Margaret Atwood
109 quotes
Biography
"War is what happens when language fails."
"I would like to be the air that inhabits you for a moment only. I would like to be that unnoticed and that necessary."
"A word after a word after a word is power."
"Another belief of mine: that everyone else my age is an adult, whereas I am merely in disguise."
"Love blurs your vision; but after it recedes, you can see more clearly than ever. It's like the tide going out, revealing whatever's been thrown away and sunk: broken bottles, old gloves, rusting pop cans, nibbled fishbodies, bones. This is the kind of thing you see if you sit in the darkness with open eyes, not knowing the future."
"Don't let the bastards grind you down."
"If you knew what was going to happen, if you knew everything that was going to happen next—if you knew in advance the consequences of your own actions—you'd be doomed. You'd be ruined as God. You'd be a stone. You'd never eat or drink or laugh or get out of bed in the morning. You'd never love anyone, ever again. You'd never dare to."
"Ignoring isn’t the same as ignorance, you have to work at it."
"The only way you can write the truth is to assume that what you set down will never be read. Not by any other person, and not even by yourself at some later date. Otherwise you begin excusing yourself. You must see the writing as emerging like a long scroll of ink from the index finger of your right hand; you must see your left hand erasing it."
"Perhaps I write for no one. Perhaps for the same person children are writing for when they scrawl their names in the snow."
"Romance takes place in the middle distance. Romance is looking in at yourself through a window clouded with dew. Romance means leaving things out: where life grunts and shuffles, romance only sighs."
"Love blurs your vision; but after it recedes, you can see more clearly than ever. It's like the tide going out, revealing whatever's been thrown away and sunk: broken bottles, old gloves, rusting pop cans, nibbled fishbodies, bones. This is the kind of thing you see if you sit in the darkness with open eyes, not knowing the future. The ruin you've made."
"You fit into melike a hook into an eyea fish hookan open eye"
"A truth should exist,it should not be usedlike this. If I love youis that a fact or a weapon?"
"How could I be sleeping with this particular man.... Surely only true love could justify my lack of taste."
"Hatred would have been easier. With hatred, I would have known what to do. Hatred is clear, metallic, one-handed, unwavering; unlike love."
"Potential has a shelf life."
"A home filled with nothing but yourself. It's heavy, that lightness. It's crushing, that emptiness."
"What am I living for and what am I dying for are the same question."
"The Eskimo has fifty-names for snow because it is important to them; there ought to be as many for love."
"There were a lot of gods. Gods always come in handy, they justify almost anything."
"It's impossible to say a thing exactly the way it was, because of what you say can never be exact, you always have to leave something out, there are too many parts, sides, crosscurrents, nuances; too many gestures, which could mean this or that, too many shapes which can never be fully described, too many flavors, in the air or on the tongue, half-colors, too many."
"We yearned for the future. How did we learn it, that talent for insatiability?"
"If I love you, is that a fact or a weapon?"
"Knowing was a temptation. What you don't know won't tempt you."