What fabrications they are, mothers. Scarecrows, wax dolls for us to stick pins into, crude diagrams. We deny them an existence of their own, we make them up to suit ourselves -- our own hungers, our own wishes, our own deficiencies.


Margaret Atwood

  Email Quote to Friends   Link to Quote   Create Short URL  Publish Text About This Quote   Share on Facebook, Twitter, and more
  See Recommended Quotes For You

Related

We make our own monsters, then fear them for what they show us about ourselves.
MIKE CAREY
We are not our own any more than what we possess is our own. We did not make ourselves, we cannot be...
ALDOUS HUXLEY
Stop lying to yourself. When we deny our own truth, we deny our own potential.
STEVE MARABOLI
I don't believe we own our children, they're their own souls who make their own choices, we ...
ELLE MACPHERSON
Maybe there isn’t such a thing as fate. Maybe it’s just the opportunities we’re given, and wha...
MARISSA MEYER
By compassion we make others' misery our own, and so, by relieving them, we relieve ourselves also
THOMAS BROWNE SR.
We, ignorant of ourselves,
Beg often our own harms, which the wise powers
Deny us for our ...
WILLIAM SHAKESPEARE
We make our own sauce. We make our own rub. We make our own marinade. We make everything but the mea...
JAMES ROBBINS
When we allow our hands and our minds to wither in our efforts to control our own habits, our own hu...
GENE CRAWFORD
Into God's hands let us now -- for the coming year, and for all the years of time, and for Eternity ...
EDWARD B. PUSEY
We made a promise to ourselves at the beginning of the process that we weren't going to put any of o...
PETER JACKSON
Authentic people are so comfortable in their own skins they make us more comfortable in our own.
SUSAN C. YOUNG
We're our own dragons as well as our own heroes, and we have to rescue ourselves from ourselves.
TOM ROBBINS
We're our own dragons as well as our own heroes, and we have to rescue ourselves from ourselves.
PATRICIA SAMPSON
We're our own dragons as well as our own heroes, and we have to rescue ourselves from ourselves.
TOM ROBBINS
We all have our own life to pursue, our own kind of dream to be weaving, and we all have the power t...
LOUISA MAY ALCOTT
We all have our own life to pursue, Our own kind of dream to be weaving... And we all have the power...
LOUISA MAY ALCOTT
Each of us has our own unique traits, but we need them to fulfil our destiny
SUNDAY ADELAJA
Eventually, we'd like to own our own property. As for our dreams for the future, we've already met m...
DAVID MCGHEE
We make our own luck. I believed that, too. We chose our own fate. We controlled our own future. I k...
KASIE WEST
Humans are insane. We kill our own people, starve our own people, sell them, work them to death, bea...
FAITH HUNTER
Our older stuff was pretty much the demos that we did on our own. We produced, recorded and mixed th...
BRETT SCALLIONS
We are looking for our own virtue, our own piety, our own goodness, and so live on and in our own po...
WILLIAM LAW
Left to our own devices, we will make God in our own image.
JARED BROCK
Our acts make or mar us, we are the children of our own deeds.
VICTOR HUGO
Maybe, the lesson we can all learn from the inner sadness of a Narcissist is to see through our own ...
SHANNON L. ALDER
Flowers reconnect us to our own beautiful and unique essence as human beings. They wake up our posit...
KATIE HESS
In our own life, we don't have a lot of control over our world. When I make my own world, I'm in con...
BARBARA HODGES
Please let us build our own homes. Let us come back on our own time. Let us spend our insurance mone...
CHARLES YOUNG
All people are, at heart, egocentric. We exist at the center of our own little universes. We believe...
PETER DAVID
Each of us -- and the Florida Supreme Court has said this -- has a right to control our own body. We...
GEORGE FELOS
Destiny grants us our wishes, but in its own way, in order to give us something beyond our wishes.
JOHANN WOLFGANG VON GOETHE
We use the same possessive pronouns for everything, but do we own our lives or sisters or husbands i...
