Quotes from Margaret Atwood

Canada is a balloon-puncturing country. You are not really allowed to be an icon unless you also make an idiot of yourself.

If I waited for perfection... I would never write a word.

If you're waiting for the perfect moment, you'll never write a thing because it will never arrive. I have no routine. I have no foolproof anything. There's nothing foolproof.

Debt is part of the human condition. Civilization is based on exchanges - on gifts, trades, loans - and the revenges and insults that come when they are not paid back.

One and one and one and one doesn't equal four. Each one remains unique, there is no way of joining them together. They cannot be exchanged, one for the other. They cannot replace each other.

I stand on the corner, pretending I am a tree.

Fear has a smell, as love does.

The way love feels is always only approximate. I would like to be without shame. I would like to be shameless. I would like to be ignorant. Then I would not know how ignorant I was.

I've never bought into any sort of hard and fast, this-box/that-box characterization. People are individuals. Yes, they may be expected to be a particular way. But that doesn't mean they're going to be that way.

You quickly find, when you are a hand-reader as I am, that nothing interests people so much as themselves.

There is good and mediocre writing within every genre.

The truth, it seems, is not just what you find when you open a door: it is itself a door, which the poet is always on the verge of going through.

The only way you can write the truth is to assume that what you set down will never be read.

There may not be one Truth - there may be several truths - but saying that is not to say that reality doesn't exist.

Nobody quite knows the truth about cats purring, but it does seem to be also a self-healing thing for them, which is why, when you take your cat to the vet and it's frightened, it will purr.

A truth should exist, it should not be usedlike this. If I love youis that a fact or a weapon?

Now I can see how that can happen. You can fall in love with anybody--a fool, a criminal, a nothing. There are no good rules.

You can't keep a cool head when you're drowning in love. You just trash around a lot and scream, and wear yourself out.

Messy love is better than none, I guess. I am no authority on sane living.

She had no images of this love. She could offer no anecdotes. It was a belief rather than a memory.

I knew what love was supposed to be: obsession with undertones of nausea.

All I can hope for is a reconstruction: the way love feels is always only approximate.

But maybe, underneath, she loves him too much. Maybe it's her excessive love that pushes him away.

We love each other, that's true whatever it means, but we aren't good at it; for some it's a talent, for others only an addiction.