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
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
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
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
As God contains all good things, He must also contain a sense of playfulness -- a gift he has shared with Creatures other than ourselves, as witness the tricks Crows play, and the sportiveness of Squirrels, and the frolicking of Kittens.
MARGARET ATWOOD
The Year of the Flood
Potential has a shelf life.
MARGARET ATWOOD
Cat's Eye
You can only be jealous of someone who has something you think you ought to have yourself.
MARGARET ATWOOD
The Handmaid's Tale
You can think clearly only with your clothes on.
MARGARET ATWOOD
The Handmaid's Tale
I would rather dance as a ballerina, though faultily, than as a flawless clown.
MARGARET ATWOOD
Lady Oracle
Hunger is a powerful reorganizer of the conscience.
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
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
What am I living for and what am I dying for are the same question.
MARGARET ATWOOD
The Year of the Flood
The Human moral keyboard is limited ... there's nothing you can play on it that hasn't been played before. And, my dear Friends, I am sorry to say this, but it has its lower notes.
MARGARET ATWOOD
The Year of the Flood
No luck was dumb because luck was just another name for miracle.
MARGARET ATWOOD
The Year of the Flood
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
The Handmaid's Tale
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
Time is not a line but a dimension, like the dimensions of space. If you can bend space you can bend time also, and if you knew enough and could move faster than light you could travel backward in time and exist in two places at once.
MARGARET ATWOOD
Cat's Eye