SAMANTHA HARVEY
We have our own history, our own language, our own culture. But our destiny is also tied up with the...
MANGOSUTHU BUTHELEZI
We are addicted to our egotism, our likes and dislikes and prejudices, and depend upon them for our ...
KAREN ARMSTRONG
But what do we know of the heart nearest to our own? What do we know of our own heart?
AMELIA BARR
It is not from the benevolence of the butcher, the brewer, or the baker, that we expect our dinner, ...
ADAM SMITH
It is not from the benevolence of the butcher, the brewer, or the baker that we expect our dinner, b...
ADAM SMITH
We speak of nature; it is folly; there is no such thing as nature; what we call by that misleading n...
MARK TWAIN
We didn't do that last game against them. And they smoked us. We had to play our own game, do our th...
KYLE DANCAUSE
To deny our own impulses is to deny the very thing that makes us human.
ANDY AND LARRY WACHOWSKI
To deny our own impulses, is to deny the very thing that makes us human.
MATT DORAN
We are simply showing public documents for them to make their own determination.
ERNEST WILLIAMS
Still to ourselves in every place consigned, / Our own felicity we make or find.
OLIVER GOLDSMITH
We know that we determine our own destiny. We just have to take care of our own business, and we can...
BRIAN SHAW
I think we held our own against them.
GORDON LEWIS
In India, they teach us if you live together and work together, you will be successful in your life....
AMRIK BHELA
We have always been appointing and consecrating our own bishops. This is what we must stick to.
YE XIAOWEN
God gave us free will so that we might choose our own destinies. He left it up to us to achieve them...
R.M. ARCEJAEGER
To choose a hardship for ourselves is our only defense against that hardship. This is what is meant ...
CESARE PAVESE
We are infected by our own misunderstanding of how our own minds work.
KEVIN KELLY
Life is not a search for experience, but for ourselves. Having discovered our own fundamental level ...
CESARE PAVESE
We will always tend to fulfill our own expectation of ourselves.
BRIAN TRACY
God and Nature first made us what we are, and then out of our own created genius we make ourselves w...
MARCUS GARVEY
The Washington black community was able to succeed beyond his wildest dreams. I mean, we had our own...
ED SMITH
If we get outside the EU, if we leave the EU system, we will be relieved of a huge amount of unneces...
BORIS JOHNSON
And so to tame Christmas we spin myths to temper the story, we create our own caricatures to speak o...
CRAIG D. LOUNSBROUGH
Our goal isn't outrageous. We simply want to live in dignity on our own land, see a just solution fo...
HANAN ASHRAWI
Like life, what gives a story its meaning is the fact that it ends. Our stories have lives of their ...
FRANCESCA ZAPPIA
We make our gadgets our own by the way that we use them, with or without the permission of the manuf...
LAURA MONCUR
We want to empower our people; we want to strengthen them; we want to provide them with the kind of ...
AUNG SAN SUU KYI
Our own people are going to other cities because we can't provide our own fields.
COUNCILMAN FRANK LOPEZ
Let our Fathers and Grandfathers be valued for their Goodness, ourselves for our own.
BENJAMIN FRANKLIN
To be conscious that we are perceiving or thinking is to be conscious of our own existence.
ARISTOTLE
We look at each person as an individual who was somebody's baby once. They have their own story, and...
LORI MCCLAIN
The beginning of love is the will to let those we love be perfectly themselves, the resolution not t...
THOMAS MERTON
We came from a family where we ran our own small business. Our dad made his own products. We made ou...
MARCY KAPTUR
What happens when we encounter a culture whose norms are very different from our own? Can we impose ...
ERIC MORTENSEN
I think we're the industry leader in terms of how we sell on our own Web site. Clearly our preferenc...
TOM KELTNER
Since we own our bodies, we also inevitably own the effects of our actions, be they good or bad. If ...
STEFAN MOLYNEUX
Our children are our own little angels, nurture them, love them, believe in how special and importan...
SARAH VINE
Most of us pass our lives never once laying eyes on our own organs, the most precious and amazing th...
