kwize
login
Quote of the day
|
Authors
|
Topics
|
Sources
Margaret Atwood quotes
English
(77)
Français
(59)
edits
filters
view all 77 quotes
“Having experienced both, I am not sure which is worse: intense feeling, or the absence of it.”
Margaret Atwood
,
The Blind Assassin
“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.”
Margaret Atwood
,
The Blind Assassin
“All stories are about wolves. All worth repeating, that is. Anything else is sentimental drivel.”
Margaret Atwood
,
The Blind Assassin
“Forgiving men is so much easier than forgiving women.”
Margaret Atwood
,
Cat's Eye
“In Paradise there are no stories, because there are no journeys. It’s loss and regret and misery and yearning that drive the story forward, along its twisted road.”
Margaret Atwood
,
The Blind Assassin
“On impulse he might die for her, but living for her would be quite different.”
Margaret Atwood
,
The Blind Assassin
“if you knew in advance the consequences of your own actions—you’d be doomed. You’d be as ruined as God.”
Margaret Atwood
,
The Blind Assassin
“When we think of the past it's the beautiful things we pick out. We want to believe it was all like that.”
Margaret Atwood
,
The Handmaid's Tale
“Hatred is clear, metallic, one-handed, unwavering; unlike love.”
Margaret Atwood
,
Cat's Eye
“When you’re young, you think everything you do is disposable.”
Margaret Atwood
,
The Blind Assassin
“To pronounce the name of the dead is to make them live again, said the ancient Egyptians: not always what one might wish.”
Margaret Atwood
,
The Blind Assassin
“Potential has a shelf life.”
Margaret Atwood
,
Cat's Eye
“I see that there will be no end to imperfection, or to doing things the wrong way. Even if you grow up, no matter how hard you scrub, whatever you do, there will always be some other stain or spot on your face or stupid act, somebody frowning.”
Margaret Atwood
,
Cat's Eye
“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,...”
Margaret Atwood
,
Cat's Eye
“She imagines him imagining her. This is her salvation.”
Margaret Atwood
,
The Blind Assassin
“Love blurs your vision; but after it recedes, you can see more clearly than ever. It’s like the tide going out, revealing what ever’s been thrown away and sunk: broken bottles, old gloves, rusting pop cans, nibbled fishbodies, bones. This is...”
Margaret Atwood
,
Cat's Eye
“Women have curious ways of hurting someone else. They hurt themselves instead; or else they do it so the guy doesn’t even know he’s been hurt until much later.”
Margaret Atwood
,
The Blind Assassin
“We understand more than we know.”
Margaret Atwood
,
Oryx and Crake
“Touch comes before sight, before speech. It is the first language and the last, and it always tells the truth.”
Margaret Atwood
,
The Blind Assassin
“The best way of keeping a secret is to pretend there isn’t one.”
Margaret Atwood
,
The Blind Assassin
“What is it that I’ll want from you? Not love: that would be too much to ask. Not forgiveness, which isn’t yours to bestow. Only a listener, perhaps; only someone who will see me.”
Margaret Atwood
,
The Blind Assassin
“Home is where the heart is”
Margaret Atwood
,
The Blind Assassin
“Don't let the bastards grind you down.”
Margaret Atwood
,
The Handmaid's Tale
“everyone else my age is an adult, whereas I am merely in disguise.”
Margaret Atwood
,
Cat's Eye
“Farewells can be shattering, but returns are surely worse.”
Margaret Atwood
,
The Blind Assassin
“People cry at weddings for the same reason they cry at happy endings: because they so desperately want to believe in something they know is not credible.”
Margaret Atwood
,
The Blind Assassin
“If you take ‘mortality’ as being, not death, but the foreknowledge of it and the fear of it, then ‘immortality’ is the absence of such fear. Babies are immortal. Edit out the fear, and you’ll be...”
Margaret Atwood
,
Oryx and Crake
“Time: old cold time, old sorrow, settling down in layers like silt in a pond.”
Margaret Atwood
,
The Blind Assassin
“After everything that’s happened, how can the world still be so beautiful? Because it is.”
Margaret Atwood
,
Oryx and Crake
“She knows herself to be at the mercy of events, and she knows by now that events have no mercy.”
Margaret Atwood
,
The Blind Assassin
“Nature is to zoos as God is to churches.”
Margaret Atwood
,
Oryx and Crake
“The young habitually mistake lust for love, they’re infested with idealism of all kinds.”
Margaret Atwood
,
The Blind Assassin
“Ignoring isn't the same as ignorance”
Margaret Atwood
,
The Handmaid's Tale
“Vanity is becoming a nuisance; I can see why women give it up, eventually. But I’m not ready for that yet.”
Margaret Atwood
,
Cat's Eye
“Lose your temper and you lose the fight, Reenie used to say.”
Margaret Atwood
,
The Blind Assassin
“Perhaps I write for no one. Perhaps for the same person children are writing for, when they scrawl their names in the snow.”
Margaret Atwood
,
The Blind Assassin
“The only way you can write the truth is to assume that what you set down will never be read.”
Margaret Atwood
,
The Blind Assassin
“It wasn’t so easy, though, ending the war. A war is a huge fire; the ashes from it drift far, and settle slowly.”
Margaret Atwood
,
The Blind Assassin
“how much needless despair has been caused by a series of biological mismatches, a misalignment of the hormones and pheromones? Resulting in the fact that the one you love so passionately won’t or can’t love you. As a species we’re pathetic...”
Margaret Atwood
,
Oryx and Crake
“And yet it disturbs me to learn I have hurt someone unintentionally. I want all my hurts to be intentional.”
Margaret Atwood
,
Cat's Eye
“Romance takes place in the middle distance. Romance is looking in at yourself, through a window clouded with dew. Romance means leaving things out: where life grunts and snuffles, romance only sighs.”
Margaret Atwood
,
The Blind Assassin
“Happy as a clam, is what my mother says for happy. I am happy as a clam: hard-shelled, firmly closed.”
Margaret Atwood
,
Cat's Eye
“Many believed what they were told: that the welfare of the entire kingdom depended on their selflessness.”
Margaret Atwood
,
The Blind Assassin
“I knew what love was supposed to be: obsession, with undertones of nausea.”
Margaret Atwood
,
Cat's Eye
“The ancestral voices were prophesying war because ancestral voices never shut up, and they hate to be wrong, and war is a sure thing, sooner or later.”
Margaret Atwood
,
The Blind Assassin
“people will do anything rather than admit that their lives have no meaning. No use, that is. No plot.”
Margaret Atwood
,
The Handmaid's Tale
“Walking into the crowd was like sinking into a stew—you became an ingredient, you took on a certain flavour.”
Margaret Atwood
,
The Blind Assassin
“Gods always come in handy, they justify almost anything, and the gods of Sakiel-Norn were no exception.”
Margaret Atwood
,
The Blind Assassin
“Nevertheless, blood is thicker than water, as anyone knows who has tasted both.”
Margaret Atwood
,
The Blind Assassin
“Little girls are cute and small only to adults. To one another they are not cute. They are life-sized.”
Margaret Atwood
,
Cat's Eye
view all 77 quotes
Related topics
love
death
women
time
pain
imagination
imperfection
nature
truth
past
writing
war
stupidity
ignorance
memory
justice
art
existence
achievement
forgiveness
Related sources
The Blind Assassin
(42)
Cat's Eye
(17)
Oryx and Crake
(11)
The Handmaid's Tale
(7)
Follow Kwize on Facebook!
Choose the picture:
Follow Kwize on Pinterest!
Choose the picture:
<< Back >>
