Margaret Atwood quotes - page 16

If you don't like it, change it, we said, to each other and to ourselves. And so we would change for the man, for another one. Change, we were sure, was for the better always. We were revisionists; what we revised was ourselves. (Margaret Atwood)
When power is scarce, a little of it is tempting. View quote
Margaret Atwood
But in life, a tragedy is not one long scream. It includes everything that led up to it. Hour after trivial hour, day after day, year after year, and then the sudden moment: the knife stab, the shell burst, the plummet of the car from a bridge. View quote
Margaret Atwood
Life is warped. I'm just in sync. View quote
Margaret Atwood
I soon had a few thousand people I didn't know sending me messages like "OMG! Is it really you?” "I love it when old ladies blog,” one early follower remarked. ... and they really shone when, during the Olympics, I said that "Own the podium" was too brash to be Canadian, and suggested "A podium might be nice." Their own variations poured onto a feed tagged #cpodium: "A podium! For me?" "Rent the podium, see if we like it." "Mind if I squeeze by you to get onto that podium?" View quote
Margaret Atwood
As soon as you have a language that has a past tense and a future tense you're going to say, 'Where did we come from, what happens next?' The ability to remember the past helps us plan the future. View quote
Margaret Atwood
When I was 16, I started publishing all kinds of things in school magazines. View quote
Margaret Atwood
I grew up in the golden age of Flash Gordon and sci-fi. View quote
Margaret Atwood
I have a big following among the biogeeks of this world. Nobody ever puts them in books. View quote
Margaret Atwood
I'm not interested in cutting the feet off my characters or stretching them to make them fit my certain political view. View quote
Margaret Atwood
Like many modern poets, I tend to conceal rhymes by placing them in the middle of lines, and to avoid immediate alliteration and assonance in favor of echoes placed later in the poems. (Margaret Atwood)
I grew up with the biologists. I know how they think. View quote
Margaret Atwood
Debt is part of the human condition. Civilization is based on exchanges - on gifts, trades, loans - and the revenges and insults that come when they are not paid back. View quote
Margaret Atwood
I didn't go to school for a full year until I was 12. In the summer I was a wild child in the woods, with no shoes, and in the fall it was back to the city, shoe shops and school. View quote
Margaret Atwood
I'm a person of whim, and easily distracted. I don't like multitasking. When I'm doing one thing, I like to do just that thing. View quote
Margaret Atwood
Before the Civil War, Canada was at the top of the underground railroad. If you made it into Canada, you were safe unless someone came and hauled you back. That was also true during the Vietnam War for draft resisters. View quote
Margaret Atwood
My brother and I were both good at science, and we were both good at English literature. Either one of us could have gone either way. View quote
Margaret Atwood
Genres aren't closed boxes. Stuff flows back and forth across the borders all the time. View quote
Margaret Atwood
Science never makes things that do not have to do with what we feel, by which I mean what we want and what we fear. View quote
Margaret Atwood
Some people mistakenly think nature is very nice and benevolent and never betrays. View quote
Margaret Atwood
The myth that everyone once read great literature is just a myth. (Margaret Atwood)
You can examine the whole 19th century from the point of view of who would have maxed out their credit cards. Emma Bovary would have maxed hers out. No question. Mr. Scrooge would not have. He would have snipped his up. View quote
Margaret Atwood
Our generation in the west was lucky: we had readymade gateways. We had books, paper, teachers, schools and libraries. But many in the world lack these luxuries. How do you practice without such tryout venues? View quote
Margaret Atwood
Some of our earliest writing, in cuneiform, was about who owes what. View quote
Margaret Atwood
I got into trouble a while ago for saying that I thought the internet led to increased literacy - people scolded me about the shocking grammar to be found online - but I was talking about fundamentals: quite simply, you can't use the net unless you can read. View quote
Margaret Atwood