Quotes by "Margaret Atwood"

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.

A word after a word after a word is power.

Don't let the bastards grind you down.

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

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

There are some women who seem to be born without fear, just as there are people who are born without the ability to feel pain. ... Providence appears to protect such women, maybe out of astonishment.

Fear has a smell, as Love does.

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

Time is compressed like the fist I close on my knee ... I hold inside it the clues and solutions and the power for what I must do now.

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

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

The answers you get from literature depend upon the questions you pose.

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

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

The Eskimo has fifty-two names for snow because it is important to them; there ought to be as many for love.

Falling in love, we said; I fell for him. We were falling women. We believed in it, this downward motion: so lovely, like flying, and yet at the same time so dire, so extreme, so unlikely. God is love, they once said, but we reversed that, and love, like heaven, was always just around the corner. The more difficult it was to love the particular man beside us, the more we believed in Love, abstract and total. We were waiting, always, for the incarnation. That word, made flesh. And sometimes it happened, for a time. That kind of love comes and goes and is hard to remember afterwards, like pain. You would look at the man one day and you would think, I loved you, and the tense would be past, and you would be filled with a sense of wonder, because it was such an amazing and precarious and dumb thing to have done; and you would know too why your friends had been evasive about it, at the time. There is a good deal of comfort, now, in remembering this.

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

Hatred would have been easier. With hatred, I would have known what to do. Hatred is clear, metallic, one-handed, unwavering; unlike love.

A truth should exist, it should not be used like this. If I love you is that a fact or a weapon?