Quote

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

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
Look
Nothing
Surface
Looks
Along
Sometimes
Goes
Time
Water
Like
Comes
Away
Back

More quotes by Margaret Atwood

Image
Every novel is-at the beginning-the same opening of a door onto a completely unknown space.
Margaret Atwood
Image
You may not be able to alter reality, but you can alter your attitude towards it, and this, paradoxically, alters reality. Try it and see.
Margaret Atwood
Image
He's lost something, some illusion I used to think was necessary to him. He's come to realize he too is human. Or is this a performance, for my benefit, to show me he's up-to-date? Maybe men shouldn't have been told about their own humanity. It's only made them uncomfortable. It's only made them trickier, slier, more evasive, harder to read.
Margaret Atwood
Image
No one knows what cuases an outer landscape to become an inner one.
Margaret Atwood
Image
Write down the thoughts and even more, write down a specific line. If you don't, it'll fly away forever.
Margaret Atwood
Image
and each of his voices left his body in a different colored soul and floated up towards the sun still singing.
Margaret Atwood
Image
The myth that everyone once read great literature is just a myth.
Margaret Atwood
Image
I lie on the floor, washed by nothing and hanging on. I cry at night. I am afraid of hearing voices, or a voice. I have come to the edge, of the land. I could get pushed over.
Margaret Atwood
Image
In the animal world individuals cheat, as do we.
Margaret Atwood
Image
What we share may be a lot like a traffic accident but we get one another. We are survivors of each other. We have been shark to one another, but also lifeboat. That counts for something.
Margaret Atwood
Image
Each form has its pluses and its minuses.
Margaret Atwood
Image
You can only be jealous of someone who has something you think you ought to have yourself.
Margaret Atwood
Image
Tell what is yours to tell. Let others tell what is theirs.
Margaret Atwood
Image
Never mind. Point being that you don't have to get too worked up about us, dear educated minds. You don't have to think of us aas real girls, real flesh and blood, real pain, real injustice. That might be too upsetting. Just discard the sordid part. Consider us pure symbol. We're no more real than money.
Margaret Atwood
Image
Can I be blamed for wanting a real body, to put my arms around? Without it I too am disembodied. I can listen to my own heartbeat against the bedsprings...but there’s something dead about it, something deserted.
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
But some people can't tell where it hurts. They can't calm down. They can't ever stop howling.
Margaret Atwood
Image
There's an epigram tacked to my office bulletin board, pinched from a magazine -- Wanting to meet an author because you like his work is like wanting to meet a duck because you like pâté.
Margaret Atwood
Image
He has to find more and better ways of occupying his time. His time, what a bankrupt idea, as if he's been given a box of time belonging to him alone, stuffed to the brim with hours and minutes that he can spend like money. Trouble is, the box has holes in it and the time is running out, no matter what he does with it.
Margaret Atwood
Image
Farewells can be shattering, but returns are surely worse. Solid flesh can never live up to the bright shadow cast by its absence.
Margaret Atwood