Quotes By Margaret Atwood

All fat women look the same; they all look 42.

A word after a word after a word is power.

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.

I got into trouble a while ago for saying that I thought the internet led to increased literacy - people scolded me about the shocking grammar to be found online - but I was talking about fundamentals: quite simply, you can't use the net unless you can read.

This above all, to refuse to be a victim.

A divorce is like an amputation: you survive it, but there's less of you.

War is what happens when language fails.

Gardening is not a rational act.

I'm the only person you've ever met who has read Longfellow.

I'm bad at picking heroes.

Reading and writing are connected. I learned to read very early so I could read the comics, which I then started to draw.

For years I wanted to be older, and now I am.

If the national mental illness of the United States is megalomania, that of Canada is paranoid schizophrenia.

Because I am a mother, I am capable of being shocked: as I never was when I was not one.

If I were going to convert to any religion I would probably choose Catholicism because it at least has female saints and the Virgin Mary.

I've never understood why people consider youth a time of freedom and joy. It's probably because they have forgotten their own.

We still think of a powerful man as a born leader and a powerful woman as an anomaly.

Canada was built on dead beavers.

Reality simply consists of different points of view.

I tend to feel if people say they're going to do something, they will, if given the chance.

I hope that people will finally come to realize that there is only one 'race' - the human race - and that we are all members of it.

The Eskimos had fifty-two names for snow because it was important to them: there ought to be as many for love.

Never pray for justice, because you might get some.

A ratio of failures is built into the process of writing. The wastebasket has evolved for a reason.

The story as told in The Odyssey doesn't hold water. There are too many inconsistencies.

We thought we were running away from the grownups, and now we are the grownups.

I don't think the relationship between novels and realities are one to one. Of course novels play different roles. It's essentially just a long narrative form. What you use that long narrative form for can be very different.

Little girls are cute and small only to adults. To one another they are not cute. They are life-sized.

Science fiction, to me, has not only things that wouldn't happen, but other planets.

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