Quote

This is what I miss, Cordelia: not something that’s gone, but something that will never happen. Two old women giggling over their tea.

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
Cordelia
Two
Women
Giggling
Something
Tea
Never
Miss
Missing
Happen
Gone
Happens

More quotes by Margaret Atwood

Image
You most likely need a thesaurus, a rudimentary grammar book, and a grip on reality. This latter means: there's no free lunch. Writing is work. It's also gambling. You don't get a pension plan. Other people can help you a bit, but ­essentially you're on your own. Nobody is making you do this: you chose it, so don't whine.
Margaret Atwood
Image
There's nothing like a shovel full of dirt to encourage literacy.
Margaret Atwood
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
I think the book you always like best is the one you're about to write.
Margaret Atwood
Image
You can pretty much trace when the big individual indebtedness kicked in, and it was when the credit card became generally available.
Margaret Atwood
Image
In theory I can do almost anything certainly I have been told how. In practice I do as little as possible. I pretend to myself that I would be quite happy in a hermit's cave, living on gruel, if someone else would make the gruel. Gruel, like so many other things, is beyond me.
Margaret Atwood
Image
art happens. It happens when you have the craft and the vocation and are waiting for something else, something extra, or maybe not waiting in any case it happens. It's the extra rabbit coming out of the hat, the one you didn't put there.
Margaret Atwood
Image
Ten days after the war ended, my sister Laura drove a car off a bridge.
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
While in a vintage restaurant...the past isn't quaint while you're in it. Only at a safe distance, later, when you see it as decor, not as the shape your life's been squeezed into.
Margaret Atwood
Image
I suppose these deadlines we set for ourselves are really a way of saying we appreciate time, and want to use all of it.
Margaret Atwood
Image
In Paradise there are no stories, because there are no journeys.
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 would not change [my past work] anymore than I would airbrush a photo of myself.
Margaret Atwood
Image
It's rather useless to write a gripping narrative with nothing in it but climate change because novels are always about people even if they purport to be about rabbits or robots.
Margaret Atwood
Image
How could I be sleeping with this particular man.... Surely only true love could justify my lack of taste.
Margaret Atwood
Image
Choice of evils debates always produce extremism - people choose what they hope is the lesser evil, then call it good and demonize the other choice. It will be a challenge for your generation to synthesize - to move beyond Us versus Them, to We.
Margaret Atwood
Image
We still think of a powerful man as a born leader and a powerful woman as an anomaly.
Margaret Atwood
Image
Fiction is not necessarily about what you know, it's about how you feel. That is the truth about fiction, and the other truth is that all science is a tool, and we use our tools not to actualise what we know, but to implement how we feel.
Margaret Atwood
Image
The problem is huge. We've just added seventy-five million people to the already large proportion of people in the world who are malnourished all the time, whose bodies are being starved.
Margaret Atwood