100 Ultimate Margaret Atwood Quotes From The Famous Canadian Writer

Margaret Atwood is a Canadian author and poet.

Margaret Atwood's work has been termed feminist literature but she tries to refrain from the label because she would like to understand what people mean by it first. She also has a distinct writing style which is introspective and coarse.

Here we present to you the best Margaret Atwood quotes that will surely make you think.

For more quotes, check out 'The Handmaid's Tale' quotes and Zadie Smith quotes.

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These quotations on feminism and patriarchy quotes showcase the gender roles in our societies and how people exploit them.

1.“Men are afraid that women will laugh at them. Women are afraid that men will kill them.”

― Margaret Atwood.

2.“They seemed to be able to choose. We seemed to be able to choose, then. We were a society dying of too much choice.”

― Margaret Atwood, ‘The Handmaid's Tale’.

3.“Little girls are cute and small only to adults. To one another they are not cute. They are life-sized.”

- Margaret Atwood.

4.“Another belief of mine: that everyone else my age is an adult, whereas I am merely in disguise.”

― Margaret Atwood.

5.“They wore blouses with buttons down the front that suggested the possibilities of the word undone. These women could be undone; or not.”

― Margaret Atwood,  'The Handmaid's Tale'.

6.“Nothing makes me more nervous than people who say, ‘It can’t happen here.’ Anything can happen anywhere, given the right circumstances.”

-Margaret Atwood.

7.“A man is just a woman's strategy for making other women.”

― Margaret Atwood.

8.“What is believed in society is not always the equivalent of what is true; but as regards to a woman’s reputation, it amounts to the same thing.”

-Margaret Atwood, 'Alias Grace'.

9.“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?”

― Margaret Atwood.

Here are some Margaret Atwood quotes from her novel that everyone should read.

10.“Nature is to zoos as God is to churches.”

― Margaret Atwood.

11.“They spent the first three years of school getting you to pretend stuff and then the rest of it marking you down if you did the same thing.”

― Margaret Atwood.

12.“We understand more than we know.”

― Margaret Atwood.

13.“There’s something to be said for hunger: at least it lets you know you’re still alive.”

—Margaret Atwood.

14.“These things sneak up on him for no reason, these flashes of irrational happiness. It's probably a vitamin deficiency.”

― Margaret Atwood.

15.“How much needless despair has been caused by a series of biological mismatches, a misalignment of the hormones and pheromones?”

― Margaret Atwood.

16.“After everything that’s happened, how can the world still be so beautiful? Because it is.”

—Margaret Atwood, 'Oryx and Crake'.

17.“So this was the rest of his life. It felt like a party to which he'd been invited, but at an address he couldn't actually locate.”

― Margaret Atwood.

18.“Toast was a pointless invention from the Dark Ages.”

― Margaret Atwood.

19.“'When any civilization is dust and ashes,' he said, 'art is all that's left over.'”

― Margaret Atwood.

Margaret Atwood quotes from Handmaid's Tale, her bestselling book, are definitely worth a read!

20.“'There is more than one kind of freedom,' said Aunt Lydia. 'Freedom to and freedom from. In the days of anarchy, it was freedom to. Now you are being given freedom from. Don't underrate it.'”

― Margaret Atwood.

21.“I am not your justification for existence.”

― Margaret Atwood.

22.“Faith is only a word, embroidered.”

― Margaret Atwood.

23.“No mother is ever, completely, a child's idea of what a mother should be, and I suppose it works the other way around as well.”

― Margaret Atwood.

24.“You can only be jealous of someone who has something you think you ought to have yourself.”

― Margaret Atwood.

25.“I avoid looking down at my body, not so much because it’s shameful or immodest but because I don’t want to see it.”

― Margaret Atwood.

26.“Nothing changes instantaneously: in a gradually heating bathtub, you'd be boiled to death before you knew it."

― Margaret Atwood.

27.“There's always something to occupy the inquiring mind.”

― Margaret Atwood.

28.“As all historians know, the past is a great darkness, and filled with echoes.”

― Margaret Atwood.

29.“How easy it is to invent a humanity, for anyone at all.”

― Margaret Atwood.

30.“To want is to have a weakness.”

-Margaret Atwood.

31.“Waste not want not. I am not being wasted. Why do I want?”

― Margaret Atwood.

32.“Whatever is silenced will clamor to be heard, though silently.”

― Margaret Atwood.

33.“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.

Margaret Atwood quotes that express love beautifully.

34.“Hatred is clear, metallic, one-handed, unwavering; unlike love.”

― Margaret Atwood, 'Cat's Eye'.

