1. People
    2.  › 
  2. Margaret Atwood
Margaret Atwood photo

Margaret Atwood Quotes

Total quotes: 12
“In the spring, at the end of the day, you should smell like dirt.”
— Margaret Atwood, Bluebeard's Egg: Stories
Tagged: Nature, Awe Of Nature, Being A Child, positive, Spring, Youth
“Take me to your trees. Take me to your breakfasts, your sunsets, your bad dreams, your shoes, your nouns. Take me to your fingers.”
— Margaret Atwood, Good Bones
“What use is moonlight?
I reach into it, fingers open,
and my hand is silvered
and blessed, and comes back to me holding
nothing.”
— Margaret Atwood, Interlunar
Tagged: Moon, Temptation, Poetry, Disappointment, Empty
“You can only be jealous of someone who has something you think you ought to have yourself.”
— Margaret Atwood, The Handmaid's Tale
Tagged: Jealousy, Desire
“Why does the mind do such things? Turn on us, rend us, dig the claws in. If you get hungry enough, they say, you start eating your own heart. Maybe it's much the same.”
— Margaret Atwood, The Blind Assassin
Tagged: Mind, Perception, Obsessiveness, Obsessing
“Nature is to zoos as God is to churches.”
— Margaret Atwood, Oryx and Crake
Tagged: Religion, God, Church
“We slept in what had once been the gymnasium.”
— Margaret Atwood, The Handmaid's Tale
Tagged: first lines of books
“If we were all on trial for our thoughts, we would all be hanged.”
— Margaret Atwood, Alias Grace: A Novel
Tagged: Thoughts, Perspective, Perception
“Potential has a shelf life.”
— Margaret Atwood, Cat's Eye
Tagged: Potential, Opportunity, Going For It, Ambition
“I’m working on my own life story. I don’t mean I’m putting it together; no, I’m taking it apart. It’s mostly a question of editing. If you’d wanted the narrative line you should have asked earlier, when I still knew everything and was more than willing to tell.”
— Margaret Atwood, The Tent
Tagged: Life, Story, Confusion, Uncertainty, Change
“When you are in the middle of a story it isn't a story at all, but only a confusion; a dark roaring, a blindness, a wreckage of shattered glass and splintered wood; like a house in a whirlwind, or else a boat crushed by the icebergs or swept over the rapids, and all aboard powerless to stop it. It's only afterwards that it becomes anything like a story at all. When you are telling it, to yourself or to someone else.”
— Margaret Atwood, Alias Grace: A Novel
Tagged: Confusion, Middles, Stories, Uncertainty
“All stories are about wolves. All worth repeating, that is. Anything else is sentimental drivel…. Think about it. There’s escaping from the wolves, fighting the wolves, capturing the wolves, taming the wolves. Being thrown to the wolves, or throwing others to the wolves so the wolves will eat them instead of you. Running with the wolf pack. Turning into a wolf. Best of all, turning into the head wolf. No other decent stories exist.”
— Margaret Atwood, The Blind Assassin: A Novel
Tagged: Wolf, Independence, Wild, Literature
loading next page...