Quote

A divorce is like an amputation: you survive it, but there's less of you.

Margaret Atwood

Change background

T
T
T

Change font

TAGS & TOPICS

Margaret Atwood
Age: 84
Born: 1939
Born: November 18
Essayist
Inventor
Literary Critic
Non-Fiction Writer
Novelist
Pedagogue
Poet
Science Fiction Writer
Writer
Ottawa (Ontario)
Margaret Eleanor Atwood
Divorce
Survive
Survival
Less
Like
Amputation
Divorced

More quotes by Margaret Atwood

Image
This is the solstice, the still point of the sun, its cusp and midnight, the year's threshold and unlocking, where the past lets go of and becomes the future the place of caught breath.
Margaret Atwood
Image
The answers you get from literature depend on the questions you pose.
Margaret Atwood
Image
There is so much going on all over the world that it's impossible for one person to keep up. And I can't.
Margaret Atwood
Image
I never say I'm an ist of any kind unless I know how the other person is defining it.
Margaret Atwood
Image
A lot of being a poet consists of willed ignorance. If you woke up from your trance and realized the nature of the life-threatening and dignity-destroying precipice you were walking along, you would switch into actuarial sciences immediately.
Margaret Atwood
Image
There is something reassuring about the toilets. Bodily functions at least remain democratic. Everybody shits.
Margaret Atwood
Image
I am rather saddened at the end of a book. I think most writers find this. It's like a friend departing on a voyage.
Margaret Atwood
Image
What am I living for and what am I dying for are the same question.
Margaret Atwood
Image
I grew up in the north woods of Canada. You had to know certain things about survival. Wilderness survival courses weren't very formalized when I was growing up, but I was taught certain things about what to do if I got lost in the woods.
Margaret Atwood
Image
This above all, to refuse to be a victim.
Margaret Atwood
Image
By telling you anything at all I'm at least believing in you, I believe you're there, I believe you into being.
Margaret Atwood
Image
Foreignness is all around. Only in the heart of the heart of the country, namely the heart of the United States, can you avoid such a thing. In the center of an empire, you can think of your experience as universal. Outside the empire or on the fringes of the empire, you cannot.
Margaret Atwood
Image
I'll make you mine, lovers said in old books. They never said, I'll make you me.
Margaret Atwood
Image
She knows herself to be at the mercy of events, and she knows by now that events have no mercy.
Margaret Atwood
Image
I look up at the ceiling, tracing the foliage of the wreath. Today it makes me think of a hat, the large-brimmed hats women used to wear at some period during the old days: hats like enormous halos, festooned with fruit and flowers, and the feathers of exotic birds hats like an idea of paradise, floating just above the head, a thought solidified.
Margaret Atwood
Image
The cat jumps up on the bed and tries to get onto my head. It's his way of telling whether or not i'm dead. If i'm not, he wants to be scratched if i am - he'll think of something
Margaret Atwood
Image
You need a certain amount of nerve to be a writer, an almost physical nerve, the kind you need to walk a log across a river.
Margaret Atwood
Image
But I began then to think of time as having a shape, something you could see, like a series of liquid transparencies, one laid on top of another.
Margaret Atwood
Image
You want the truth, of course. You want me to put two and two together. But two and two doesn’t necessarily get you the truth. Two and two equals a voice outside the window. Two and two equals the wind. The living bird is not its labeled bones.
Margaret Atwood
Image
I was born in the Ottawa General Hospital right after the Gray Cup Football Game in 1939. Six months later, I was backpacked into the Quebec bush. I grew up in and out of the bush, in and out of Ottawa, Sault Ste. Marie and Toronto.
Margaret Atwood