Quotes by Margaret Atwood

“Another belief of mine; that everyone else my age is an adult, whereas I am merely in disguise.”

“War is what happens when language fails”

“The Eskimos had fifty-two names for snow because it was important to them: there ought to be as many for love.”

“Does feminist mean large unpleasant person wholl shout at you or someone who believes women are human beings. To me its the latter, so I sign up.”

“We still think of a powerful man as a born leader and a powerful woman as an anomaly.”

“The answers you get from literature depend on the questions you pose”

“In the spring, at the end of the day, you should smell like dirt.”

“Ive never understood why people consider youth a time of freedom and joy. Its probably because they have forgotten their own.”

“A divorce is like an amputation: you survive it, but theres less of you”

“I hope that people will finally come to realize that there is only one race - the human race - and that we are all members of it.”

“Race hate isnt human nature; race hate is the abandonment of human nature.”

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

“She even had a kind of special position among men: she was an exception, she fitted none of the categories they commonly used when talking about girls; she wasnt a cock-teaser, a cold fish, an easy lay or a sneaky bitch; she was an honorary person. She had grown to share their contempt for most women.”

“Literature is where I go to explore the highest and lowest places in human society and in the human spirit, where I hope to find not absolute truth but the truth of the tale, of the imagination and of the heart.”

“People are taken aback by a confident, pretty girl who knows what she wants in life and isnt going to let anyone get in her way. And you know what its all about? Jealousy.”

“Theyve removed anything you can tie a rope to.”

I would like to be the air that inhabits you for a moment only. I would like to be that unnoticed and that necessary.

Falling in love, we said; I fell for him. We were falling women. We believed in it, this downward motion: so lovely, like flying, and yet at the same time so dire, so extreme, so unlikely. God is love, they once said, but we reversed that, and love, like heaven, was always just around the corner. The more difficult it was to love the particular man beside us, the more we believed in Love, abstract and total. We were waiting, always, for the incarnation. That word, made flesh.And sometimes it happened, for a time. That kind of love comes and goes and is hard to remember afterwards, like pain. You would look at the man one day and you would think, I loved you, and the tense would be past, and you would be filled with a sense of wonder, because it was such an amazing and precarious and dumb thing to have done; and you would know too why your friends had been evasive about it, at the time.There is a good deal of comfort, now, in remembering this.

How could I be sleeping with this particular man.... Surely only true love could justify my lack of taste.

A truth should exist,it should not be usedlike this. If I love youis that a fact or a weapon?