Quotes from Margaret Atwood

Night falls. Or has fallen. Why is it that night falls, instead of rising, like the dawn?... Maybe night falls because it's heavy, a thick curtain pulled up over the eyes. Wool blanket.

A lot of being a poet consists of willed ignorance. If you woke up from your trance and realized the nature of the life-threatening and dignity-destroying precipice you were walking along, you would switch into actuarial sciences immediately.

No matter how much you've been warned, Death always comes without knocking. Why now? is the cry. Why so soon? It's the cry of a child being called home at dusk.

It is better to hope than to mope!

The sands of time are quicksands ... so much can sink into them without a trace.

Don't let the bastards grind you down.

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

I've never understood why people consider youth a time of freedom and joy. It's probably because they have forgotten their own.

I would like to be the airthat inhabits you for a momentonly. I would like to be that unnoticed& that necessary.

I hope that people will finally come to realize that there is only one 'race' - the human race - and that we are all members of it.

If I were going to convert to any religion I would probably choose Catholicism because it at least has female saints and the Virgin Mary.

Popular art is the dream of society it does not examine itself.

Science fiction, to me, has not only things that wouldn't happen, but other planets.

We thought we were running away from the grown-ups, and now we're the grown-ups.

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

If you knew what was going to happen, if you knew everything that was going to happen next—if you knew in advance the consequences of your own actions—you'd be doomed. You'd be ruined as God. You'd be a stone. You'd never eat or drink or laugh or get out of bed in the morning. You'd never love anyone, ever again. You'd never dare to.

Time is compressed like the fist I close on my knee... I hold inside it the clues and solutions and the power for what I must do now.

I don't want to see anyone. I lie in the bedroom with the curtains drawn and nothingness washing over me like a sluggish wave. Whatever is happening to me is my own fault. I have done something wrong, something so huge I can't even see it, something that's drowning me. I am inadequate and stupid, without worth. I might as well be dead.

I don't think the relationship between novels and realities are one to one. Of course novels play different roles. It's essentially just a long narrative form. What you use that long narrative form for can be very different.

The Eskimos had fifty-two names for snow because it was important to them: there ought to be as many for love.

If I pick up a book with spaceships on the cover, I want spaceships. If I see one with dragons, I want there to be dragons inside the book. Proper labeling. Ethical labeling. I don't want to open up my cornflakes and find that they're full of pebbles... You need to respect the reader enough not to call it something it isn't.

War is what happens when language fails.

I would like to be the air that inhabits you for a moment only. I would like to be that unnoticed and that necessary.

Men are afraid that women will laugh at them. Women are afraid that men will kill them.