Quotes from Margaret Atwood

The newspaper journalists like to believe the worst; they can sell more papers that way, as one of them told me himself; for even upstanding and respectable people dearly love to read ill of others.

Love is the pursuit of shadows.

Love was like a steamroller. There was no avoiding it; it went over you and you came out flat.

Maybe that's what love is, I thought: it's being pissed off.

He has been trying to sing Love into existence again And he has failed

His mouth is on me, his hands, I can't wait and he's moving, already, love, it's been so long, I'm alive in my skin, again, arms around him, falling and water softly everywhere, never-ending.

Reading and writing, like everything else, improve with practice. And, of course, if there are no young readers and writers, there will shortly be no older ones. Literacy will be dead, and democracy - which many believe goes hand in hand with it - will be dead as well.

And yet it disturbs me to learn I have hurt someone unintentionally. I want all my hurts to be intentional.

The Eskimo has fifty-names for snow because it is important to them there ought to be as many for love.

Storytelling is a very old human skill that gives us an evolutionary advantage. If you can tell young people how you kill an emu, acted out in song or dance, or that Uncle George was eaten by a croc over there, don't go there to swim, then those young people don't have to find out by trial and error.

Younger people have greatest fears. Why is that? Because they don't know the plot. They don't know their own individual plot... they don't know what's going to happen to them.

Sooner or later, I hate to break it to you, you're gonna die, so how do you fill in the space between here and there? It's yours. Seize your space.

Fiction is not necessarily about what you know, it's about how you feel. That is the truth about fiction, and the other truth is that all science is a tool, and we use our tools not to actualise what we know, but to implement how we feel.

You can wet the rim of a glass and run your finger around the rim and it will make a sound. This is what I feel like: this sound of glass. I feel like the word shatter. I want to be with someone.

Waste not want not. I am not being wasted. Why do I want?

EXTINCTATHON, Monitored by MaddAddam. Adam named the living animals, MaddAddam names the dead ones. Do you want to play?

People cry at weddings for the same reason they cry at happy endings: because they so desperately want to believe in something they know is not credible.

Where do you draw the line, between love and greed? We never did know, we always wanted more. We want to take it all in, for one last time, we want to eat the world with our eyes.

I didn't want him to become gray and multi-dimensional and complicated like everyone else. Was every Heathcliff a Linton in disguise?

Social media is called social media for a reason. It lends itself to sharing rather than horn-tooting.

The Eskimo has fifty-two names for snow because it is important to them there ought to be as many for love.

Vampires get the joy of flying around and living forever, werewolves get the joy of animal spirits. But zombies, they're not rich, or aristocratic, they shuffle around. They're a group phenomenon, they're not very fast, they're quite sickly. So what's the pleasure of being one?

If the national mental illness of the United States is megalomania, that of Canada is paranoid schizophrenia.

A divorce is like an amputation: you survive it, but there's less of you.