Quotes by Margaret Atwood

Vanity is becoming a nuisance, I can see why women give it up, eventually. But Im not ready for that yet.

Forgiving men is so much easier than forgiving women.

I have periods now, like normal girls; I too am among the knowing, I too can sit out volleyball games and go to the nurses for aspirin and waddle along the halls with a pad like a flattened rabbit tail wadded between my legs, sopping with liver-colored blood.

I am tempted to think that to be despised by her sex is a very great compliment to a woman.

According to Tobias, women hang around longer because they’re less capable of indignation and better at being humiliated, for what is old age but one long string of indignities? What person of integrity would put up with it?

My self is a thing that I must now compose...as one composes a speech. What I must present is a made thing. Not something born.

To have them putting him on, trying him on, trying him out while he himself puts them on like a sock over a foot onto the stub of himself--his extra sensitive thumb, his tentacle, his delicate, stalked slugs eye which extrudes, expands, winces and shrivels back into himself when touched wrongly, grows big again. Bulging a little at the tip, traveling forward as if along a leaf into them, avid for vision. To achieve vision in this way; this journey into a darkness that is composed of women--a woman--who can see in darkness while he himself strains blindly forward.

Our big mistake was teaching them to read. We wont do that again.

There is never only one, of anyone

As we know from the study of history, no new system can impose itself upon a previous one without incorporating many of the elements to be found in the latter...

Like preachers, I sell vision,like perfume ads, desireor its facsimile. Like jokesor war, it’s all in the timing.I sell men back their worse suspicions:that everything’s for sale,

You cant lead if no one will follow.

When any civilization is dust and ashes, he said, art is all thats left over. Images, words, music. Imaginative structures. Meaning—human meaning, that is—is defined by them. You have to admit that.

I read for pleasure and that is the moment I learn the most.

The answers you get from literature depend on the questions you pose.

If writing novels - and reading them - have any redeeming social value, its probably that they force you to imagine what its like to be somebody else. Which increasingly is something we all need to know.

What did they want from it? Lechery, smut, confirmation of their worst suspicions. But perhaps some of them wanted, despite themselves, to be seduced. Perhaps they were looking for passion; perhaps they delved into this book as into a mysterious parcel - a gift box at the bottom of which, hidden in layers of rustling tissue paper, lay something theyd always longed for but couldnt ever grasp.

You learn to write by reading and writing, writing and reading. As a craft its acquired through the apprentice system, but you choose your own teachers. Sometimes theyre alive, sometimes dead.As a vocation, it involves the laying on of hands. You receive your vocation and in your turn you must pass it on. Perhaps you will do this only through your work, perhaps in other ways. Either way, youre part of a community, the community of writers, the community of storytellers that stretches back through time to the beginning of human society.As for the particular society to which you yourself belong -- sometimes youll feel youre speaking for it, sometimes -- when its taken an unjust form -- against it, or for that other community, the community of the oppressed, the exploited, the voiceless. Either way, the pressures on you will be intense; in other countries, perhaps fatal. But even here, speak for women, or for any other group that is feeling the boot, and there will be many at hand, both for and against, to tell you to shut up, or to say what they want you to say, or to say it a different way. Or to save them. The billboard awaits you, but if you succumb to its temptations youll end up two-dimensional.Tell what is yours to tell. Let others tell what is theirs.

I wasnt discriminating in my reading, and Im still not. I read then primarily to be entertained, as I do now. And Im not saying that apologetically: I feel that if you remove the initial gut response from reading — the delight or excitement or simply the enjoyment of being told a story — and try to concentrate on the meaning or the shape of the message first, you might as well give up, its too much like all work and no play.

We want to get there faster. Get where? Wherever we are not. But a human soul can only go as fast as a man can walk, they used to say. In that case, where are all the souls? Left behind. They wander here and there, slowly, dim lights flickering in the marshes at night, looking for us. But theyre not nearly fast enough, not for us, were way ahead of them, theyll never catch up. Thats why we can go so fast: our souls dont weigh us down.