MARY ROACH
If we don’t make our own future, it will be made for us.
MIKE KLEPPER
We are each our own devil, and we make this world our hell.
OSCAR WILDE
We are each our own devil, and we make this world our hell
OSCAR WILDE
Everything here is natural. We don't have any plastic toys or fake dolls. Our students knit their ow...
JANE MULLAN
When we deny the EVIL within ourselves, we dehumanize ourselves, and we deprive ourselves not only o...
J. ROBERT OPPENHEIMER
It is well for us that we are born babies in intellect. Could we understand half what mothers say an...
AUGUSTUS HARE
We have extremists, too, in our own camp, in our own ranks, ... Of course, there are extremists ever...
YASSER ARAFAT
We may convince others by our arguments; but we can only persuade them by their own
JOSEPH JOUBERT
It is therefore of supreme importance that we consent to live not for ourselves but for others. When...
THOMAS MERTON
It really is something ... that men disapprove even of our doing things that are patently good. Woul...
MODERATA FONTE
We can provide our own security. We can police ourselves.
BETTY THOMAS
Let children learn about different faiths, let them notice their incompatibility, and let them draw ...
RICHARD DAWKINS
We're trying to reach out to the Hispanic community with our own Spanish speakers. Many Hispanics ma...
ED BLAKESLEE
We would step in if we felt like it was being botched. Our owners control their own destiny. Maybe w...
CAROLYN SHIVER
When whistleblowers come forward, we need to fight for them, so others will be encouraged. When they...
SARA HARRISON
They called us a blighted area, which we're not. We're operating businesses down there. It's a shame...
SALVATORE DIBLASI
We fail to see that we can control our own destiny; make ourselves do whatever is possible; make our...
ORISON SWETT MARDEN
Quacks are a part of our culture, and we all fall prey to them. Who among us can say, for sure, that...
HUNTER S. THOMPSON
TV actors are doing great in Bollywood. We have our own market, our own fans, who love to see us on ...
MONA SINGH
In our own hearts, we mold the whole world's hereafters; and in our own hearts we fashion our own go...
HERMAN MELVILLE
We encourage them to begin their own companies, start their own businesses.
BRENDA MERRITT
Where we desire to be informed 'tis good to contest with men above ourselves; but to confirm and es...
SIR THOMAS BROWNE
To prejudge other men's notions before we have looked into them is not to show their darkness but to...
JOHN LOCKE
The numerous evils to which individual persons are exposed are due to the defects existing in the pe...
MAIMONIDES
We were our own worst enemy at times. We put ourselves in position to win but put them on the line t...
PERRY WATSON
Take our own company as an example: We're living proof, we jump with our own parachutes.
JIM BARKSDALE
We go to court for clients and move them to different places in our own vehicles.
CONNIE WILSON
All the lies, all the ways we have of trying to make life simple for ourselves by putting people int...
JULIA GREGSON

More Margaret Atwood

Heroes need monsters to establish their heroic credentials. You need something scary to overcome.
MARGARET ATWOOD
Optimism means better than reality; pessimism means worse than reality. I'm a realist.
MARGARET ATWOOD
Science and fiction both begin with similar questions: What if? Why? How does it all work? But they ...
MARGARET ATWOOD
A divorce is like an amputation: you survive it, but there's less of you.
MARGARET ATWOOD
If the national mental illness of the United States is megalomania, that of Canada is paranoid schiz...
MARGARET ATWOOD
The Eskimos had fifty-two names for snow because it was important to them: there ought to be as many...
MARGARET ATWOOD
An eye for an eye only leads to more blindness.
MARGARET ATWOOD
If I waited for perfection... I would never write a word.
MARGARET ATWOOD
Sooner or later, I hate to break it to you, you're gonna die, so how do you fill in the space be...
MARGARET ATWOOD
I was once a graduate student in Victorian literature, and I believe as the Victorian novelists did,...
MARGARET ATWOOD
When things are really dismal, you can laugh, or you can cave in completely.
