Canadian novelist, poet, and literary critic (1939- )
Surely only true love could justify my lack of taste.
MARGARET ATWOOD
Lady Oracle
As all historians know, the past is a great darkness, and filled with echoes. Voices may reach us from it; but what they say to us is imbued with the obscurity of the matrix out of which they come; and, try as we may, we cannot always decipher them precisely in the clearer light of our own day.
MARGARET ATWOOD
The Handmaid's Tale
Time in dreams is frozen. You can never get away from where you've been.
MARGARET ATWOOD
The Blind Assassin
A lot of being a poet consists of willed ignorance. If you woke up from your trance and realized the nature of the life-threatening and dignity-destroying precipice you were walking along, you would switch into actuarial sciences immediately.
MARGARET ATWOOD
On Writing Poetry
Last night I watched the weather channel, as is my habit. Elsewhere in the world there are floods: roiling brown water, bloated cows floating by, survivors huddled on rooftops. Thousands have drowned. Global warming is held accountable: People must stop burning things up, it is said. Gasoline, oil, whole forests. But they won't stop. Greed and hunger lash them on, as usual.
MARGARET ATWOOD
The Blind Assassin
When we think of the past it's the beautiful things we pick out. We want to believe it was all like that.
MARGARET ATWOOD
The Handmaid's Tale
Water is patient. Dripping water wears away a stone. Remember that, my child. Remember you are half water. If you can't go through an obstacle, go around it. Water does.
MARGARET ATWOOD
The Penelopiad
Noble people don't do things for the money, they simply have money, and that's what allows they to be noble.
MARGARET ATWOOD
Hag-Seed
For drinking Life there are two cups:
The No Cup is bitter, the Yes Cup is yummy --
Now, which one would you rather have in your tummy?
MARGARET ATWOOD
The Year of the Flood
Sanity is a valuable possession; I hoard it the way people once hoarded money. I save it, so I will have enough, when the time comes.
MARGARET ATWOOD
The Handmaid's Tale
Love's never a fair trade.
MARGARET ATWOOD
The Year of the Flood
We still think of a powerful man as a born leader and a powerful woman as an anomaly.
MARGARET ATWOOD
The Advertiser, Sep. 9, 2004
I'm working on my own life story. I don't mean I'm putting it together; no, I'm taking it apart.
MARGARET ATWOOD
The Tent
The sands of time are quicksands ... so much can sink into them without a trace.
MARGARET ATWOOD
The Year of the Flood
You fit into me
like a hook into an eye
a fish hook
an open eye
MARGARET ATWOOD
Selected Poems
No matter how much you've been warned, Death always comes without knocking. Why now? is the cry. Why so soon? It's the cry of a child being called home at dusk.
MARGARET ATWOOD
The Year of the Flood
Stupidity is the same as evil if you judge by the results.
MARGARET ATWOOD
Surfacing
Night falls. Or has fallen. Why is it that night falls, instead of rising, like the dawn?... Maybe night falls because it's heavy, a thick curtain pulled up over the eyes. Wool blanket.
MARGARET ATWOOD
The Handmaid's Tale
It is better to hope than to mope!
MARGARET ATWOOD
The Year of the Flood
When women let their hair down, it means either sexiness or craziness or death, the three by Victorian times having become virtually synonymous.
MARGARET ATWOOD
"Ophelia Has a Lot to Answer For"