Quote

I don't want to look at something that determines me so completely.

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
Determines
Determine
Completely
Look
Looks
Something

More quotes by Margaret Atwood

Image
It's evening, one of those gray water-color washes, like liquid dust.
Margaret Atwood
Image
I'm a refugee from the past, and like other refugees I go over the customs and habits of being I've left or been forced to leave behind me, and it all seems just as quaint, from here, and I am just as obsessive about it.
Margaret Atwood
Image
Everybody acts as if they have free will. They act as if they can make these decisions do they know they don't? I think there's been some back-down on the idea that everything is determined.
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
In the spring, at the end of the day, you should smell like dirt.
Margaret Atwood
Image
Glenn used to say the reason you can't really imagine yourself being dead was that as soon as you say, 'I'll be dead,' you've said the word I, and so you're still alive inside the sentence. And that's how people got the idea of the immortality of the soul - it was a consequence of grammar.
Margaret Atwood
Image
Love is giving, marriage is buying and selling. You can't put love into a contract.
Margaret Atwood
Image
There's always something to occupy the inquiring mind.
Margaret Atwood
Image
For every age there is a popular idea about what madness is, what causes it, and how a mad person should look and behave and it's usually these popular ideas, rather than those of medical professionals, that turn up in songs and stories and plays and books.
Margaret Atwood
Image
I was horrified in high school by the fate of the hanged maids at the end of the Odyssey it seemed unfair to me, even then.
Margaret Atwood
Image
I'm not senile, I snapped. If I burn the house down it will be on purpose.
Margaret Atwood
Image
It made him feel invisible—not that he wanted to feel anything else.
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
In view of the fading animals the proliferation of sewers and fears the sea clogging, the air nearing extinction we should be kind, we should take warning, we should forgive each other Instead we are opposite, we touch as though attacking, the gifts we bring even in good faith maybe warp in our hands to implements, to manoeuvres
Margaret Atwood
Image
I didn't want him to become gray and multi-dimensional and complicated like everyone else. Was every Heathcliff a Linton in disguise?
Margaret Atwood
Image
Lose your temper and you lose the fight.
Margaret Atwood
Image
There is so much going on all over the world that it's impossible for one person to keep up. And I can't.
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. Time and distance blur the edges then suddenly the beloved has arrived, and it's noon with its merciless light, and every spot and pore and wrinkle and bristle stands clear.
Margaret Atwood
Image
A movie about the past is not the same as the past.
Margaret Atwood
Image
You can wet the rim of a glass and run your finger around the rim and it will make a sound. This is what I feel like: this sound of glass. I feel like the word shatter. I want to be with someone.
Margaret Atwood