Canadian novelist, poet, and literary critic (1939- )
In an age that persecutes deviants, you can yet lose your life for being the possessor of a dangerous or unacceptable story. Words are powerful, which means that words can also be fatal.
MARGARET ATWOOD
address at the Jaipur Literature Festival, January 21, 2016
The Eskimo has fifty-two names for snow because it is important to them; there ought to be as many for love.
MARGARET ATWOOD
Surfacing
Farewells can be shattering, but returns are surely worse. Solid flesh can never live up to the bright shadow cast by its absence.
MARGARET ATWOOD
The Blind Assassin
Change, we were sure, was for the better always. We were revisionists; what we revised was ourselves.
MARGARET ATWOOD
The Handmaid's Tale
No mother is ever, completely, a child's idea of what a mother should be, and I suppose it works the other way around as well.
MARGARET ATWOOD
The Handmaid's Tale
You can think clearly only with your clothes on.
MARGARET ATWOOD
The Handmaid's Tale
I would rather dance as a ballerina, though faultily, than as a flawless clown.
MARGARET ATWOOD
Lady Oracle
I knew what love was supposed to be: obsession with undertones of nausea.
MARGARET ATWOOD
Cat's Eye
Hunger is a powerful reorganizer of the conscience.
MARGARET ATWOOD
The Year of the Flood
But remember that forgiveness too is a power. To beg for it is a power, and to withhold or bestow it is a power, perhaps the greatest.
MARGARET ATWOOD
The Handmaid's Tale
But who can remember pain, once it's over? All that remains of it is a shadow, not in the mind even, in the flesh. Pain marks you, but too deep to see. Out of sight, out of mind.
MARGARET ATWOOD
The Handmaid's Tale
You can only be jealous of someone who has something you think you ought to have yourself.
MARGARET ATWOOD
The Handmaid's Tale
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.
MARGARET ATWOOD
Cat's Eye
Potential has a shelf life.
MARGARET ATWOOD
Cat's Eye
A man is just a woman's strategy for making other women.
MARGARET ATWOOD
The Handmaid's Tale
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.
MARGARET ATWOOD
On Writing Poetry
I am the horizon
you ride towards, the thing you can never lasso
MARGARET ATWOOD
"Backdrop addresses cowboy"
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.
MARGARET ATWOOD
Moving Targets: Writing with Intent
To live in prison is to live without mirrors. To live without mirrors is to live without the self.
MARGARET ATWOOD
"Marrying the Hangman", Selected Poems
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.
MARGARET ATWOOD
The Year of the Flood