Margaret Atwood quotes - page 2

I am certain that a Sewing Machine would relieve as much human suffering as a hundred Lunatic Asylums, and possibly a good deal more. (Margaret Atwood)
Good judgment comes from experience. Experience comes from bad judgment. View quote
Margaret Atwood
Freedom, like everything else, is relative. View quote
Margaret Atwood
We were the people who were not in the papers. We lived in the blank white spaces at the edges of print. It gave us more freedom. We lived in the gaps between the stories. View quote
Margaret Atwood
Myths can't be translated as they did in their ancient soil. We can only find our own meaning in our own time. View quote
Margaret Atwood
Publishers are in business to make money, and if your books do well they don't care if you are male, female, or an elephant. View quote
Margaret Atwood
There is more than one kind of freedom, said Aunt Lydia. Freedom to and freedom from. In the days of anarchy, it was freedom to. Now you are being given freedom from. Don't underrate it. View quote
Margaret Atwood
You want the truth, of course. You want me to put two and two together. But two and two doesn't necessarily get you the truth. Two and two equals a voice outside the window. Two and two equals the wind. The living bird is not its labeled bones. View quote
Margaret Atwood
You don't look back along time but down through it, like water. Sometimes this comes to the surface, sometimes that, sometimes nothing. Nothing goes away. View quote
Margaret Atwood
When we think of the past it's the beautiful things we pick out. We want to believe it was all like that. View quote
Margaret Atwood
This is how the girl who couldn't speak and the man who couldn't see fell in love. (Margaret Atwood)
If it's a story I'm telling, then I have control over the ending... But if it's a story, even in my head, I must be telling it to someone. You don't tell a story only to yourself. There's always someone else. Even when there is no one. View quote
Margaret Atwood
Knowing was a temptation. What you don't know won't tempt you. View quote
Margaret Atwood
It isn't running away they're afraid of. We wouldn't get far. It's those other escapes, the ones you can open in yourself, given a cutting edge. View quote
Margaret Atwood
The young habitually mistake lust for love, they're infested with idealism of all kinds. View quote
Margaret Atwood
These things sneak up on him for no reason, these flashes of irrational happiness. It's probably a vitamin deficiency. View quote
Margaret Atwood
When they're gone out of his head, these words, they'll be gone, everywhere, forever. As if they had never been. View quote
Margaret Atwood
So this was the rest of his life. It felt like a party to which he'd been invited, but at an address he couldn't actually locate. Someone must be having fun at it, this life of his; only, right at the moment, it wasn't him. View quote
Margaret Atwood
The body is so easily damaged, so easily disposed of, water and chemicals is all it is, hardly more to it than a jellyfish drying on sand. View quote
Margaret Atwood
I'm working on my own life story. I don't mean I'm putting it together; no, I'm taking it apart. View quote
Margaret Atwood
He stops, looks up at this window, and I can see the white oblong of his face. We look at each other. I have no rose to toss, he has no lute. But it's the same kind of hunger. (Margaret Atwood)
Because you may think a bed is a peaceful thing, Sir, and to you it may mean rest and comfort and a good night's sleep. But it isn't so for everyone; and there are many dangerous things that may take place in a bed. View quote
Margaret Atwood
It's his word against the Commander's, unless he wants to head a posse. Kick in the door, and what did I tell you? Caught in the act, sinfully Scrabbling. Quick, eat those words. View quote
Margaret Atwood
Like all twenty-one-year-old poets, I thought I would be dead by thirty, and Sylvia Plath had not set a helpful example. For a while there, you were made to feel that, if a poet and female, you could not really be serious about it unless you'd made a least one suicide attempt. So I felt I was running out of time. View quote
Margaret Atwood
For every age there is a popular idea about what madness is, what causes it, and how a mad person should look and behave; and it's usually these popular ideas, rather than those of medical professionals, that turn up in songs and stories and plays and books. View quote
Margaret Atwood