Best Margaret Atwood Quotes

Margaret Atwood Quotes About Male Gaze, Writing, The Halamaid,s Tale, Feminism, Change, Love, Goodreads, Dystopia, Life & Storytelling! In addition to writing novels, Poems, and short stories, Margaret Atwood is an award-winning author. She centers a female character around a feminist ideology throughout her works. She was born in Ottawa, Canada, on 18 November 1939. After eighth grade, she attended a regular school full-time, and at 16, she decided to become a writer. She graduated from Leaside High School in 1957.

At Victoria College in the University of Toronto, in 1961, she earned her Bachelor of Arts in English. The Circle Game was her first significant work of poetry, published in 1964, and received high praise worldwide and honors in Canada. Another of her masterpieces, The Edible Women, was a feminist novel published in 1969 about a woman who is incapable of eating and feels like she is being eaten somehow. She wrote one of the best novels of her career in 1972, ‘Surfacing,’ about her daughter searching for her missing father.

‘Life Before Man’ was written in 1979, and it has three main characters who each have their perspective on what’s happening. The New York Times gave it a positive review. She wrote ‘Oryx and Crake,’ a novel about a scientific dystopia that was shortlisted for the 2003 Man Booker Prize and the 2004 Orange Prize.

‘Dancing Girls,’ her short fiction collection, won her the St. Lawrence Award for Fiction in 1977. ‘The Blind Assassin’ won her the prestigious Booker Prize in 2000. In addition to her honorary degree from Harvard University, she holds 20 honorary degrees from prestigious universities throughout the world.

Best Margaret Atwood Quotes

1. “War is what happens when language fails.” ― Margaret Atwood

2. “An eye for an eye only leads to more blindness.” ― Margaret Atwood

3. “In the spring, at the end of the day, you should smell like dirt.” ― Margaret Atwood

4. “Reality simply consists of different points of view.” ― Margaret Atwood

5. “If I waited for perfection… I would never write a word.” ― Margaret Atwood

6. “A word after a word after a word is power.” ― Margaret Atwood

7. “Never pray for justice, because you might get some.” ― Margaret Atwood

8. “For years I wanted to be older, and now I am.” ― Margaret Atwood

9. “This above all, to refuse to be a victim.” ― Margaret Atwood

10. “Gardening is not a rational act.” ― Margaret Atwood

11. “Some people mistakenly think nature is very nice and benevolent and never betrays.” ― Margaret Atwood

12. “Another belief of mine; that everyone else my age is an adult, whereas I am merely in disguise.” ― Margaret Atwood

13. “Myths can’t be translated as they did in their ancient soil. We can only find our own meaning in our own time.” ― Margaret Atwood

14. “Little girls are cute and small only to adults. To one another they are not cute. They are life-sized.” ― Margaret Atwood

15. “Our generation in the west was lucky: we had readymade gateways. We had books, paper, teachers, schools, and libraries. But many in the world lack these luxuries. How do you practice without such tryout venues?” ― Margaret Atwood

16. “Storytelling is a very old human skill that gives us an evolutionary advantage. If you can tell young people how you kill an emu, acted out in song or dance, or that Uncle George was eaten by a croc over there, don’t go there to swim, then those young people don’t have to find out by trial and error.” ― Margaret Atwood

17. “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.” ― Margaret Atwood

18. “We thought we were running away from the grownups, and now we are the grownups.” ― Margaret Atwood

19. “The genesis of a poem for me is usually a cluster of words. The only good metaphor I can think of is a scientific one: dipping a thread into a supersaturated solution to induce crystal formation. I don’t think I solve problems in my poetry; I think I uncover the problems.” ― Margaret Atwood

20. “Speculative fiction encompasses that which we could actually do. Sci-fi is that which we’re probably not going to see.” ― Margaret Atwood

21. “You’re never going to kill storytelling because it’s built into the human plan. We come with it.” ― Margaret Atwood

22. “The answers you get from literature depend on the questions you pose.” ― Margaret Atwood

23. “All fiction is about people unless it’s about rabbits pretending to be people. It’s all essentially characters in action, which means characters moving through time and changes taking place, and that’s what we call ‘the plot’.” ― Margaret Atwood

24. “I was once a graduate student in Victorian literature, and I believe as the Victorian novelists did, that a novel isn’t simply a vehicle for private expression, but that it also exists for social examination. I firmly believe this.” ― Margaret Atwood

25. “If I pick up a book with spaceships on the cover, I want spaceships. If I see one with dragons, I want there to be dragons inside the book. Proper labeling. Ethical labeling. I don’t want to open up my cornflakes and find that they’re full of pebbles… You need to respect the reader enough not to call it something it isn’t.” ― Margaret Atwood

26. “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.” ― Margaret Atwood

27. “Heroes need monsters to establish their heroic credentials. You need something scary to overcome.” ― Margaret Atwood

28. A voice is a human gift; it should be cherished and used, to utter fully human speech as possible. Powerlessness and silence go together.” ― Margaret Atwood

29. “A divorce is like an amputation: you survive it, but there’s less of you.” ― Margaret Atwood

30. “We still think of a powerful man as a born leader and a powerful woman as an anomaly.” ― Margaret Atwood