MARGARET ATWOOD
You're never going to kill storytelling, because it's built into the human plan. We come wit...
MARGARET ATWOOD
Reading and writing, like everything else, improve with practice. And, of course, if there are no yo...
MARGARET ATWOOD
Every utopia - let's just stick with the literary ones - faces the same problem: What do you do ...
MARGARET ATWOOD
Don't let the bastards grind you down.
MARGARET ATWOOD
When you can't tell the difference between your own pleasure and your pain then you're an addict.
MARGARET ATWOOD
The beginning of Canadian cultural nationalism was not 'Am I really that oppressed?' but ...
MARGARET ATWOOD
Once upon a time you could wander around one country, then the next and then maybe you'd go to Engla...
MARGARET ATWOOD
They've removed anything you can tie a rope to.
MARGARET ATWOOD
Their mothers had finally caught up to them and been proven right. There were consequences after all...
MARGARET ATWOOD
No one knows what cuases an outer landscape to become an inner one.
MARGARET ATWOOD
The Eskimos had 52 names for snow because it was important to them; there ought to be as many for ...
MARGARET ATWOOD
Why is it that night falls, instead of rising, like the dawn? Yet if you look east, at sunset, you c...
MARGARET ATWOOD
Happiness is a garden walled with glass: there's no way in or out. In Paradise there are no stories,...
MARGARET ATWOOD
Touch comes before sight, before speech. It is the first language and the last, and it always tells ...
MARGARET ATWOOD
Stupidity is the same as evil if you judge by the results.
MARGARET ATWOOD
Longed for him. Got him. Shit.
MARGARET ATWOOD
If you knew what was going to happen, if you knew everything that was going to happen next—if you ...
MARGARET ATWOOD
But who can remember pain, once it’s over? All that remains of it is a shadow, not in the mind eve...
MARGARET ATWOOD
I would like to be the air that inhabits you for a moment only. I would like to be that unnoticed an...
MARGARET ATWOOD
I wonder which is preferable, to walk around all your life swollen up with your own secrets until yo...
MARGARET ATWOOD
If i thought this would never happen again I would die.
But this is wrong, nobody dies from lac...
MARGARET ATWOOD
Hatred would have been easier. With hatred, I would have known what to do. Hatred is clear, metallic...
MARGARET ATWOOD
That was when they suspended the Constitution. They said it would be temporary. There wasn't even an...
MARGARET ATWOOD
There's an epigram tacked to my office bulletin board, pinched from a magazine -- "Wanting to meet a...
MARGARET ATWOOD
We were the people who were not in the papers. We lived in the blank white spaces at the edges of pr...
MARGARET ATWOOD
But remember that forgiveness too is a power. To beg for it is a power, and to withhold or bestow it...
MARGARET ATWOOD
Water does not resist. Water flows. When you plunge your hand into it, all you feel is a caress. Wat...
MARGARET ATWOOD
Popular art is the dream of society; it does not examine itself.
MARGARET ATWOOD
The Eskimos had 52 names for snow because it was important to them; there ought to be as many for lo...
MARGARET ATWOOD
A word after a word after a word is power.
MARGARET ATWOOD
I've never understood why people consider youth a time of freedom and joy. It's probably because the...
MARGARET ATWOOD
She even had a kind of special position among men: she was an exception, she fitted none of the cate...
MARGARET ATWOOD
Men are not to be told anything they might find too painful; the secret depths of human nature, the ...
MARGARET ATWOOD
The basic Female body comes with the following accessories: garter belt, panty-girdle, crinoline, ca...
MARGARET ATWOOD
Never pray for justice, because you might get some.
MARGARET ATWOOD
If I were going to convert to any religion I would probably choose Catholicism because it at least h...
MARGARET ATWOOD
I hope that people will finally come to realize that there is only one 'race' - the human race - and...
MARGARET ATWOOD
A divorce is like an amputation: you survive it, but there's less of you
MARGARET ATWOOD
Another belief of mine: that everyone else my age is an adult, whereas I am merely in disguise.
