I don't want to look at something that determines me so completely. — Margaret Atwood Copy Share Image
All you have to do, I tell myself, is keep your mouth shut and look stupid. It shouldn't be that hard. — Margaret Atwood Copy Share Image
You don't look back along time but down through it, like water. Sometimes this comes to the surface, sometimes that, sometimes nothing.… — Margaret Atwood Copy Share Image
For every age there is a popular idea about what madness is, what causes it, and how a mad person should look… — Margaret Atwood Copy Share Image
Canadians are fond of a good disaster, especially if it has ice, water, or snow in it. You thought the national flag… — Margaret Atwood Copy Share Image
The alcohol smell is on my fingers, cold and remote, piercing like a steel pin going in. It smells like white enamel… — Margaret Atwood Copy Share Image
Always good to take a look at the long list for the Mann Booker, for the Commonwealth. It gives you an overview.There… — Margaret Atwood Copy Share Image
He stops, looks up at this window, and I can see the white oblong of his face. We look at each other.… — Margaret Atwood Copy Share Image
If you're a woman writer, sometime, somewhere, you will be asked: Do you think of yourself as a writer first, or as… — Margaret Atwood Copy Share Image
Some cleric putting a match to her. /Neither of them looks happy about it. /Once lit, she'll burn like a book, /like… — Margaret Atwood Copy Share Image
The world is being run by people my age, men my age, with falling-out hair and health worries, and it frightens me.… — Margaret Atwood Copy Share Image
I marvel again at the nakedness of men's lives: the showers right out in the open, the body exposed for inspection and… — Margaret Atwood Copy Share Image
When they came to harvest my corpse (open your mouth, close your eyes) cut my body from the rope, surprise, surprise: I… — Margaret Atwood Copy Share Image
You can never read your own book with the innocent anticipation that comes with that first delicious page of a new book, because you wrote the thing. You've been backstage. You've seen how the rabbits were smuggled into the hat. Therefore ask a reading friend or two to look at it before you give it to anyone in the publishing… — Margaret Atwood Copy Share
And sometimes it happened, for a time. That kind of love comes and goes and is hard to remember afterwards, like pain. You would look at the man one day and you would think, I loved you, and the tense would be past, and you would be filled with a sense of wonder, because it was such an amazing and… — Margaret Atwood Copy Share
There are novels that end well, but in between there are human beings acting like human beings. And human beings are not… — Margaret Atwood Copy Share Image
I look up at the ceiling, tracing the foliage of the wreath. Today it makes me think of a hat, the large-brimmed… — Margaret Atwood Copy Share Image
The interesting thing about the religious component, for me, is that Jesus hardly mentions sex at all. He's pretty interested in the… — Margaret Atwood Copy Share Image
I'm with the spirit of Earth-Day-yet-to-come. Nobody can really predict the future, all you can do is look at trends, and that… — Margaret Atwood Copy Share Image
He doesn't know which is worse, a past he can't regain or a present that will destroy him if he looks at… — Margaret Atwood Copy Share Image
I have been known to buy e-versions of my books because I was in a hotel room and I needed one right… — Margaret Atwood Copy Share Image
Night falls. Or has fallen. Why is it that night falls, instead of rising, like the dawn? Yet if you look east,… — Margaret Atwood Copy Share Image
One of the reasons [William] Shakespeare is so endlessly fascinating is that you can look at that figure from about 10 different angles: Caliban in Shakespeare's day was probably viewed as a sort of comic, barbarian type, but into the 19th century there were productions where Caliban was the hero. He's a potential rapist of a minor. Is that a… — Margaret Atwood Copy Share
Because you are never here but always there, I forget not you but what you look like You drift down the street… — Margaret Atwood Copy Share Image
Canadians and Americans may look alike, but the contents of their heads are quite different. Americans experience themselves, individually, as small toads… — 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
“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 heights, but each one of them is admirably proportioned. Each is sound of tooth, smooth of skin. No ripples of fat around their waists, no bulges, no dimpled orange-skin cellulite on their thighs. No body hair,… — Margaret Atwood Copy Share
