Margaret Atwood Quotes

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"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

"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

"Keep an eye on the weather, which is changing faster than predicted, and on the new diseases escaping or being made, even as we speak. It's a race between new tech and biosphere bankruptcy, I'd say."

--- Margaret Atwood

#Race #Eye #Made

"There's something final about saying you were married once. It's like saying you were dead once. It shuts them up."

--- Margaret Atwood

#Finals #Married

"How shrunk, how dwindled, in our times Creation's mighty seed - For Man has broke the Fellowship With murder, lust, and greed."

--- Margaret Atwood

#Creation #Our Time #Murder

"So that’s what art is, for the artist,” said Crake. “An empty drainpipe. An amplifier. A stab at getting laid."

--- Margaret Atwood

#Said #Amplifiers #Empty

"Was this a betrayal, or was it an act of courage? Perhaps both. Neither one involves forethought: such things take place in an instant, in an eyeblink. This can only be because they have been rehearsed by us already, over and over, in silence and darkness; in such silence, such darkness, that we are ignorant of them ourselves. Blind but sure-footed, we step forward as if into a remembered dance."

--- Margaret Atwood

#Silence #Betrayal #Steps

"The male frog in mating season," said Crake, "makes as much noise as it can. The females are attracted to the male frog with the biggest, deepest voice because it suggests a more powerful frog, one with superior genes. Small male frogs—it's been documented—discover if they position themselves in empty drainpipes, the pipe acts as a voice amplifier and the small frog appears much larger than it really is." So?" So that's what art is for the artist, an empty drainpipe. An amplifier. A stab at getting laid."

--- Margaret Atwood

#Seasons #Noise #Superiors

"Make the verses flow together. If a following verse has nothing to do with the previous, you may lose our listener/reader. You want a smooth flow to hear or read, and it's easier to memorize."

--- Margaret Atwood

#May #Together #Following

"Because you are never here but always there, I forget not you but what you look like You drift down the street in the rain, your face dissolving, changing shape, the colours running together My walls absorb you, breathe you forth again, you resume yourself, I do not recognize you You rest on the bed watching me watching you, we will never know each other any better than we do now"

--- Margaret Atwood

#Breathe #Rain #Shapes

"Each form has its pluses and its minuses."

--- Margaret Atwood

#Form

"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

"I was sand, I was snow—written on, rewritten, smoothed over."

--- Margaret Atwood

#Snow #Written #Sand

"We love each other, that’s true whatever it means, but we aren’t good at it; for some it’s a talent, for others only an addiction."

--- Margaret Atwood

#Mean #Talent #Addiction

"It had helped to keep her sane, that writing. Then, when time had begun again and real people had entered it, she'd abandoned it here. Now it's a whisper from the past. Is that what writing amounts to? The voice your ghost would have, if it had a voice?"

--- Margaret Atwood

#People #Writing #Voice

"We want to get there faster. Get where? Wherever we are not. But a human soul can only go as fast as a man can walk, they used to say. In that case, where are all the souls? Left behind. They wander here and there, slowly, dim lights flickering in the marshes at night, looking for us. But they're not nearly fast enough, not for us, we're way ahead of them, they'll never catch up. That's why we can go so fast: our souls don't weigh us down."

--- Margaret Atwood

#Soul #Walks #Wander

"If I love you, is that a fact or a weapon?"

--- Margaret Atwood

#My Love For You #I Love You #Love

"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

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

--- Margaret Atwood

#Thinking #Suspicious #Utopian

"We're facing growing climate change, more floods, more droughts, more crisis on a planetary level, and the systems we put in place in the twentieth century are just not going to work. We've run out of stuff. Our big problems are going to be energy supplies and food supplies. This is not a right-left issue. It's a people issue, and it cuts across all our categories."

--- Margaret Atwood

#People #Cutting #Climate Change

"The responsible treatment of this particular Ring of Power is not necessarily to toss it into the Cracks of Doom. But we have to come up with something rather quickly, or what we'll get is the Land of Mordor."

--- Margaret Atwood

#Cracks #Responsible #Doom

"Time is not a line but a dimension, like the dimensions of space. If you can bend space you can bend time also, and if you knew enough and could move faster than light you could travel backwards in time and exist in two places at once."

--- Margaret Atwood

#End Times #Time #Lines

"'1984' is not a wonder tale. Not only could it happen, but it has happened, but under different names."

--- Margaret Atwood

#Happened #Tales #Different

"I read a piece by a guy out in Alberta that said Canadians are lazy because they're not patenting enough new inventions. I disagree. Canadians invent a lot of stuff. Actually patenting them is expensive."

--- Margaret Atwood

#Expensive #Said #Enough

"The newspaper journalists like to believe the worst; they can sell more papers that way, as one of them told me himself; for even upstanding and respectable people dearly love to read ill of others."

--- Margaret Atwood

#Newspapers #People #Sells

"Walking along past the store windows, into which she peers with her usual eagerness, her usual sense that maybe, today, she will discover behind them something that will truly be worth seeing, she feels as if her feet are not on cement at all but on ice. The blade of the skate floats, she knows, on a thin film of water, which it melts by pressure and which freezes behind it. This is the freedom of the present tense, this sliding edge."

--- Margaret Atwood

#Feels #Tense #Skates

"Science fiction went through a period that was mostly object-oriented or inventions for distant galaxies.But when we cracked the genetic DNA code, opened the big Pandora's box, and it really did become possible to produce chimeras, my ears shot up."

--- Margaret Atwood

#Pandora #Galaxy #Ears

"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

"If we read books all the time we would be very unhealthy, as we would not get any fresh air, exercise, or contact with nature. Also we would not spend time with other people. There are a lot of plusses to reading - it's an interactive brain workout - but like everything else that's beneficial in moderation, overdoses can be dangerous."

--- Margaret Atwood

#Book #People #Beneficial

"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

"There is something powerful in the whispering of obscenities, about those in power. There's something delightful about it, something naughty, secretive, forbidden, thrilling. It's like a spell, of sorts. It deflates them, reduces them to the common denominator where they can be dealt."

--- Margaret Atwood

#Whispering #Forbidden #Thrilling

"So much for endings. Beginnings are always more fun. True connoisseurs, however, are known to favor the stretch in between, since it's the hardest to do anything with. That's about all that can be said for plots, which anyway are just one thing after another, a what and a what and a what."

--- Margaret Atwood

#Just One #Said #Known

"You can’t buy it, but it has a price,” said Oryx. “Everything has a price."

--- Margaret Atwood

#Said

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