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Margaret Atwood Quotes - IQDb - Internet Quotes Database

Quotes from Margaret Atwood


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If I waited for perfection... I would never write a word.


I have a big following among the biogeeks of this world. Nobody ever puts them in books.


Religions in general have to rediscover their roots. In Hinduism and the Koran, animals are described as equals. If you walk into a cathedral and look at the decorations of early Christianity, there are vines, animals, creatures and birds thriving all over the stonework.


Every aspect of human technology has a dark side, including the bow and arrow.


The object is very clear in the fight against racism; you have reasons why you're opposed to it. But when you're writing a novel, you don't want the reader to come out of it voting yes or no to some question. Life is more complicated than that.


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.


Heroes need monsters to establish their heroic credentials. You need something scary to overcome.


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


Vampires get the joy of flying around and living forever, werewolves get the joy of animal spirits. But zombies, they're not rich, or aristocratic, they shuffle around. They're a group phenomenon, they're not very fast, they're quite sickly. So what's the pleasure of being one?


An eye for an eye only leads to more blindness.


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.


Sooner or later, I hate to break it to you, you're gonna die, so how do you fill in the space between here and there? It's yours. Seize your space.


A word after a word after a word is power.


Before the Civil War, Canada was at the top of the underground railroad. If you made it into Canada, you were safe unless someone came and hauled you back. That was also true during the Vietnam War for draft resisters.


When things are really dismal, you can laugh, or you can cave in completely.


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.


Optimism means better than reality; pessimism means worse than reality. I'm a realist.


You will always have partial points of view, and you'll always have the story behind the story that hasn't come out yet. And any form of journalism you're involved with is going to be up against a biased viewpoint and partial knowledge.


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


The society in 'The Handmaid's Tale' is a throwback to the early Puritans whom I studied extensively at Harvard under Perry Miller, to whom the book is dedicated.