the mercy of events, and she knows by now that events have no mercy. View quote
Margaret Atwood
An unearned income encourages self-pity in those already prone to it. View quote
Margaret Atwood
No mother is ever, completely, a child's idea of what a mother should be, and I suppose it works the other way around as well. (Margaret Atwood)
I am not mad because I'm a woman... I'm mad because you're an asshole. View quote
Margaret Atwood
Tell me where it hurts, she'd say. Stop howling. Just calm down and show me where. But some people can't tell where it hurts. They can't calm down. They can't ever stop howling. View quote
Margaret Atwood
The past is so much safer, because whatever's in it has already happened. It can't be changed; so, in a way, there's nothing to dread. View quote
Margaret Atwood
The night is mine, my own time, to do with it as I will, as long as I am quiet. As long as I don't move. As long as I lie still. The difference betweenand. Lay is always passive. View quote
Margaret Atwood
Just because there's a silence it doesn't mean that nothing is going on. View quote
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. Because I'm telling you this story I will your existence. I tell, therefore you are. View quote
Margaret Atwood
I thought my heart was pure. We do like to have such good opinions of our own motives when we're about to do something harmful, to someone else. View quote
Margaret Atwood
Sex is like a drink, it's bad to start brooding about it too early in the day. View quote
Margaret Atwood
Writers started doing dystopias after we saw the effects of trying to build utopias that required, unfortunately, the elimination of a lot of people before you could get to the perfect point, which never arrived. View quote
Margaret Atwood
Sometimes men throw themselves on grenades and burst like paper bags of guts to save their comrades. I can admire that. But rats and cholera have won many wars. Those, and potatoes, or the absence of them. (Margaret Atwood)
Your righteous eyes, your laconic trigger-fingers people the streets with villains: as you move, the air in front of you blossoms with targets and you leave behind you a heroic trail of desolation. View quote
Margaret Atwood
The weapons that were once outside sharpening themselves on war are now indoors there, in the fortress, fragile in glass cases. View quote
Margaret Atwood
Despite the propaganda, there are no monsters, or none that can be finally buried. Finish one off, and circumstances and the radio create another. Believe me: whole armies have prayed fervently to God all night and meant it, and been slaughtered anyway. View quote
Margaret Atwood
Now we come to forgiveness. Don't worry about forgiving me right now. There are more important things. For instance: keep the others safe, if they are safe. Don't let them suffer too much. View quote
Margaret Atwood