Quote

A rat in a maze is free to go anywhere, as long as it stays inside the maze.

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
Long
Maze
Mazes
Stays
Rats
Anywhere
Inside
Free

More quotes by Margaret Atwood

Image
In the animal world individuals cheat, as do we.
Margaret Atwood
Image
Her glass wings are gone.
Margaret Atwood
Image
The only way you can write the truth is to assume that what you set down will never be read. Not by any other person, and not even by yourself at some later date. Otherwise you begin excusing yourself. You must see the writing as emerging like a long scroll of ink from the index finger of your right hand you must see your left hand erasing it.
Margaret Atwood
Image
I did ... learn an important distinction in graduate school: a speculation about who had syphilis when is gossip if it's about your friends, a plot element if it's about a character in a novel, and scholarship if it's about John Keats.
Margaret Atwood
Image
I grew up in the golden age of Flash Gordon and sci-fi.
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
A lot of the stuff Kafka said he thought was hilariously funny.
Margaret Atwood
Image
Debt is part of the human condition. Civilization is based on exchanges - on gifts, trades, loans - and the revenges and insults that come when they are not paid back.
Margaret Atwood
Image
Reading ... changes you. You aren't the same person after you've read a particular book as you were before, and you will read the next book, unless both are Harlequin Romances, in a slightly different way.
Margaret Atwood
Image
Blondes are like white mice, you only find them in cages. They wouldn’t last long in nature. They’re too conspicuous.
Margaret Atwood
Image
The responsible treatment of this particular Ring of Power is not necessarily to toss it into the Cracks of Doom. But we have to come up with something rather quickly, or what we'll get is the Land of Mordor.
Margaret Atwood
Image
The alcohol smell is on my fingers, cold and remote, piercing like a steel pin going in. It smells like white enamel basins. When I look up at the stars in the nighttime, cold and white and sharp, I think they must smell like that.
Margaret Atwood
Image
The moment of betrayal is the worst, the moment when you know beyond any doubt that you've been betrayed: that some other human being has wished you that much evil
Margaret Atwood
Image
She had no images of this love. She could offer no anecdotes. It was a belief rather than a memory.
Margaret Atwood
Image
But in the end, back she comes. There's no use resisting. She goes to him for amnesia, for oblivion. She renders herself up, is blotted out enters the darkness of her own body, forgets her name. Immolation is what she wants, however briefly. To exist without boundaries.
Margaret Atwood
Image
If I love you, is that a fact or a weapon?
Margaret Atwood
Image
Remember that, my child. Remember you are half water. If you can't go through an obstacle, go around it. Water does.
Margaret Atwood
Image
Repeat reading for me shares a few things with hot-water bottles and thumbsucking: comfort, familiarity, the recurrence of the expected.
Margaret Atwood
Image
About no subject are poets tempted to lie so much as about their own lives.
Margaret Atwood
Image
But who can remember pain, once it’s over? All that remains of it is a shadow, not in the mind even, in the flesh. Pain marks you, but too deep to see. Out of sight, out of mind.
Margaret Atwood