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

More quotes by Margaret Atwood

Image
It isn't chic for women to be drunk. Men drunks are more excusable, more easily absolved, but why? It must be thought they have better reasons.
Margaret Atwood
Image
This has been her problem all her life: picturing other people's responses. She's too good at it. She can picture the response of anyone--other people's reactions, their emotions, their criticisms, their demands--but somehow they don't reciprocate. Maybe they can't. Maybe they lack the gift, if it is one.
Margaret Atwood
Image
If you disagree with your government, that's political. If you disagree with your government that is approaching theocracy, then you're evil.
Margaret Atwood
Image
Debt is part of the human condition. Civilization is based on exchanges - on gifts, trades, loans - and the revenges and insults that come when they are not paid back.
Margaret Atwood
Image
In the evenings there's been thunder, a distant bumping and stumbling, like God on a sullen binge.
Margaret Atwood
Image
To live in prison is to live without mirrors. To live without mirrors is to live without the self.
Margaret Atwood
Image
All observations of life are harsh, because life is. I lament that fact, but I cannot change it.
Margaret Atwood
Image
There's nothing like drawing a thing to make you really see it.
Margaret Atwood
Image
Support your libraries... or else!
Margaret Atwood
Image
I believe in the resistance as I believe there can be no light without shadow or rather, no shadow unless there is also light.
Margaret Atwood
Image
The body is so easily damaged, so easily disposed of, water and chemicals is all it is, hardly more to it than a jellyfish drying on sand.
Margaret Atwood
Image
While in a vintage restaurant...the past isn't quaint while you're in it. Only at a safe distance, later, when you see it as decor, not as the shape your life's been squeezed into.
Margaret Atwood
Image
Stick a shovel into the ground almost anywhere and some horrible thing or other will come to light. Good for trade, we thrive on bones without them there'd be no stories.
Margaret Atwood
Image
No one knows what cuases an outer landscape to become an inner one.
Margaret Atwood
Image
Foreignness is all around. Only in the heart of the heart of the country, namely the heart of the United States, can you avoid such a thing. In the center of an empire, you can think of your experience as universal. Outside the empire or on the fringes of the empire, you cannot.
Margaret Atwood
Image
I look up at the ceiling, tracing the foliage of the wreath. Today it makes me think of a hat, the large-brimmed hats women used to wear at some period during the old days: hats like enormous halos, festooned with fruit and flowers, and the feathers of exotic birds hats like an idea of paradise, floating just above the head, a thought solidified.
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
It's in Macbeth: The devil damn thee black, thou cream-faced loon. I seldom have occasion to pull it out, but it's ready and waiting!
Margaret Atwood
Image
To take that risk, to offer life and remain alive, open yourself like this and become whole.
Margaret Atwood
Image
In the spring, at the end of the day, you should smell like dirt.
Margaret Atwood