35.“Falling in love, we said; I fell for him. We were falling women. We believed in it, this downward motion: so lovely, like flying, and yet at the same time so dire, so extreme, so unlikely.”

― Margaret Atwood, ‘The Handmaid's Tale’.

36.“If I love you, is that a fact or a weapon?”

― Margaret Atwood, 'Power Politics'.

37.“This is how the girl who couldn't speak and the man who couldn't see fell in love.”

― Margaret Atwood, 'The Blind Assassin'.

38.“Neither of us says the word love, not once. It would be tempting fate; it would be romance, bad luck.”

― Margaret Atwood, ‘The Handmaid's Tale’.

39.“Can I be blamed for wanting a real body, to put my arms around? Without it I too am disembodied.”

― Margaret Atwood, 'The Handmaid's Tale'.

40.“Old lovers go the way of old photographs, bleaching out gradually as in a slow bath of acid”

― Margaret Atwood, 'Cat's Eye'.

41.“The desire to be loved is the last illusion Give it up and you will be free.”

― Margaret Atwood.

42.“Amazing how the heart clutches at anything familiar, whimpering Mine! Mine!”

—Margaret Atwood, 'The Year Of The Flood'.

43.“God is love, they once said, but we reversed that, and love, like heaven, was always just around the corner.”

― Margaret Atwood, ‘The Year of the Flood’.

Here are some Margaret Atwood quotes that became famous and will get you thinking.

44.“We are survivors, of each other. We have been shark to one another, but also lifeboat.”

― Margaret Atwood, 'Cat's Eye'.

45.“­Do back exercises. Pain is distracting.”

- Margaret Atwood.

46.“War is what happens when language fails.”

—Margaret Atwood, 'The Robber Bride.

47.“As a species we're pathetic that way: imperfectly monogamous.”

― Margaret Atwood.

48.“You’d be surprised how quickly the mind goes soggy in the absence of other people.”

― Margaret Atwood, 'The Testaments'.

49.“When I was young I believed that ‘nonfiction’ meant ‘true.’ But you read a history written in, say, 1920 and a history of the same events written in 1995 and they’re very different.”

-Margaret Atwood.

50.“In the spring, at the end of the day, you should smell like dirt.”

- Margaret Atwood.

51.“I wanted to forget the past, but it refused to forget me; it waited for sleep, then cornered me.”

― Margaret Atwood,  ‘Lady Oracle’.

52.“I am nervous about dogmas of any kind, whether they be religious, political, or anti-religious.”

- Margaret Atwood.

53.“Knowing too much about other people puts you in their power, they have a claim on you, you are forced to understand their reasons for doing things and then you are weakened.”

-Margaret Atwood, 'Cat's Eye'.

54.“We thought we were running away from the grownups, and now we are the grownups.”

― Margaret Atwood.

55.“Once a story you’ve regarded as true has turned false, you begin suspecting all stories.”

― Margaret Atwood, 'The Testaments'.

56.“You fit into me

like a hook into an eye

a fish hook

an open eye”

—Margaret Atwood, ‘You Fit Into Me’.

57.“Our heaven is their hell, said God. I like a balanced universe.”

― Margaret Atwood, 'The Tent'.

58.“The artist doesn’t necessarily communicate. The artist evokes … [It] actually doesn’t matter what I feel. What matters is how the art makes you feel.”

-Margaret Atwood.

59.“You aren't sick & unhappy

only alive & stuck with it.”

― Margaret Atwood, 'Power Politics'.

60.“I wonder which is preferable, to walk around all your life swollen up with your own secrets until you burst from the pressure of them, or to have them sucked out of you, every paragraph, every sentence, every word of them”

― Margaret Atwood, 'The Blind Assassin'.

61.“You don’t believe the sky is falling until a chunk of it falls on you.”

― Margaret Atwood, ‘The Testaments’.

62.“In my dreams of this city I am always lost.”

― Margaret Atwood, ‘Cat's Eye’.

63.“Optimism means better than reality; pessimism means worse than reality. I’m a realist.”

-Margaret Atwood.

64.“A divorce is like an amputation: you survive it, but there’s less of you.”

-Margaret Atwood.

65.“I’m not sure which is worse: intense feeling, or the absence of it.”

― Margaret Atwood.

The best quotes about writing and storytelling quotes from the writer. These Margaret Atwood quotes are powerful for aspiring any writer.

66.“A word after a word after a word is power.”

― Margaret Atwood.

67."All writers feel struck by the limitations of language."

-Margaret Atwood.

