1,705 Quotes by Margaret Atwood

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

Farewells can be shattering, but returns are surely worse. Solid flesh can never live up to the bright shadow cast by its absence. Time and distance blur the edges; then suddenly the beloved has arrived, and it's noon with its merciless light, and every spot and pore and wrinkle and bristle stands clear.

Right now I have some choice in the matter. Not whether to die, but when and how. Isn't that a freedom of sort? Oh, and who to take down with me. I have made my list

There I am, in the Grade Six class picture, smiling broadly. Happy as a clam, is what my mother says for happy. I am happy as a clam: hardshelled, firmly closed.

The answers you get from literature depend on the questions you pose.

Acting up, a peculiar phrase. It's what people say to minimize the gravity of their condition. It implies that the offending part (heart, stomach, liver, whatever) is a fractious, bratty child, which can be brought into line with a slap or a sharp word. At the same time, that these symptoms--these tremors and pains, these palpitations--are mere theatrics, and that the organ in question will soon stop capering about and making a spectacle of itself, and resume its placid, off-stage existence.

It’s always encouraging to be told that it is intellectually acceptable to read the sorts of things that you like to read anyway.

Where do the words gowhen we have said them?

Perhaps they were looking for passion; perhaps they delved into this book as into a mysterious parcel - a gift box at the bottom of which, hidden in layers of rustling tissue paper, lay something they'd always longed for but couldn't ever grasp.