Quotes from Margaret Atwood

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.

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.

When I was sixteen, it was simple. Poetry existed; therefore it could be written; and nobody had told me -- yet -- the many, many reasons why it could not be written by me.

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.

One of the things about totalitarianism is that people disappear, and you can't find out what happened to them.

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.

It's a feature of our age that if you write a work of fiction, everyone assumes that the people and events in it are disguised biography -- but if you write your biography, it's equally assumed you're lying your head off.

No luck was dumb because luck was just another name for miracle.

I am the horizon you ride towards, the thing you can never lasso

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.

Confronted by too much emptiness ... the brain invents. Loneliness creates company as thirst creates water. How many sailors have been wrecked in pursuit of islands that were merely a shimmering?

The minimalist life. Pleasure is an egg. Blessings that can be counted, on the fingers of one hand.

Surely only true love could justify my lack of taste.

When you're young, you think everything you do is disposable. You move from now to now, crumpling time up in your hands, tossing it away. You're your own speeding car. You think you can get rid of things, and people too--leave them behind. You don't yet know about the habit they have, of coming back.

When we think of the past it's the beautiful things we pick out. We want to believe it was all like that.

Water is patient. Dripping water wears away a stone. Remember that, my child. Remember you are half water. If you can't go through an obstacle, go around it. Water does.

Love's never a fair trade.

Time in dreams is frozen. You can never get away from where you've been.

Last night I watched the weather channel, as is my habit. Elsewhere in the world there are floods: roiling brown water, bloated cows floating by, survivors huddled on rooftops. Thousands have drowned. Global warming is held accountable: People must stop burning things up, it is said. Gasoline, oil, whole forests. But they won't stop. Greed and hunger lash them on, as usual.

For drinking Life there are two cups: The No Cup is bitter, the Yes Cup is yummy -- Now, which one would you rather have in your tummy?

I'm working on my own life story. I don't mean I'm putting it together; no, I'm taking it apart.

As all historians know, the past is a great darkness, and filled with echoes. Voices may reach us from it; but what they say to us is imbued with the obscurity of the matrix out of which they come; and, try as we may, we cannot always decipher them precisely in the clearer light of our own day.

Noble people don't do things for the money, they simply have money, and that's what allows they to be noble.

Malicious rumours can spread confusion. A careless remark can be as a cigarette butt casually tossed into the dumpster, smouldering until it bursts into flame and engulfs a neighborhood.