Quote

A man is just a woman's strategy for making other women.

Margaret Atwood

Change background

T
T
T

Change font

TAGS & TOPICS

Margaret Atwood
Age: 85
Born: 1939
Born: November 18
Essayist
Inventor
Literary Critic
Non-Fiction Writer
Novelist
Pedagogue
Poet
Science Fiction Writer
Writer
Ottawa (Ontario)
Margaret Eleanor Atwood
Woman
Making
Women
Men
Strategy

More quotes by Margaret Atwood

Image
I enjoyed teaching. I liked the students. Having to formulate my ideas about literature made them clearer. I did not particularly enjoy the more bureaucratic aspects of the job. However, if you are teaching fervently, your energy and time are used up at a great rate.
Margaret Atwood
Image
As human beings, we are always torn between individual freedom and the ability of choose our actions, and the need for at least enough social structure so that anarchy, chaos, and warlordery - or the war of all against all - can be avoided.
Margaret Atwood
Image
But people will do anything rather than admit that their lives have no meaning. No use, that is. No plot.
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
poetry is where the language is renewed.
Margaret Atwood
Image
Love is giving, marriage is buying and selling. You can't put love into a contract.
Margaret Atwood
Image
In my dreams of this city I am always lost.
Margaret Atwood
Image
I’m not used to girls, or familiar with their customs. I feel awkward around them, I don’t know what to say. I know the unspoken rules of boys, but with girls I sense that I am always on the verge of some unforeseen, calamitous blunder.
Margaret Atwood
Image
If a god showed up every time you put a quarter in the prayer slot it wouldn't be God, it would be a puppet that you could control by doing that...that would make the deity subservient to you. So it wouldn't be a deity would it?
Margaret Atwood
Image
I was unfair to him, of course, but where would I have been without unfairness? In thrall, in harness. Young women need unfairness, it's one of their few defenses. They need their callousness, they need their ignorance. They walk in the dark, along the edges of high cliffs, humming to themselves, thinking themselves invulnerable.
Margaret Atwood
Image
As an artist your first loyalty is to your art. Unless this is the case, you're going to be a second-rate artist.
Margaret Atwood
Image
It's his word against the Commander's, unless he wants to head a posse. Kick in the door, and what did I tell you? Caught in the act, sinfully Scrabbling. Quick, eat those words.
Margaret Atwood
Image
When I finally went to school I had to adjust to other girls and learn their fiendish ways. Having learnt them, I turned them on all and sundry.
Margaret Atwood
Image
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
Image
History, as I recall, was never this winsome, and especially not this clean, but the real thing would never sell: most people prefer a past in which nothing smells.
Margaret Atwood
Image
Whatever is silenced will clamor to be heard, though silently.
Margaret Atwood
Image
Every habit he's ever had is still there in his body, lying dormant like flowers in the desert. Given the right conditions, all his old addictions would burst into full and luxuriant bloom.
Margaret Atwood
Image
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.
Margaret Atwood
Image
Show me a character totally without anxieties and I will show you a boring book.
Margaret Atwood
Image
You don't look back along time but down through it, like water. Sometimes this comes to the surface, sometimes that, sometimes nothing. Nothing goes away.
Margaret Atwood