Margaret Atwood Quotes

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"I'm a Red Tory. To get a fix on this category, you have to go back to the 19th century. The Tories were the ones who believed that those in power had a responsibility to the community, that money should not be the measure of all things."

--- Margaret Atwood

#19th Century #Community #Responsibility

"History, as I recall, was never this winsome, and especially not this clean, but the real thing would never sell: most people prefer a past in which nothing smells."

--- Margaret Atwood

#Real Things #People #Sells

"But most hearts say, I want, I want, I want, I want. My heart is more duplicitous, though no twin as I once thought. It says, I want, I don't want, I want, and then a pause. It forces me to listen."

--- Margaret Atwood

#Twins #Pauses #Force

"Inside the peach, there is a stone."

--- Margaret Atwood

#Stones #Peaches

"You quickly find, when you are a hand-reader as I am, that nothing interests people so much as themselves."

--- Margaret Atwood

#People #Interest #Hands

"Where do you draw the line, between love and greed? We never did know, we always wanted more. We want to take it all in, for one last time, we want to eat the world with our eyes."

--- Margaret Atwood

#Lasts #Eye #Lines

"For years I wanted to be older, and now I am."

--- Margaret Atwood

#December #Wanted #Years

"The Eskimos had fifty-two names for snow because it was important to them: there ought to be as many for love."

--- Margaret Atwood

#Valentines Day Cards #Love #Valentine Love

"Anyway, maybe there weren't any solutions. Human society, corpses and rubble. It never learned, it made the same cretinous mistakes over and over, trading short-term gain for long-term pain."

--- Margaret Atwood

#Corpses #Solutions #Term

"If I pick up a book with vampires on the cover, I want there to be vampires. If I pick up a book with spaceships on the cover, I want spaceships. If I see one with dragons, I want there to be dragons inside the book. Proper labeling. Ethical labeling."

--- Margaret Atwood

#Book #Dragons #Labeling

"My father was a forest entomologist, which means he was aware that spraying forests for spruce budworm was counterproductive in that it didn't really work, and it killed everything else in the forests, and it wasn't good for the people who were exposed to it, either. So he was an early proponent of not doing that, but, of course, nobody listened."

--- Margaret Atwood

#Mean #People #Courses

"Some travelers think they want to go to foreign places but are dismayed when the places turn out actually to be foreign."

--- Margaret Atwood

#Thinking #Dismayed #Want

"There's always something to occupy the inquiring mind."

--- Margaret Atwood

#Inquiring #Mind #Inquiring Minds

"Sooner or later, I hate to break it to you, you're gonna die, so how do you fill in the space between here and there? It's yours. Seize your space."

--- Margaret Atwood

#Break #Dies #Space

"What is the real breath of a man — the breathing out or the breathing in?"

--- Margaret Atwood

#Breathing #Breaths #Men

"Once I was in Texas, where they had this thing called Ralph the Swimming Pig. You went into a theater and you were looking through a great big window at people dressed as mermaids swimming around with oxygen tanks. One of the mermaids had a bottle of milk, and a small Ralph the Swimming Pig dove in and swam over. Naturally, afterward, I said in the cafeteria, "What happens to the Ralphs when they get bigger? Would you serve Ralphs who have retired?" "Oh no! We would never do such a thing.""

--- Margaret Atwood

#People #Theater #Said

"Farewells can be shattering, but returns are surely worse. Solid flesh can never live up to the bright shadow cast by its absence."

--- Margaret Atwood

#Shadow #Shattering #Return

"I grew up in the golden age of Flash Gordon and sci-fi."

--- Margaret Atwood

#Flash Gordon #Grew Up #Sci Fi

"I'm not an activist by nature. I am suspicious of Utopian thinking and equally suspicious of its alternate."

--- Margaret Atwood

#Thinking #Suspicious #Utopian

"Where do the words go when we have said them?"

--- Margaret Atwood

#Said

"Winning intoxicates you, and numbs you to the sufferings of others."

--- Margaret Atwood

#Detachment #Numbness #Suffering Of Others

"Science and fiction both begin with similar questions: What if? Why? How does it all work? But they focus on different areas of life on earth."

--- Margaret Atwood

#Focus #Fiction #Different

"I was born in the Ottawa General Hospital right after the Gray Cup Football Game in 1939. Six months later, I was backpacked into the Quebec bush. I grew up in and out of the bush, in and out of Ottawa, Sault Ste. Marie and Toronto."

--- Margaret Atwood

#Months #Grew Up #Born

"I think every age lives in a blend of technology so there's always older ones mixed in with newer ones, and when the new technology goes down, the immediate fallback position is either that technology just before that or one several technologies back."

--- Margaret Atwood

#Thinking #Technology #Position

"Writing... is an act of faith: I believe it's also an act of hope, the hope that things can get better than they are."

--- Margaret Atwood

#Get Better #Writing #I Believe

"Writing of the narrative kind, and perhaps all writing, is motivated deep down, by a fear or and fascination with mortality - by a desire to make the risky trip to the underworld and to bring something or someone back from the dead."

--- Margaret Atwood

#Mortality #Underworld #Fascination

"The temptation is to stay inside; to subside into the kind of recluse whom neighborhood children regard with derision and little awe; to let the hedges and weeds grow up, to allow the doors to rust shut, to lie on my bed in some gown-shaped garment and let my hair lengthens and spread out over the pillow and my fingernails to sprout into claws, while candle wax drips onto the carpet. But long ago I made a choice between classicism and romanticism. I prefer to be upright and contained—an urn in daylight."

--- Margaret Atwood

#Daylight #Made #Long

"The future of the codex book, with pages and so forth? A platform for transmitting narratives. There are others."

--- Margaret Atwood

#Book #Pages #Platforms

"Science is not something that exists apart from human beings. It's one of the things we do as human beings, and we always have done science and technology in some form."

--- Margaret Atwood

#Human Beings #Done #Science And Technology

"Every aspect of human technology has a dark side, including the bow and arrow."

--- Margaret Atwood

#Including #Bows And Arrows #Aspect

"She who pays the undertaker calls the tune."

--- Margaret Atwood

#Undertaker #Pay #Tunes

"Why can't I believe? she asked the darkness. Behind her eyelids she saw an animal. It was golden colour, with gentle green eyes and canine teeth, and curly wool instead of fur. It opened its mouth, but it did not speak. Instead, it yawned.It gazed at her. She gazed at it. "You are the effect of a carefully calibrated blend of plant toxins," she told it.Then she fell asleep."

--- Margaret Atwood

#Effects #Gentle #Green

"Knowing was a temptation. What you don't know won't tempt you."

--- Margaret Atwood

#Fear #Knows #Temptation

"Ah men, why do you want all this attention? I can write poems for myself, make love to a doorknob if absolutely necessary. What do you have to offer me I can't find otherwise except humiliation? Which I no longer need."

--- Margaret Atwood

#I Can #Making Love #Writing

"Thy only authentic ending is the one provided here: John and Mary die, John and Mary die, John and Mary die."

--- Margaret Atwood

#Mary #Dies

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