MARGARET ATWOOD
War is what happens when language fails.
MARGARET ATWOOD
Miranda nods, because she knows that to be true: noble people don't do things for the money, they si...
MARGARET ATWOOD
Men are afraid that women will laugh at them. Women are afraid that men will kill them.
MARGARET ATWOOD
This is how the girl who couldn't speak and the man who couldn't see fell in love.
MARGARET ATWOOD
I'm a strict, strict agnostic. It's very different from a casual, 'I don't know.'...
MARGARET ATWOOD
Little girls are cute and small only to adults. To one another they are not cute. They are life-size...
MARGARET ATWOOD
Another belief of mine; that everyone else my age is an adult, whereas I am merely in disguise.
MARGARET ATWOOD
A voice is a human gift; it should be cherished and used, to utter fully human speech as possible. P...
MARGARET ATWOOD
I hate to tell you this, but you will never actually go to a galaxy far, far away and encounter Dart...
MARGARET ATWOOD
Religions in general have to rediscover their roots. In Hinduism and the Koran, animals are describe...
MARGARET ATWOOD
The answers you get from literature depend on the questions you pose.
MARGARET ATWOOD
In the spring, at the end of the day, you should smell like dirt.
MARGARET ATWOOD
I grew up with the biologists. I know how they think.
MARGARET ATWOOD
Before the Civil War, Canada was at the top of the underground railroad. If you made it into Canada,...
MARGARET ATWOOD
Sometimes there would be couples, arm in arm—laughing, happy, amorous. Victims of an enormous frau...
MARGARET ATWOOD
I've never bought into any sort of hard and fast, this-box/that-box characterization. People are...
MARGARET ATWOOD
Was this a betrayal, or was it an act of courage? Perhaps both. Neither one involves forethought: su...
MARGARET ATWOOD
The genesis of a poem for me is usually a cluster of words. The only good metaphor I can think of is...
MARGARET ATWOOD
Time is compressed like the fist I close on my knee... I hold inside it the clues and solutions and ...
MARGARET ATWOOD
They spent the first three years of school getting you to pretend stuff and then the rest of it mark...
MARGARET ATWOOD
Beginnings are sudden, but also insidious. They creep up on you sideways, they keep to the shadows, ...
MARGARET ATWOOD
If you're put on a pedestal, you're supposed to behave yourself like a pedestal type of pers...
MARGARET ATWOOD
If you feel that there's the author and then the character, then the book is not working. People...
MARGARET ATWOOD
I don't think of poetry as a 'rational' activity but as an aural one. My poems usually b...
MARGARET ATWOOD
Every aspect of human technology has a dark side, including the bow and arrow.
MARGARET ATWOOD
Vampires get the joy of flying around and living forever, werewolves get the joy of animal spirits. ...
MARGARET ATWOOD
Some people mistakenly think nature is very nice and benevolent and never betrays.
MARGARET ATWOOD
You will always have partial points of view, and you'll always have the story behind the story t...
MARGARET ATWOOD
Canada was built on dead beavers.
MARGARET ATWOOD
How shrunk, how dwindled, in our times
Creation's mighty seed -
For Man has broke the Fell...
MARGARET ATWOOD
She imagines him imagining her. This is her salvation.
In spirit she walks the city, traces its...
MARGARET ATWOOD
You can only be jealous of someone who has something you think you ought to have yourself.
MARGARET ATWOOD
Can I be blamed for wanting a real body, to put my arms around? Without it I too am disembodied. I c...
MARGARET ATWOOD
Gardening is not a rational act.
MARGARET ATWOOD
Second-hand American was spreading over him in patches, like mange or lichen. He was infested, garbl...
MARGARET ATWOOD
وقتی دردپایان می یابد،دیگر در یاد چه کسی می ماند؟ تنها �...
MARGARET ATWOOD
We still think of a powerful man as a born leader and a powerful woman as an anomaly.
