1,705 Quotes by Margaret Atwood

I have to recant, give up the old belief that I am powerless and and because of it nothing I can do will ever hurt anyone.

And what has become of Ronette, after all, left behind in the past, dappled by its chiaroscuro, stained and haloed by it, stuck with other people's adjectives?

Но если это история, пусть даже мысленная, значит, я её рассказываю кому-то. Самому себе истории не расскажешь. Всегда найдётся кто-то ещё.Даже если никого нет.

Sono una profuga del passato, e come altri profughi ricordo le usanze e le abitudini di vita che ho lasciato o sono stata costretta a lasciarmi alle spalle, tutto sembra così strano, da qui, che ne sono ossessionata.

I keep on going with this sad and hungry and sordid, this limping and mutilated story, because after all I want you to hear it….By telling you anything at all I’m at least believing in you….Because I’m telling you this story I will your existence. I tell, therefore you are.

We may call Eurydice forth from the world of the dead, but we cannot make her answer; and when we turn to look at her we glimpse her only for a moment, before she slips from our grasp and flees. 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.

Our problem right now is that we're so specialized that if the lights go out, there are a huge number of people who are not going to know what to do. But within every dystopia there's a little utopia.

But then it came to me that who I really am is a person who doesn't need to know who he really is, in the usual sense. What does it mean, anyway - family background and so forth? People use it mostly as an excuse for their own snobbery, or else their failings. I'm free of the temptation, that's all. I'm free of the strings. Nothing ties me down.

I believe in the resistance as I believe there can be no light without shadow; or rather no shadow unless there is also light.