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

More quotes by Margaret Atwood

Image
There may not be one Truth - there may be several truths - but saying that is not to say that reality doesn't exist.
Margaret Atwood
Image
People cry at weddings for the same reason they cry at happy endings: because they so desperately want to believe in something they know is not credible.
Margaret Atwood
Image
More powerful than God, more evil than the Devil the poor have it, the rich lack it, and if you eat it you die?
Margaret Atwood
Image
Children were vehicles for passing things along. These things could be kingdoms, rich wedding gifts, stories, grudges, blood feuds. Through children, alliances were forged through children, wrongs were avenged. To have a child was to set loose a force in the world.
Margaret Atwood
Image
I walk away from him. It's enormously pleasing to me, this walking away. It's like being able to make people appear and vanish, at will.
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 any civilization is dust and ashes, he said, art is all that's left over. Images, words, music. Imaginative structures. Meaning—human meaning, that is—is defined by them. You have to admit that.
Margaret Atwood
Image
For me the experience of writing is really an experience of losing control.... I think it's very much like dreaming or like surfing. You go out there and wait for a wave, and when it comes it takes you somewhere and you don't know where it'll go.
Margaret Atwood
Image
A voice is a human gift it should be cherished and used, to utter fully human speech as possible. Powerlessness and silence go together.
Margaret Atwood
Image
I'm not senile, I snapped. If I burn the house down it will be on purpose.
Margaret Atwood
Image
When we're young, we like happy endings. When we're a little older, we think happy endings are unrealistic and so we prefer bad but credible endings. When we're older still, we realize happy endings aren't so bad after all.
Margaret Atwood
Image
Screw poetry, it’s you I want, your taste, rain on you, mouth on your skin.
Margaret Atwood
Image
Though as he'd say, what is 'belief' but a willingness to suspend the negatives?
Margaret Atwood
Image
I sometimes felt as if these marks on my body were a kind of code, which blossomed, then faded, like invisible ink held to a candle. But if they were a code, who held the key to it? I was sand, I was snow — written on, rewritten, smoothed over.
Margaret Atwood
Image
Stupidity is the same as evil if you judge by the results.
Margaret Atwood
Image
You can't keep a cool head when you're drowning in love. You just trash around a lot and scream, and wear yourself out.
Margaret Atwood
Image
Where do the words go when we have said them?
Margaret Atwood
Image
A rat in a maze is free to go anywhere, as long as it stays inside the maze.
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
he might die for her, but living for her would be quite different.
Margaret Atwood