Margaret Atwood Quotes

I would like to be the air that inhabits you for a moment only. I would like to be that unnoticed and that necessary.

A truth should exist,
it should not be used
like this. If I love you

is that a fact or a weapon?

How could I be sleeping with this particular man.... Surely only true love could justify my lack of taste.

The only way you can write the truth is to assume that what you set down will never be read. Not by any other person, and not even by yourself at some later date. Otherwise you begin excusing yourself. You must see the writing as emerging like a long scroll of ink from the index finger of your right hand; you must see your left hand erasing it.

They didn't realize that her clumsiness was not the ordinary kind, not poor coordination. It was just because she wasn't sure where the edges of her body ended and the rest of the world began.

A word after a word after a word is power.

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

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

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.

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.

For me the experience of writing is really an experience of losing control.… I think it’s very much like dreaming or like surfing. You go out there and wait for a wave, and when it comes it takes you somewhere and you don’t know where it’ll go.

Where do the words go
when we have said them?

Reading and writing, like everything else, improve with practice. And, of course, if there are no young readers and writers, there will shortly be no older ones. Literacy will be dead, and democracy - which many believe goes hand in hand with it - will be dead as well.

Perhaps its not the world that is soundless but we who are deaf.

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

Writing poetry is a state of free float

When they're gone out of his head, these words, they'll be gone, everywhere, forever. As if they had never been.

speech to him was a task, a battle, words mustered behind his beard and issued one at a time, heavy and square like tanks.

But she went to tell the bees. She felt like an idiot doing it, but she'd promised. She remembered that it wasn't enough just to think at them: you had to say the words out loud. Bees were the messengers between this world and the other worlds, Pilar had said. Between the living and the dead. They carried the Word made air.

You couldn’t leave words lying around where our enemies might find them.