MARGARET ATWOOD
If social stability goes pear-shaped, you have a choice between anarchy and dictatorship. Most peopl...
MARGARET ATWOOD
When you're young, you think everything you do is disposable. You move from now to now, crumpling ti...
MARGARET ATWOOD
We understand more than we know.
MARGARET ATWOOD
Nolite te bastardes carborundorum. Don't let the bastards grind you down.
MARGARET ATWOOD
You can examine the whole 19th century from the point of view of who would have maxed out their cred...
MARGARET ATWOOD
You hear doom and gloom about the Internet ruining young people's command of English - that'...
MARGARET ATWOOD
If I pick up a book with spaceships on the cover, I want spaceships. If I see one with dragons, I wa...
MARGARET ATWOOD
Girl Without Hands

Walking through the ruins
on your way to work
that do not lo...
MARGARET ATWOOD
'1984' is not a wonder tale. Not only could it happen, but it has happened, but under differ...
MARGARET ATWOOD
The thing about delirium is you think it's great, but it actually isn't.
MARGARET ATWOOD
We have to rethink our whole energy approach, which is hard to do because we're so dependent on ...
MARGARET ATWOOD
I was warped early by Ray Bradbury and Edgar Allan Poe. I was very fond of Franz Kafka.
MARGARET ATWOOD
A divorce is like an amputation; you survive, but there's less of you.
MARGARET ATWOOD
The truly fearless think of themselves as normal.
MARGARET ATWOOD
Or perhaps she's just softening me up: she's a Baptist, she'd like me to find Jesus, or vice versa, ...
MARGARET ATWOOD
Another belief of mine: that everyone else my age is an adult, whereas I am merely in disguise.
MARGARET ATWOOD
I don't want to see anyone. I lie in the bedroom with the curtains drawn and nothingness washing ove...
MARGARET ATWOOD
When we think of the past it's the beautiful things we pick out. We want to believe it was all like ...
MARGARET ATWOOD
My brother and I were both good at science, and we were both good at English literature. Either one ...
MARGARET ATWOOD
The myth that everyone once read great literature is just a myth.
MARGARET ATWOOD
I was born in the Ottawa General Hospital right after the Gray Cup Football Game in 1939. Six months...
MARGARET ATWOOD
If you're waiting for the perfect moment, you'll never write a thing because it will never a...
MARGARET ATWOOD
Debt is part of the human condition. Civilization is based on exchanges - on gifts, trades, loans - ...
MARGARET ATWOOD
I particularly like Twitter, because it's short and can be very funny and informative. It's ...
MARGARET ATWOOD
I do have a life,' says Charis, blinking wet eyes.

'You have a rich inner life,' says Ton...
MARGARET ATWOOD
Night falls. Or has fallen. Why is it that night falls, instead of rising, like the dawn?
MARGARET ATWOOD
No mother is ever, completely, a child's idea of what a mother should be, and I suppose it works the...
MARGARET ATWOOD
We were the people who were not in the papers. We lived in the blank white spaces at the edges of pr...
MARGARET ATWOOD
But despite everything, we didn't do badly by one another, we did as well as most. I wish she were h...
MARGARET ATWOOD
But people will do anything rather than admit that their lives have no meaning. No use, that is. No ...
MARGARET ATWOOD
Better never means better for everyone... It always means worse, for some.
MARGARET ATWOOD
Our problem right now is that we're so specialized that if the lights go out, there are a huge n...
MARGARET ATWOOD
There's always something to occupy the inquiring mind.
MARGARET ATWOOD
Social media is called social media for a reason. It lends itself to sharing rather than horn-tootin...
MARGARET ATWOOD
Love blurs your vision; but after it recedes, you can see more clearly than ever. It's like the tide...
MARGARET ATWOOD
Romance takes place in the middle distance. Romance is looking in at yourself through a window cloud...
MARGARET ATWOOD
Modesty is invisibility...Never forget it. To be seen—to be seen—is to be...penetrated. W...
MARGARET ATWOOD
In theory I can do almost anything; certainly I have been told how. In practice I do as little as po...
