Quotes from Margaret Atwood

Water does not resist. Water flows. When you plunge your hand into it, all you feel is a caress.

I don't think I solve problems in my poetry; I think I uncover the problems.

Writing poetry is a state of free float.

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.

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

For years I wanted to be older and now I am.

God is not the voice in the whirlwind, God is the whirlwind.

God gave unto the Animals A wisdom past our power to see: Each knows innately how to live, Which we must learn laboriously.

Human understanding is fallible, and we see through a glass, darkly. Any religion is a shadow of God. But the shadows of God are not God.

More powerful than God, more evil than the Devil; the poor have it, the rich lack it, and if you eat it you die?

You say, The sensed absence of God and the sensed presence amount to much the same thing, only in reverse.

Too much God and you overdose. God needs to be filtered.

In the evenings there's been thunder, a distant bumping and stumbling, like God on a sullen binge.

The fact is that blank pages inspire me with terror. What will I put on them? Will it be good enough? Will I have to throw it out?

I don't know why they are all so eager to be remembered. What good will it do them? There are some things that should be forgotten by everyone, and never spoken of again.

I'm a fool, to confuse this with goodness. I am not good. I know too much to be good. I know myself. I know myself to be vengeful, greedy, secretive and sly.

Debt is not just a money thing. It's about owing and being owed. Money is just one thing you can exchange. You can exchange good deeds, you can exchange revenge, you can exchange murders.

It doesn't really matter what "genre" your book is. What matters is that it's a good book of its kind. Whatever that kind may be.

If you disagree with your government, that's political. If you disagree with your government that is approaching theocracy, then you're evil.

Don't let the bastards grind you down.

History, as I recall, was never this winsome, and especially not this clean, but the real thing would never sell: most people prefer a past in which nothing smells.

As we know from the study of history, no new system can impose itself upon a previous one without incorporating many of the elements to be found in the latter.

Today on the way home, it snows. Big, soft caressing flakes fall onto our skin like cold moths; the air fills with feathers.

Little girls are cute and small only to adults. To one another they are not cute. They are life-sized.