Remember that, my child. Remember you are half water. If you can't go through an obstacle, go around it. Water does. — Margaret Atwood Copy Share Image
“Unlike some other religions, we have never felt it served a higher purpose to lie to children about geology.” — Margaret Atwood Copy Share Image
“Already my childhood seemed far away—a remote age, faded and bittersweet, like dried flowers. Did I regret its loss, did I want… — Margaret Atwood Copy Share Image
Without the protection of surliness and levity, all children would be crushed by the past—the past of others, loaded onto their shoulders.… — Margaret Atwood Copy Share Image
For the children with their greedy little mouths represent the future, which like time itself will devour all now alive. — Margaret Atwood Copy Share Image
He’d developed a strangely tender feeling towards such words, as if they were children abandoned in the woods and it was his… — Margaret Atwood Copy Share Image
Time has not stood still. It has washed over me, washed me away, as if I'm nothing more than a woman of… — Margaret Atwood Copy Share Image
“In those timeless years between infancy and, say, seven what is has always been: in that way children inhabit the realm of… — Margaret Atwood Copy Share Image
“The stories the children whispered to one another - while they sat weaving their endless carpets, while they could still see -… — Margaret Atwood Copy Share Image
“No mother is ever, completely, a child’s idea of what a mother should be, and I suppose it works the other way… — Margaret Atwood Copy Share Image
“When a child, I have played games with a blindfold obscuring my vision. Now I am like that child. Blindfolded, groping my… — Margaret Atwood Copy Share Image
“if the teenage kids want to carouse, that's where they do it. They make bonfires, and drink too much and smoke dope,… — Margaret Atwood Copy Share Image
“Maybe the kid gravitated to Zeb for the same reason children like dinosaurs: when feeling abandoned in a world of forces beyond… — Margaret Atwood Copy Share Image
Children were vehicles for passing things along. These things could be kingdoms, rich wedding gifts, stories, grudges, blood feuds. Through children, alliances… — Margaret Atwood Copy Share Image
“She has never been in the presence, before, of two people who are in love with each other. She feels like a… — Margaret Atwood Copy Share Image
Most mothers worry when their daughters reach adolescence but I was the opposite. I relaxed, I sighed with relief. Little girls are… — Margaret Atwood Copy Share Image
“Here the children have a custom. After the celebration of evil they take those vacant heads that shone once with such anguish… — Margaret Atwood Copy Share Image
“I learned about religion the way most children learned about sex, [in the schoolyard]. . . . They terrified me by telling… — Margaret Atwood Copy Share Image
“That image - of a little child being suffocated, or almost suffocated, by others who thought the whole thing was a game… — Margaret Atwood Copy Share Image
“Now maybe I wouldn't do it, but I was a child then," said Oryx more softly. "Why are you so angry?" "I… — Margaret Atwood Copy Share Image
“Luke and I used to walk together, sometimes, along these streets. We used to talk about buying a house like one of… — Margaret Atwood Copy Share Image
“Children don’t read ‘genres’; they read stories. Below a certain age, they don’t distinguish between ‘true’ and ‘not true,’ because they see… — Margaret Atwood Copy Share Image
Of course (said Oryx), having a money value was no substitute for love. Every child should have love, every person should have… — Margaret Atwood Copy Share Image
But thoughtless ingratitude is the armour of the young; without it, how would they ever get through life? The old wish the… — Margaret Atwood Copy Share Image
“Her metaphors for her children included barnacles encrusting a ship and limpets clinging to a rock.” — Margaret Atwood Copy Share Image
“No mother is ever, completely, a child’s idea of what a mother should be, and I suppose it works the other way… — Margaret Atwood Copy Share Image
“There is a little verse I remember from a child: Needles and pins, needles and pins, When a man marries his trouble… — Margaret Atwood Copy Share Image
“You're not my real parents, every child has thought. I'm not your real child. But with orphans, it's true. What freedom, to… — Margaret Atwood Copy Share Image
This afternoon held that special quality of mournful emptiness I've connected with late Sunday afternoons ever since childhood: the feeling of having… — Margaret Atwood Copy Share Image
I didn't go to school for a full year until I was 12. In the summer I was a wild child in… — Margaret Atwood Copy Share Image
“I am a believer in sensible choices, so different from many of my own. Also in sensible names for children.” — Margaret Atwood Copy Share Image
No matter how much you've been warned, Death always comes without knocking. Why now? is the cry. Why so soon? It's the… — Margaret Atwood Copy Share Image
“But it seems she’d wanted children after all, because when she was told she’d been accidentally sterilized she could feel all the… — Margaret Atwood Copy Share Image
Perhaps I write for no one. Perhaps for the same person children are writing for when they scrawl their names in the… — Margaret Atwood Copy Share Image
I spent much of my childhood in northern Quebec, and often there was no radio, no television - there wasn't a lot… — Margaret Atwood Copy Share Image
“What are we do to? The child sex trade is not for us: our children are unattractive and rude, and - due… — Margaret Atwood Copy Share Image
It's a critical fallacy of our times ... that a writer should 'grow,' 'change,' or 'develop.' This fallacy causes us to expect… — Margaret Atwood Copy Share Image
“Every child should have love, every person should have it. She herself would rather have had her mother's love - the love… — Margaret Atwood Copy Share Image
“I'm fine," said Pilar, "for the moment. And the moment is the only time we can be fine in.” — Margaret Atwood Copy Share Image
And yet it disturbs me to learn I have hurt someone unintentionally. I want all my hurts to be intentional. — Margaret Atwood Copy Share Image
“Mary: Some call this "Eve's curse," but I think that is stupid because the real curse of Eve was having to put up with… — Margaret Atwood Copy Share Image
“The birds were singing around me, but I reflected that the very birds were strangers to me, for I did not even know their… — Margaret Atwood Copy Share Image
“Strange how we decorate pain. These ribbons, for instance, and the small hard teardrops of blood. Who are they for? Do we think the… — margaret atwood Copy Share Image
I wanted to forget the past, but it refused to forget me; it waited for sleep, then cornered me. — Margaret Atwood Copy Share Image
“Back at home they drew the curtains and read, with disapproval, with relish, with avidity and glee - even the ones who'd never thought… — Margaret Atwood Copy Share Image
All fiction is about people, unless it's about rabbits pretending to be people. It's all essentially characters in action, which means characters moving through… — Margaret Atwood Copy Share Image
“Simon walks back to the house alone. The night is clear and warm, with a moon, almost full, enclosed in a nimbus of mist;… — Margaret Atwood Copy Share Image
“There is indeed something delightful about being able to combine obedience and disobedience in the same act.” — Margaret Atwood Copy Share Image
“Every time the women appear, Snowman is astonished all over again. They're every known colour from the deepest black to whitest white, they're various… — Margaret Atwood Copy Share Image