MARGARET ATWOOD
Male fantasies, male fantasies, is everything run by male fantasies? Up on a pedestal or down on you...
MARGARET ATWOOD
Sauve qui peut. To survive
we’d all turn thief

and rascal, or so says the fox,
MARGARET ATWOOD
Science fiction is filled with Martians and space travel to other planets, and things like that.
MARGARET ATWOOD
But how can you have a sense of wonder if you’re prepared for everything?
MARGARET ATWOOD
Our generation in the west was lucky: we had readymade gateways. We had books, paper, teachers, scho...
MARGARET ATWOOD
A home filled with nothing but yourself. It's heavy, that lightness. It's crushing, that emptiness.
MARGARET ATWOOD
The problem with meditating is I generally go to sleep, and that's because I'm doing it wron...
MARGARET ATWOOD
She finds this objectivity of hers, this clarity, almost more depressing than she can bear, not beca...
MARGARET ATWOOD
Fatigue is here, in my body, in my legs and eyes. That is what gets you in the end. Faith is only a ...
MARGARET ATWOOD
Many believed what they were told: that the welfare of the entire kingdom depended on their selfless...
MARGARET ATWOOD
She did understand, or at least she understood that she was supposed to understand. She understood, ...
MARGARET ATWOOD
When I am writing fiction, I believe I am much better organized, more methodical - one has to be whe...
MARGARET ATWOOD
We do like to have such good opinions of our own motives when we're about to do something harmful, t...
MARGARET ATWOOD
Love blurs your vision; but after it recedes, you can see more clearly than ever. It's like the tide...
MARGARET ATWOOD
I guess that's how they were able to do it, in the way they did, all at once, without anyone knowing...
MARGARET ATWOOD
Night falls. Or has fallen. Why is it that night falls, instead of rising, like the dawn? Yet if you...
MARGARET ATWOOD
There is something powerful in the whispering of obscenities, about those in power. There's somethin...
MARGARET ATWOOD
I believe that everyone else my age is an adult whereas I am merely in disguise.
MARGARET ATWOOD
How could I have been so ignorant? she thinks. So stupid, so unseeing, so given over to carelessness...
MARGARET ATWOOD
The society in 'The Handmaid's Tale' is a throwback to the early Puritans whom I studied...
MARGARET ATWOOD
You could tell 'The Handmaid's Tale' from a male point of view. People have mistakenly f...
MARGARET ATWOOD
Glenn used to say the reason you can't really imagine yourself being dead was that as soon as you sa...
MARGARET ATWOOD
You want the truth, of course. You want me to put two and two together. But two and two doesn’t ne...
MARGARET ATWOOD
But in the end, back she comes. There's no use resisting. She goes to him for amnesia, for oblivion....
MARGARET ATWOOD
When you're unhinged, things make their way out of you that should be kept inside, and other things ...
MARGARET ATWOOD
Why is it we want so badly to memorialize ourselves? Even while we're still alive. We wish to assert...
MARGARET ATWOOD
It wasn't so easy though, ending the war. A war is a huge fire; the ashes from it drift far, and set...
MARGARET ATWOOD
The young habitually mistake lust for love, they're infested with idealism of all kinds.
MARGARET ATWOOD
I'm not senile," I snapped. "If I burn the house down it will be on purpose.
MARGARET ATWOOD
She knows herself to be at the mercy of events, and she knows by now that events have no mercy.
MARGARET ATWOOD
Why does the mind do such things? Turn on us, rend us, dig the claws in. If you get hungry enough, t...
MARGARET ATWOOD
Why is it we want so badly to memorialize ourselves? Even while we're still alive. We wish to assert...
MARGARET ATWOOD
Home is where the heart is, I thought now, gathering myself together in Betty's Luncheonette. I had ...
MARGARET ATWOOD
Should is a futile word. It's about what didn't happen. It belongs in a parallel universe. It...
MARGARET ATWOOD
What is it the I'll want from you? Not love: that would be too much to ask. Not forgiveness, which i...
