Quote

My brother and I were both good at science, and we were both good at English literature. Either one of us could have gone either way.

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
Gone
Science
Way
Good
English
Brother
Either
Literature

More quotes by Margaret Atwood

Image
Oppression involves a failure of the imagination: the failure to imagine the full humanity of other human beings.
Margaret Atwood
Image
She had no images of this love. She could offer no anecdotes. It was a belief rather than a memory.
Margaret Atwood
Image
If a god showed up every time you put a quarter in the prayer slot it wouldn't be God, it would be a puppet that you could control by doing that...that would make the deity subservient to you. So it wouldn't be a deity would it?
Margaret Atwood
Image
Happy as a clam, is what my mother says for happy. I am happy as a clam: hard-shelled, firmly closed.
Margaret Atwood
Image
About no subject are poets tempted to lie so much as about their own lives.
Margaret Atwood
Image
All I can hope for is a reconstruction: the way love feels is always only approximate.
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
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
Don't let the bastards grind you down.
Margaret Atwood
Image
So this was the rest of his life. It felt like a party to which he'd been invited, but at an address he couldn't actually locate. Someone must be having fun at it, this life of his only, right at the moment, it wasn't him.
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
We are very short on organs, and the pig solution is probably a lot better than the human clone solution - though maybe not for the pigs.
Margaret Atwood
Image
It made him feel invisible—not that he wanted to feel anything else.
Margaret Atwood
Image
It's evening, one of those gray water-color washes, like liquid dust.
Margaret Atwood
Image
The cat jumps up on the bed and tries to get onto my head. It's his way of telling whether or not i'm dead. If i'm not, he wants to be scratched if i am - he'll think of something
Margaret Atwood
Image
All fat women look the same they all look 42.
Margaret Atwood
Image
To take that risk, to offer life and remain alive, open yourself like this and become whole.
Margaret Atwood
Image
It was very interesting to me that when Louisiana was destroyed in that flood the fundamentalists were very quick to say, it's the punishment of God on a sinful city. Now that the oil industry has been so hard hit in Galveston, are they up on their pulpits saying, God is punishing the oil industry? No, no, no!
Margaret Atwood
Image
Powerlessness and silence go together.
Margaret Atwood
Image
Writing is alone, but I don't think it's lonely. Ask any writer if they feel lonely when they're writing their book, and I think they'll say no.
Margaret Atwood