Quotes from Margaret Atwood

Then sail, my fine lady, on the billowing wave - The water below is as dark as the grave, And maybe you'll sink in your little blue boat - It's hope, and hope only, that keeps us afloat

My good intentions are completely lethal.

Oppression involves a failure of the imagination: the failure to imagine the full humanity of other human beings.

The story as told in The Odyssey doesn't hold water. There are too many inconsistencies.

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

Some bioengineering is good, especially if it results in plants that are more drought-resistant or perennial food crops.

Like many modern poets, I tend to conceal rhymes by placing them in the middle of lines, and to avoid immediate alliteration and assonance in favor of echoes placed later in the poems.

You can examine the whole 19th century from the point of view of who would have maxed out their credit cards. Emma Bovary would have maxed hers out. No question. Mr. Scrooge would not have. He would have snipped his up.

I learned to read very early so I could read the comics, which I then started to draw.

Reading and writing are connected. I learned to read very early so I could read the comics, which I then started to draw.

Knowledge is power only as long as you keep your mouth shut.

I've learned quite a lot, over the years, by avoiding what I was supposed to be learning.

Our generation in the west was lucky: we had readymade gateways. We had books, paper, teachers, schools and libraries. But many in the world lack these luxuries. How do you practice without such tryout venues?

I have been known to buy e-versions of my books because I was in a hotel room and I needed one right away to look up something in it; very handy for that - you can have it just the next minute; you can press the button and just have it.

Canada was built on dead beavers.

The thing about delirium is you think it's great, but it actually isn't.

Science fiction is filled with Martians and space travel to other planets, and things like that.

I'm a person of whim, and easily distracted. I don't like multitasking. When I'm doing one thing, I like to do just that thing.

When things are really dismal, you can laugh, or you can cave in completely.

I think every age lives in a blend of technology so there's always older ones mixed in with newer ones, and when the new technology goes down, the immediate fallback position is either that technology just before that or one several technologies back.

Every aspect of human technology has a dark side, including the bow and arrow.

Anyway, maybe there weren't any solutions. Human society, corpses and rubble. It never learned, it made the same cretinous mistakes over and over, trading short-term gain for long-term pain.

for me the novel is a social vehicle, it reflects society.

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