1,705 Quotes by Margaret Atwood

I must have been grown up. So I didn't notice.

...otherwise, one of you, most likely the man, would go wandering off on a trajectory of his own, taking his addictive body with him and leaving you with bad withdrawal, which you could counteract by exercise. If you didn't work it out it was because one of you had the wrong attitude. Everything that went on in your life was thought to be due to some positive or negative power emanating from inside your head.

Publishing a book is like stuffing a note into a bottle and hurling it into the sea. Some bottles drown, some come safe to land, where the notes are read and then possibly cherished, or else misinterpreted, or else understood all too well by those who hate the message. You never know who your readers might be.

with shrunken fingerswe ate our oranges and bread,shivering in the parked car;though we know we had neverbeen there before,we knew we had been there before.

What a moron I was to think you were sweet and innocent, when it turns out you were actually college-educated the whole time!

Good writing takes place at intersections, at what you might call knots, at places where the society is snarled or knotted up.

My fundamental position is that women are human beings, with the full range of saintly and demonic behaviours this entails, including criminal ones. They're not angels, incapable of wrongdoing. If they were, we wouldn't need a legal system.

We were revisionists; what we revised was ourselves.

Everyone thinks writers must know more about the inside of the human head, but that's wrong. They know less, that's why they write. Trying to find out what everyone else takes for granted.