Quote

I've never understood why people consider youth a time of freedom and joy. It's probably because they have forgotten their own.

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
Freedom
Aging
Never
Forgotten
Time
Consider
People
Understood
Youth
Joy
Probably
Understanding

More quotes by Margaret Atwood

Image
Happy as a clam, is what my mother says for happy. I am happy as a clam: hard-shelled, firmly closed.
Margaret Atwood
Image
You could tell 'The Handmaid's Tale' from a male point of view. People have mistakenly felt that the women are oppressed, but power tends to organise itself in a pyramid. I could pick a male narrator from somewhere in that pyramid. It would interesting.
Margaret Atwood
Image
What am I living for and what am I dying for are the same question.
Margaret Atwood
Image
expectation isn't the same as desire
Margaret Atwood
Image
No male writer is likely to be asked to sit on a panel addressing itself to the special problems of a male writer.
Margaret Atwood
Image
Anaesthesia, that's one technique: if it hurts, invent a different pain.
Margaret Atwood
Image
A lot of the stuff Kafka said he thought was hilariously funny.
Margaret Atwood
Image
Without the light, no chance without the dark, no dance.
Margaret Atwood
Image
Moira was like an elevator with open sides. She made us dizzy.
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
When women let their hair down, it means either sexiness or craziness or death, the three by Victorian times having become virtually synonymous.
Margaret Atwood
Image
Laughter may instruct but it may also conceal, defending the joker against anger and retaliation: a game is only a game.
Margaret Atwood
Image
I always thought eating was a ridiculous activity anyway. I'd get out of it myself if I could, though you've got to do it to stay alive, they tell me.
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
If it's all instruction, you get annoyed with it and bored, and you stop reading. If it's all entertainment, you read it quite quickly, your heart going pitty-pat, pitty-pat. But when you finish, that's it. You're not going to think about it much afterward, apart from the odd nightmare. You're not going to read that book again.
Margaret Atwood
Image
I don't want to look at something that determines me so completely.
Margaret Atwood
Image
How easy it is, treachery. You just slide into it.
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
Although from you I far must roam, do not be broken hearted. We two, who in the souls are one, are never truly parted.
Margaret Atwood
Image
What fabrications they are, mothers. Scarecrows, wax dolls for us to stick pins into, crude diagrams. We deny them an existence of their own, we make them up to suit ourselves -- our own hungers, our own wishes, our own deficiencies.
Margaret Atwood