Top 15 Margaret Atwood Quotes

War is what happens when language fails.

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

Men are afraid that women will laugh at them. Women are afraid that men will kill them.

A word after a word after a word is power.

Don't let the bastards grind you down.

Male fantasies, male fantasies, is everything run by male fantasies? Up on a pedestal or down on your knees, it's all a male fantasy: that you're strong enough to take what they dish out, or else too weak to do anything about it. Even pretending you aren't catering to male fantasies is a male fantasy: pretending you're unseen, pretending you have a life of your own, that you can wash your feet and comb your hair unconscious of the ever-present watcher peering through the keyhole, peering through the keyhole in your own head, if nowhere else. You are a woman with a man inside watching a woman. You are your own voyeur.

Another belief of mine: that everyone else my age is an adult, whereas I am merely in disguise.

Ignoring isn’t the same as ignorance, you have to work at it.

In the spring, at the end of the day, you should smell like dirt.

Love blurs your vision; but after it recedes, you can see more clearly than ever. It's like the tide going out, revealing whatever's been thrown away and sunk: broken bottles, old gloves, rusting pop cans, nibbled fishbodies, bones. This is the kind of thing you see if you sit in the darkness with open eyes, not knowing the future.

But who can remember pain, once it’s over? All that remains of it is a shadow, not in the mind even, in the flesh. Pain marks you, but too deep to see. Out of sight, out of mind.

Nolite te bastardes carborundorum. Don't let the bastards grind you down.

Better never means better for everyone... It always means worse, for some.

I don't want to see anyone. I lie in the bedroom with the curtains drawn and nothingness washing over me like a sluggish wave. Whatever is happening to me is my own fault. I have done something wrong, something so huge I can't even see it, something that's drowning me. I am inadequate and stupid, without worth. I might as well be dead.

We were the people who were not in the papers. We lived in the blank white spaces at the edges of print. It gave us more freedom.
We lived in the gaps between the stories.