Share
×
Inspirational Quotes
Authors
Professions
Topics
Tags
Quote
Don't be married to a line or verse if it can't rhyme, fit the meter, or doesn't fit the outline.
Margaret Atwood
Share
Change background
T
T
T
Change font
Original
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
Writing
Verse
Verses
Rhyme
Fit
Line
Married
Outline
Lines
Meter
Doesn
Outlines
More quotes by Margaret Atwood
Once a month I wake in the night, slippery with terror. I'm afraid, not because there's someone in the room, in the dark, in the bed, but because there isn't. I'm afraid of the emptiness, which lies beside me like a corpse.
Margaret Atwood
As an artist your first loyalty is to your art. Unless this is the case, you're going to be a second-rate artist.
Margaret Atwood
The sands of time are quicksands ... so much can sink into them without a trace.
Margaret Atwood
I was kidnapped by literature at a young age and never wanted to be ransomed.
Margaret Atwood
The fabric of democracy is always fragile everywhere because it depends on the will of citizens to protect it, and when they become scared, when it becomes dangerous for them to defend it, it can go very quickly.
Margaret Atwood
If I am good enough and quiet enough, perhaps after all they will let me go but it’s not easy being quiet and good, it’s like hanging on to the edge of a bridge when you’ve already fallen over you don’t seem to be moving, just dangling there, and yet it is taking all your strength.
Margaret Atwood
Little girls are cute and small only to adults. To one another they are not cute. They are life-sized.
Margaret Atwood
Science never makes things that do not have to do with what we feel, by which I mean what we want and what we fear.
Margaret Atwood
I don't think the relationship between novels and realities are one to one. Of course novels play different roles. It's essentially just a long narrative form. What you use that long narrative form for can be very different.
Margaret Atwood
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
Before the Civil War, Canada was at the top of the underground railroad. If you made it into Canada, you were safe unless someone came and hauled you back. That was also true during the Vietnam War for draft resisters.
Margaret Atwood
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
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
The act of making a photograph is less a question of what is being looked at than how.
Margaret Atwood
Optimism means better than reality pessimism means worse than reality. I'm a realist.
Margaret Atwood
Laughter may instruct but it may also conceal, defending the joker against anger and retaliation: a game is only a game.
Margaret Atwood
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
A divorce is like an amputation: you survive it, but there's less of you.
Margaret Atwood
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
and each of his voices left his body in a different colored soul and floated up towards the sun still singing.
Margaret Atwood