68.“There’s the story, then there’s the real story, then there’s the story of how the story came to be told. Then there’s what you leave out of the story. Which is part of the story too.”

—Margaret Atwood, 'MaddAddam'.

69.“Reading and writing, like everything else, improve with practice.”

- Margaret Atwood.

70."Everyone ‘writes’ in a way; that is, each person has a ‘story’—a personal narrative—which is constantly being replayed, revised, taken apart and put together again."

-Margaret Atwood.

71.“All stories are about wolves. All worth repeating, that is. Anything else is sentimental drivel”

—Margaret Atwood, 'The Blind Assassin'.

72.“I read for pleasure and that is the moment I learn the most.”

― Margaret Atwood.

73.“Is that what writing amounts to? The voice your ghost would have, if it had a voice?”

—Margaret Atwood, 'MaddAddam'.

74."You’re never going to kill storytelling, because it’s built into the human plan we come with."

-Margaret Atwood.

75.“Sometimes reactions can be quite surprising: readers like things that you, the author, feel you've barely gotten away with; or they dislike one of the parts you secretly think is one of your little gems.”

- Margaret Atwood.

76.“Perhaps I write for no one. Perhaps for the same person children are writing for when they scrawl their names in the snow.”

-Margaret Atwood.

77."Paper isn’t important. It’s the words on them that are important."

-Margaret Atwood.

78."The significant points in this narrative change as a person ages—what may have been tragedy at 20 is seen as comedy or nostalgia at 40."

-Margaret Atwood.

79."In the end, we all become stories."

-Margaret Atwood.

80.“If I waited for perfection, I would never write a word.”

― Margaret Atwood.

81."All writers learn from the dead. As long as you continue to write, you continue to explore the work of writers who have preceded you; you also feel judged and held to account by them."

-Margaret Atwood.

Margaret Atwood quotes from her novel 'Alias Grace' are thought-provoking and powerful.

82.“There is no fool like an educated fool.”

― Margaret Atwood.

83.“Gone mad is what they say, and sometimes Run mad, as if mad is a different direction, like west; as if mad is a different house you could step into, or a separate country entirely.”

― Margaret Atwood.

84.“For if the world treats you well, Sir, you come to believe you are deserving of it.”

― Margaret Atwood.

85.“When you are in the middle of a story it isn’t a story at all, but only a confusion; a dark roaring, a blindness, a wreckage of shattered glass and splintered wood. It’s only afterwards that it becomes anything like a story at all. When you are telling it, to yourself or to someone else.”

-Margaret Atwood.

86.“The small details of life often hide a great significance.”

-Margaret Atwood.

87.“I am afraid of falling into hopeless despair, over my wasted life, and I am still not sure how it happened.”

― Margaret Atwood.

88.“If I am good enough and quiet enough, perhaps after all they will let me go; but it’s not easy being quiet and good”

― Margaret Atwood.

89.“A prison does not only lock its inmates inside, it keeps all others out.”

― Margaret Atwood.

90.“He doesn't understand yet that guilt comes to you not from the things you've done, but from the things that others have done to you.”

― Margaret Atwood.

91.“If we were all on trial for our thoughts, we would all be hanged.”

-Margaret Atwood.

Margaret Atwood quotes from another of her amazing novels.

92.“Why is it we want so badly to memorialize ourselves? Even while we're still alive.”

― Margaret Atwood.

93.“Water does not resist. Water flows. When you plunge your hand into it, all you feel is a caress.”

― Margaret Atwood.

94.“Home is where the heart is, I thought now, gathering myself together in Betty's Luncheonette. I had no heart any more, it had been broken; or not broken, it simply wasn't there anymore. I'm heartless, I thought. Therefore I'm homeless.”

― Margaret Atwood.

95.“The picture is of happiness, the story not.”

― Margaret Atwood.

96.“Why does the mind do such things? Turn on us, rend us, dig the claws in.”

― Margaret Atwood.

97.“Immolation is what she wants, however briefly. To exist without boundaries.”

― Margaret Atwood.

98.“He might die for her, but living for her would be quite different.”

― Margaret Atwood.

99.“It wasn't so easy though, ending the war. A war is a huge fire; the ashes from it drift far, and settle slowly.”

― Margaret Atwood.

100.“'I'm not senile,' I snapped. 'If I burn the house down it will be on purpose.'”

― Margaret Atwood, ‘The Blind Assassin’.

Here at Kidadl, we have carefully created lots of interesting family-friendly quotes for everyone to enjoy! If you liked our suggestions for Margaret Atwood quotes then why not take a look at [Cheryl Strayed quotes], or [Harper Lee quotes].