Margaret Atwood quotes - page 6

Why does the mind do such things? Turn on us, rend us, dig the claws in. If you get hungry enough, they say, you start eating your own heart. Maybe it's much the same. (Margaret Atwood)
Anyway, maybe there weren't any solutions. Human society, corpses and rubble. It never learned, it made the same cretinous mistakes over and over, trading short-term gain for long-term pain. View quote
Margaret Atwood
But who can remember pain, once it's over? All that remains of it is a shadow, not in the mind even, in the flesh. Pain marks you, but too deep to see. Out of sight, out of mind. View quote
Margaret Atwood
Then sail, my fine lady, on the billowing wave - The water below is as dark as the grave, And maybe you'll sink in your little blue boat - It's hope, and hope only, that keeps us afloat. View quote
Margaret Atwood
To live in prison is to live without mirrors. To live without mirrors is to live without the self. View quote
Margaret Atwood
It's a feature of our age that if you write a work of fiction, everyone assumes that the people and events in it are disguised biography - but if you write your biography, it's equally assumed you're lying your head off. View quote
Margaret Atwood
I no longer feel I'll be dead by thirty; now it's sixty. I suppose these deadlines we set for ourselves are really a way of saying we appreciate time, and want to use all of it. I'm still writing, I'm still writing poetry, I still can't explain why, and I'm still running out of time. View quote
Margaret Atwood
There's an epigram tacked to my office bulletin board, pinched from a magazine -- "Wanting to meet an author because you like his work is like wanting to meet a duck because you like pâté. View quote
Margaret Atwood
But some people can't tell where it hurts. They can't calm down. They can't ever stop howling. View quote
Margaret Atwood
If he wants to be an asshole, it's a free country. Millions before him have made the same life choice. View quote
Margaret Atwood
A home filled with nothing but yourself. It's heavy, that lightness. It's crushing, that emptiness. (Margaret Atwood)
Maybe the life I think I'm living is a paranoid delusion... Sanity is a valuable possession; I hoard it the way people once hoarded money. I save it, so I will have enough, when the time comes. View quote
Margaret Atwood
Should is a futile word. It's about what didn't happen. It belongs in a parallel universe. It belongs in another dimension of space. View quote
Margaret Atwood
In the end, we'll all become stories. View quote
Margaret Atwood
They will not let you have peace, they don't want you to have anything they don't have themselves. View quote
Margaret Atwood
Maybe that's what love is, I thought: it's being pissed off. View quote
Margaret Atwood
I'm a fool, to confuse this with goodness. I am not good. I know too much to be good. I know myself. I know myself to be vengeful, greedy, secretive and sly. View quote
Margaret Atwood
There's the story, then there's the real story, then there's the story of how the story came to be told. Then there's what you leave out of the story. Which is part of the story too. View quote
Margaret Atwood
You can forget who you are if you're alone too much. View quote
Margaret Atwood
There's something to be said for hunger: at least it lets you know you're still alive. View quote
Margaret Atwood
Ah men, why do you want all this attention? I can write poems for myself, make love to a doorknob if absolutely necessary. What do you have to offer me I can't find otherwise except humiliation? Which I no longer need. (Margaret Atwood)
When any civilization is dust and ashes," he said, "art is all that's left over. Images, words, music. Imaginative structures. Meaning-human meaning, that is-is defined by them. You have to admit that. View quote
Margaret Atwood
It wasn't so easy though, ending the war. A war is a huge fire; the ashes from it drift far, and settle slowly. 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. But despite everything, we didn't do too badly by one another, we did as well as most. View quote
Margaret Atwood
Canadians are fond of a good disaster, especially if it has ice, water, or snow in it. You thought the national flag was about a leaf, didn't you? Look harder. It's where someone got axed in the snow. View quote
Margaret Atwood