Margaret Atwood

Novelist

1939-11-18

Margaret Atwood is a Canadian novelist, poet, and critic known for literary fiction and speculative works. Her books include The Handmaids Tale and Alias Grace.

Quotes by Margaret Atwood

He feels the need to hear a human voice— a fully human voice like his own. Sometimes he laughs like a hyena or roars like a lion— his idea of a hyena his idea of a lion.
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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.
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What fabrications they are, mothers. Scarecrows, wax dolls for us to stick pins into, crude diagrams. We deny them an existence of their own, we make them up to suit ourselves -- our own hungers, our own wishes, our own deficiencies.
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They are boiling with the pressured energy of explosive forces confined in a small space, and with the fervor of all religious movements in their early, purist stages. It is not enough to give lip service and to believe in equal pay: there has to be a conversion, from the heart. Or so they imply.
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... Remember that forgiveness too is a power. To beg for it is a power, and to withold or bestow it is a power, perhaps the greatest.
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Though I knew how this failure would hurt you, I had to fold like a grey moth and let go.You could not believe I was more than your echo.
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A lot of people call you a feminist painter.What indeed, I say. I hate party lines, I hate ghettos. Anyway. I'm too old to have invented it and you're too young to understand it, so what's the point of discussing it at all?
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You can wipe your feet on me, twist my motives around all you like, you can dump millstones on my head and drown me in the river, but you can't get me out of the story. I'm the plot, babe, and don't ever forget it.
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From her handbag she takes a round gilt compact with violets on the cover. She opens it, unclosing her other self, and runs her fingertip around the corners of her mouth, left one, right one; then she unswivels a pink stick and dots her cheeks and blends them, changing her shape, performing the only magic left to her.Rump on a packsack, harem cushion, pink on the cheeks and black discreetly around the eyes, as red as blood as black as ebony, a seamed and folded imitation of a magazine picture that is itself an imitation of a woman who is also an imitation, the original nowhere, hairless lobed angel in the same heaven where God is a circle, captive princess in someone's head. She is locked in, she isn't allowed to eat or shit or cry or give birth, nothing goes in, nothing comes out. She takes her clothes off or puts them on, paper doll wardrobe, she copulates under strobe lights with the man's torso while his brain watches from its glassed-in control cubicle at the other end of the room, her face twists into poses of exultation and total abandonment, that is all. She is not bored, she has no other interests.
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But if you happen to be a man, sometime in the future, and you've made it this far, please remember: you will never be subjected to the temptation of feeling you must forgive, a man, as a woman.
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Fraternize means to behave like a brother. Luke told me that. He said there was no corresponding word that meant to behave like a sister. Sororize, it would have to be, he said. From the Latin.
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There's just one thing I want you to remember. You know those chemicals women have in them, when they've got PMS? Well, men have the very same chemicals in them all the time.
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Point being that you don't have to get too worked up about us, dear educated minds. You don't have to think of us as real girls, real flesh and blood, real pain, real injustice. That might be too upsetting. Just discard the sordid part. Consider us pure symbol. We're no more real than money.
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Lambhood and tigerishness may be found in either gender, and in the same individual at different times.
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I guess that's how they were able to do it, in the way they did, all at once, without anyone knowing beforehand. If there had still been portable money, it would have been more difficult. It was after the catastrophe, when they shot the president and machine-gunned the Congress and the army declared a state of emergency. They blamed it on the Islamic fanatics, at the time. Keep calm, they said on television. Everything is under control. I was stunned. Everyone was, I know that. It was hard to believe. The entire government, gone like that. How did they get in, how did it happen?That was when they suspended the Constitution. They said it would be temporary. There wasn't even any rioting in the streets. People stayed at home at night, watching television, looking for some direction. There wasn't even an enemy you could point your finger at. ...Newspapers were censored and some were closed down, for security reasons they said. The roadblocks began to appear, and Identipasses. Everyone approved of that, since it was obvious you couldn't be too careful.
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I don't want a man around, what use are they except for ten seconds' worth of half babies
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She was not stunned, the way I was. In some strange way she was gleeful, as if this was what she had been expecting for some time and now she'd been proven right.
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But there's something missing in them, even the nice ones. It's like they're permanently absent-minded, like that can't quite remember who they are.
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Men are afraid that women will laugh at them. Women are afraid that men will kill them.
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All you have to do, I tell myself, is keep your mouth shut and look stupid. It shouldn't be that hard.
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