Quote

Time has not stood still. It has washed over me, washed me away, as if I'm nothing more than a woman of sand, left by a careless child too near the water.

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
Away
Careless
Stills
Stood
Still
Sand
Nothing
Near
Children
Child
Time
Water
Woman
Simile
Left
Washed

More quotes by Margaret Atwood

Image
Eating is our earliest metaphor, preceding our consciousness of gender difference, race, nationality, and language. We eat before we talk.
Margaret Atwood
Image
There is something reassuring about the toilets. Bodily functions at least remain democratic. Everybody shits.
Margaret Atwood
Image
Laughter may instruct but it may also conceal, defending the joker against anger and retaliation: a game is only a game.
Margaret Atwood
Image
Fatigue is here, in my body, in my legs and eyes. That is what gets you in the end. Faith is only a word, embroidered.
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
So much for endings. Beginnings are always more fun. True connoisseurs, however, are known to favor the stretch in between, since it's the hardest to do anything with. That's about all that can be said for plots, which anyway are just one thing after another, a what and a what and a what.
Margaret Atwood
Image
at last you, will say (maybe without speaking) (there are mountains inside your skull garden and chaos, ocean and hurricane certain corners of rooms, portraits of great-grandmothers, curtains of a particular shade your deserts your private dinosaurs the first woman) all i need to know: tell me everything just as it was from the beginning.
Margaret Atwood
Image
A ratio of failures is built into the process of writing. The wastebasket has evolved for a reason. Think of it as the altar of the Muse Oblivion, to whom you sacrifice your botched first drafts, the tokens of your human imperfection.
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
When I finally went to school I had to adjust to other girls and learn their fiendish ways. Having learnt them, I turned them on all and sundry.
Margaret Atwood
Image
The darkness is really out there. It's not something that's in my head, just. It's in my work because it's in the world.
Margaret Atwood
Image
For the children with their greedy little mouths represent the future, which like time itself will devour all now alive.
Margaret Atwood
Image
Why do men feel threatened by women?
Margaret Atwood
Image
In high school, in 1956, at the age of sixteen, we were not taught creative writing. We were taught literature and grammar. So no one ever told me I couldn't write both prose and poetry, and I started out writing all the things I still write: poetry, prose fiction - which took me longer to get published - and non-fiction prose.
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
A movie about the past is not the same as the past.
Margaret Atwood
Image
All I can hope for is a reconstruction: the way love feels is always only approximate.
Margaret Atwood
Image
But nothing is more opaque than absolute transparency.
Margaret Atwood
Image
A reader can never tell if it's a real thimble or an imaginary thimble, because by the time you're reading it, they're the same. It's a thimble. It's in the book.
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