Canadian novelist, poet, and literary critic (1939- )
Farewells can be shattering, but returns are surely worse. Solid flesh can never live up to the bright shadow cast by its absence.
MARGARET ATWOOD
The Blind Assassin
I knew what love was supposed to be: obsession with undertones of nausea.
MARGARET ATWOOD
Cat's Eye
Change, we were sure, was for the better always. We were revisionists; what we revised was ourselves.
MARGARET ATWOOD
The Handmaid's Tale
I am the horizon
you ride towards, the thing you can never lasso
MARGARET ATWOOD
"Backdrop addresses cowboy"
You can think clearly only with your clothes on.
MARGARET ATWOOD
The Handmaid's Tale
What I need is perspective. The illusion of depth, created by a frame, the arrangement of shapes on a flat surface. Perspective is necessary. Otherwise there are only two dimensions. Otherwise you live with your face squashed against a wall, everything a huge foreground, of details, close-ups, hairs, the weave of the bedsheet, the molecules of the face. Your own skin like a map, a diagram of futility, crisscrossed with tiny roads that lead nowhere. Otherwise you live in the moment. Which is not where I want to be.
MARGARET ATWOOD
The Handmaid's Tale
No luck was dumb because luck was just another name for miracle.
MARGARET ATWOOD
The Year of the Flood
The Eskimo has fifty-two names for snow because it is important to them; there ought to be as many for love.
MARGARET ATWOOD
Surfacing
Hunger is the best sauce.
MARGARET ATWOOD
The Year of the Flood
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.
MARGARET ATWOOD
The Handmaid's Tale
But remember that forgiveness too is a power. To beg for it is a power, and to withhold or bestow it is a power, perhaps the greatest.
MARGARET ATWOOD
The Handmaid's Tale
In an age that persecutes deviants, you can yet lose your life for being the possessor of a dangerous or unacceptable story. Words are powerful, which means that words can also be fatal.
MARGARET ATWOOD
address at the Jaipur Literature Festival, January 21, 2016
To live in prison is to live without mirrors. To live without mirrors is to live without the self.
MARGARET ATWOOD
"Marrying the Hangman", Selected Poems
Tell, rather than write, because I have nothing to write with and writing is in any case forbidden. 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.
MARGARET ATWOOD
The Handmaid's Tale
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
Alias Grace
What is needed for really good tyranny is an unquestionable idea or authority. Political disagreement is political disagreement. But political disagreement with a theocracy is heresy.
MARGARET ATWOOD
Moving Targets: Writing with Intent
One of the things about totalitarianism is that people disappear, and you can't find out what happened to them.
MARGARET ATWOOD
"Margaret Atwood Is Still Seeing the Future", The Ringer, April 27, 2017
All stories are about wolves. All worth repeating, that is. Anything else is sentimental drivel.
MARGARET ATWOOD
The Blind Assassin
The only way you can write the truth is to assume that what you set down will never be read.
MARGARET ATWOOD
The Blind Assassin
Love blurs your vision; but after it recedes, you can see more clearly than ever. It's like the tide going out, revealing whatever's been thrown away and sunk: broken bottles, old gloves, rusting pop cans, nibbled fishbodies, bones.
MARGARET ATWOOD
Cat's Eye