MARGARET ATWOOD
There were a lot of gods. Gods always come in handy, they justify almost anything.
MARGARET ATWOOD
Women have curious ways of hurting someone else. They hurt themselves instead; or else they do it so...
MARGARET ATWOOD
Farewells can be shattering, but returns are surely worse. Solid flesh can never live up to the brig...
MARGARET ATWOOD
The only way you can write the truth is to assume that what you set down will never be read. Not by ...
MARGARET ATWOOD
There would be no Sherlock Holmes if it were not for serial publication.
MARGARET ATWOOD
The best way of keeping a secret is to pretend there isn't one.
MARGARET ATWOOD
Anybody who writes a book is an optimist. First of all, they think they're going to finish it. Secon...
MARGARET ATWOOD
Ignoring isn’t the same as ignorance, you have to work at it.
MARGARET ATWOOD
We thought we had such problems. How were we to know we were happy?
MARGARET ATWOOD
The moment of betrayal is the worst, the moment when you know beyond any doubt that you've been betr...
MARGARET ATWOOD
Put yourself in a different room, that's what the mind is for.
MARGARET ATWOOD
The answers you get from literature depend on the questions you pose
MARGARET ATWOOD
I think of this as a democratizing device.
MARGARET ATWOOD
I'm curious. If someone says 'Don't open that door', I'm right there!
MARGARET ATWOOD
The main thing is to keep yourself awake [on writing]
MARGARET ATWOOD
For years I wanted to be older, and now I am.
MARGARET ATWOOD
He's very in depth, on the dark side. He's interested in structure and how things work. After readin...
MARGARET ATWOOD
The Orange prize has been pivotal in the careers of many women writers - it's given them that extra ...
MARGARET ATWOOD
Just think of it as a very, very long pen.
MARGARET ATWOOD
Because I am a mother, I am capable of being shocked; as I never was when I was not one
MARGARET ATWOOD
This above all, to refuse to be a victim.
MARGARET ATWOOD
We thought we were running away from the grownups, and now we are the grownups.
MARGARET ATWOOD
A ratio of failures is built into the process of writing. The wastebasket has evolved for a reason.
MARGARET ATWOOD
Does feminist mean large unpleasant person who'll shout at you or someone who believes women are hum...
MARGARET ATWOOD
They all disowned their parents long ago, the way you are supposed to
MARGARET ATWOOD
You need a certain amount of nerve to be a writer.
MARGARET ATWOOD
Foreignness is all around. Only in the heart of the heart of the country, namely the heart of the Un...
MARGARET ATWOOD
Any death is stupid from the viewpoint of whoever is undergoing it, Adam One used to say, because no...
MARGARET ATWOOD
Also I could hear Amanda’s voice: Why are you being so weak? Love’s never a fair trade. So Jimmy...
MARGARET ATWOOD
I lie on the floor, washed by nothing and hanging on. I cry at night. I am afraid of hearing voices,...
MARGARET ATWOOD
Life is warped. I'm just in sync.
MARGARET ATWOOD
I thought everyone would be familiar with this figure: if I'd studied a thing in school I assumed it...
MARGARET ATWOOD
We were revisionists; what we revised was ourselves.
MARGARET ATWOOD
My parents are like younger, urchinlike brothers and sisters whose faces are dirty and who blurt out...
MARGARET ATWOOD
Now we come to forgiveness. Don't worry about forgiving me right now. There are more important thing...
MARGARET ATWOOD
Our heaven is their hell, said God. I like a balanced universe.
MARGARET ATWOOD
Human tool-makers always make tools that will help us get what we want, and what we want hasn't chan...
MARGARET ATWOOD
She doesn't think it's a good idea to know the future, because you can hardly ever change it, so why...
MARGARET ATWOOD
The possibility of injury or death was a strong attraction: as the online world became more and more...
MARGARET ATWOOD
My self is a thing that I must now compose...as one composes a speech. What I must present is a 'mad...
MARGARET ATWOOD