I would like to be the air that inhabits you for a moment only. I would like to be that unnoticed and that necessary. - Margaret Atwood
We still think of a powerful man as a born leader and a powerful woman as an anomaly. - Margaret Atwood
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? - Margaret Atwood
nothing is more opaque than absolute transparency. Look--my feet don't hit the marble! Like breath or a balloon, I'm rising, I hover six inches in the air in my blazing swan-egg of light. You think I'm not a goddess? Try me. This is a torch song. Touch me and you'll burn. - Margaret Atwood
Heroes need monsters to establish their heroic credentials. You need something scary to overcome. - Margaret Atwood
A word after a word after a word is power. - Margaret Atwood
Men are afraid that women will laugh at them. Women are afraid that men will kill them. - Margaret Atwood
Every Canadian has a complicated relationship with the United States, whereas Americans think of Canada as the place where the weather comes from. - Margaret Atwood
The answers you get from literature depend on the questions you pose. - Margaret Atwood
I read for pleasure and that is the moment I learn the most. - Margaret Atwood
I'm not going to have a husband anyway," said Laura. "I'm going to live by myself in the garage. - Margaret Atwood
For me the experience of writing is really an experience of losing control.… I think it’s very much like dreaming or like surfing. You go out there and wait for a wave, and when it comes it takes you somewhere and you don’t know where it’ll go. - Margaret Atwood
Surviving Is the only warWe can afford - Margaret Atwood
Whatever is silenced will clamour to be heard, though silently. - Margaret Atwood
You fit into melike a hook into an eyea fish hookan open eye - Margaret Atwood
So much for endings. Beginnings are always more fun. True connoisseurs, however, are known to favor the stretch in between, since it's the hardest to do anything with. That's about all that can be said for plots, which anyway are just one thing after another, a what and a what and a what. - Margaret Atwood
Romance takes place in the middle distance. Romance is looking in at yourself through a window clouded with dew. Romance means leaving things out: where life grunts and shuffles, romance only sighs. - Margaret Atwood
Lambhood and tigerishness may be found in either gender, and in the same individual at different times. - Margaret Atwood
Ah men,why do you want all this attention?I can write poems for myself, make love to a doorknob if absolutelynecessary. What do you have to offer meI can't find otherwiseexcept humiliation? Which I no longerneed. - Margaret Atwood
A language is everything you do. - Margaret Atwood
Our problem right now is that we're so specialized that if the lights go out, there are a huge number of people who are not going to know what to do. But within every dystopia there's a little utopia. - Margaret Atwood
Expand your world. (Stories about wizards and spells) are very frequently about power relationships... - Margaret Atwood
Another belief of mine: that everyone else my age is an adult, whereas I am merely in disguise. - Margaret Atwood
Longed for him. Got him. Shit. - Margaret Atwood
A truth should exist,it should not be usedlike this. If I love youis that a fact or a weapon? - Margaret Atwood
Perhaps I write for no one. Perhaps for the same person children are writing for when they scrawl their names in the snow. - Margaret Atwood
Every budding dictatorship begins by muzzling the artists, because they're a mouthy lot and they don't line up and salute very easily. - Margaret Atwood
But my dreaming self refuses to be consoled. It continues to wander, aimless, homeless, alone. It cannot be convinced of its safety by any evidence drawn from my waking life. - Margaret Atwood
There is more than one kind of freedom...Freedom to and freedom from - Margaret Atwood
Maybe I don't really want to know what's going on. Maybe I'd rather not know. Maybe I couldn't bear to know. The Fall was a fall from innocence to knowledge. - Margaret Atwood
Being kind to your dog doesn't make you a better artist. - Margaret Atwood
War is what happens when language fails. - Margaret Atwood
The Eskimo has fifty-names for snow because it is important to them; there ought to be as many for love. - Margaret Atwood
Good writing takes place at intersections, at what you might call knots, at places where the society is snarled or knotted up. - Margaret Atwood
Pink is supposed to weaken your enemies, make them go soft on you, which must be why it's used for baby girls. It's a wonder the military hasn't got on to this. - Margaret Atwood
Writing poetry is a state of free float - Margaret Atwood
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