Quote

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

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
Persons
Causes
Mad
Ideas
Books
Behave
Person
Age
Medical
Look
Turns
Madness
Book
Rather
Popular
Play
Idea
Songs
Looks
Song
Usually
Professionals
Every
Stories
Turn
Plays

More quotes by Margaret Atwood

Image
My own view of myself was that I was small and innocuous, a marshmallow compared to the others. I was a poor shot with a 22, for instance, and not very good with an ax. It took me a long time to figure out that the youngest in a family of dragons is still a dragon from the point of view of those who find dragons alarming.
Margaret Atwood
Image
Lose your temper and you lose the fight.
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
If you want what's in the package you should at least know how to get the string off, is what I say.
Margaret Atwood
Image
The only way you can write the truth is to assume that what you set down will never be read.
Margaret Atwood
Image
Where there's a doctor it's always a bad sign. Even when they are not doing the killing themselves it means a death is close, and in that way they are like ravens or crows.
Margaret Atwood
Image
I'm the only person you've ever met who has read Longfellow.
Margaret Atwood
Image
To want is to have a weakness.
Margaret Atwood
Image
... Remember that forgiveness too is a power. To beg for it is a power, and to withold or bestow it is a power, perhaps the greatest.
Margaret Atwood
Image
Every utopia - let's just stick with the literary ones - faces the same problem: What do you do with the people who don't fit in?
Margaret Atwood
Image
Keep an eye on the weather, which is changing faster than predicted, and on the new diseases escaping or being made, even as we speak. It's a race between new tech and biosphere bankruptcy, I'd say.
Margaret Atwood
Image
It wasn't so easy though, ending the war. A war is a huge fire the ashes from it drift far, and settle slowly.
Margaret Atwood
Image
Storytelling is a very old human skill that gives us an evolutionary advantage. If you can tell young people how you kill an emu, acted out in song or dance, or that Uncle George was eaten by a croc over there, don't go there to swim, then those young people don't have to find out by trial and error.
Margaret Atwood
Image
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
Image
Neither of us says the word love, not once. It would be tempting fate it would be romance, bad luck.
Margaret Atwood
Image
But maybe boredom is erotic, when women do it, for men.
Margaret Atwood
Image
I could end this with a moral, as if this were a fable about animals, though no fables are really about animals.
Margaret Atwood
Image
What am I living for and what am I dying for are the same question.
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
It's very hard for students not to be in debt unless they've got big scholarships or rich parents. And it's called investing in your future, but like any investment it's risky because your future is an unknown quantity. However, if you don't invest in your future, you may be flipping hamburgers for the rest of your life. So it's a real dilemma.
Margaret Atwood