Quotes from Margaret Atwood

We thought we were running away from the grownups, and now we are the grownups.

Some of our earliest writing, in cuneiform, was about who owes what.

A voice is a human gift; it should be cherished and used, to utter fully human speech as possible. Powerlessness and silence go together.

I tend to feel if people say they're going to do something, they will, if given the chance.

The object is very clear in the fight against racism; you have reasons why you're opposed to it. But when you're writing a novel, you don't want the reader to come out of it voting yes or no to some question. Life is more complicated than that.

When you're writing a novel, you don't want the reader to come out of it voting yes or no to some question. Life is more complicated than that. Reality simply consists of different points of view.

Some people mistakenly think nature is very nice and benevolent and never betrays.

I grew up with the biologists. I know how they think.

I'm bad at picking heroes.

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.

I was warped early by Ray Bradbury and Edgar Allan Poe. I was very fond of Franz Kafka.

Menopause. A pause while you reconsider men.

Cleverness is a quality a man likes to have in his wife as long as she is some distance away from him. Up close, he'll take kindness any day of the week, if there's nothing more alluring to be had.

What is the real breath of a man — the breathing out or the breathing in?

How shrunk, how dwindled, in our times Creation's mighty seed - For Man has broke the Fellowship With murder, lust, and greed.

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.

Within one's own family, money is not the measure of things, unless the person is an absolute Scrooge. Only the most extreme kind of monster would put a price on everything.

Every night when I go to bed I think, In the morning I will wake up in my own house and things will be back the way they were. It hasn't happened this morning, either.

Happy as a clam, is what my mother says for happy. I am happy as a clam: hard-shelled, firmly closed.

Your friend is intellectually honourable," Jimmy's mother would say. "He doesn't lie to himself.

Because I am a mother, I am capable of being shocked: as I never was when I was not one.

Blondes are like white mice, you only find them in cages. They wouldn't last long in nature. They're too conspicuous.

I'm not an activist by nature. I am suspicious of Utopian thinking and equally suspicious of its alternate.

Remember that, my child. Remember you are half water. If you can't go through an obstacle, go around it. Water does.