X

Sort by

Quote length

Sentiment

Change font

Change background

Margaret Atwood Inspirational Quotes (469)

Page 3 of 20
Filter & Style
Image
Writing is alone, but I don't think it's lonely. Ask any writer if they feel lonely when they're writing their book, and I think they'll say no.
Margaret Atwood
Image
Debt is part of the human condition. Civilization is based on exchanges - on gifts, trades, loans - and the revenges and insults that come when they are not paid back.
Margaret Atwood
Image
Hunger is a powerful reorganizer of the conscience.
Margaret Atwood
Image
Things might have been different if she hadn't been able to drift if she'd had to concentrate on her next meal, instead of dwelling on all the injuries she felt we'd done her. An unearned income encourages self-pity in those already prone to it.
Margaret Atwood
Image
His father was self-made, but his mother was constructed by others, and such edifices are notoriously fragile.
Margaret Atwood
Image
She knows the rituals, she knows how we're supposed to be behaving...But I think these things are impenetrable and fraudulent, and I can't do them without feeling I'm acting.
Margaret Atwood
Image
Teaching other people to write is not something I can do. The only kind of advice I can give them will be trite by its nature. Of course, read a lot, write a lot. The kind of advice I wish I had been given is all of a practical nature, having to do with publishers and agents.
Margaret Atwood
Image
Poetry isn't written from the idea down. It's written from the phrase, line and stanza up, which is different from what your teacher taught you to do in school.
Margaret Atwood
Image
The body is so easily damaged, so easily disposed of, water and chemicals is all it is, hardly more to it than a jellyfish drying on sand.
Margaret Atwood
Image
I didn't much like it, this grudge-holding against the past.
Margaret Atwood
Image
The short answer to 'Why do you write' is - I suppose I write for some of the same reasons I read: to live a double life to go places I haven't been to examine life on earth to come to know people in ways, and at depths, that are otherwise impossible to be surprised.
Margaret Atwood
Image
All observations of life are harsh, because life is. I lament that fact, but I cannot change it.
Margaret Atwood
Image
The idea of the chickens with the multiple breasts and thighs came from an urban legend that some fast-food places had developed chickens with four thighs. It wasn't true, but it is a suggestive rumor.
Margaret Atwood
Image
The truly fearless think of themselves as normal.
Margaret Atwood
Image
Jimmy had been full of himself back then, thinks Snowman with indulgence and a little envy. He’d been unhappy too, of course. It went without saying, his unhappiness. He’d put a lot of energy into it.
Margaret Atwood
Image
Just as if you do a mash-up of reality from the point of view of African Americans in this country, you're going to end up with something that will say, This is Black Lives Matter. It's not that people necessarily have started out from that premise. But if you're looking at reality, that will be the result because that is reality.
Margaret Atwood
Image
Confronted by too much emptiness ... the brain invents. Loneliness creates company as thirst creates water. How many sailors have been wrecked in pursuit of islands that were merely a shimmering?
Margaret Atwood
Image
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, something that's drowning me. I am inadequate and stupid, without worth. I might as well be dead.
Margaret Atwood
Image
The act of making a photograph is less a question of what is being looked at than how.
Margaret Atwood
Image
Blondes are like white mice, you only find them in cages. They wouldn’t last long in nature. They’re too conspicuous.
Margaret Atwood
Image
Science is not something that exists apart from human beings. It's one of the things we do as human beings, and we always have done science and technology in some form.
Margaret Atwood
Image
He’d developed a strangely tender feeling towards such words, as if they were children abandoned in the woods and it was his duty to rescue them.
Margaret Atwood
Image
Victorian literature was my subject at Harvard.
Margaret Atwood
Image
You can examine the whole 19th century from the point of view of who would have maxed out their credit cards. Emma Bovary would have maxed hers out. No question. Mr. Scrooge would not have. He would have snipped his up.
Margaret Atwood
Previous
Next