Margaret Atwood is a literary icon who has been shaking up the literary world for five decades. Known for her keen eye on social issues and feminist themes, she penned some real thought-provokers. From The Handmaid’s Tale to Oryx and Crake, it’s never just about fiction with Atwood; it’s about reflecting our own world back at us. And let me tell you, it’s not always comfortable to look at. So prepare to be intrigued, inspired, and possibly unsettled by 20 of Margaret Atwood’s most powerful quotes.
1. “We were the people who were not in the papers. We lived in the blank white spaces at the edges of print. It gave us more freedom. We lived in the gaps between the stories.”
― The Handmaid’s Tale
2. “But who can remember pain, once it’s over? All that remains of it is a shadow, not in the mind even, in the flesh. Pain marks you, but too deep to see. Out of sight, out of mind.”
― The Handmaid’s Tale
3. “Life is warped. I’m just in sync.”
― MaddAddam
4. “I’m working on my own life story. I don’t mean I’m putting it together; no, I’m taking it apart.”
― The Tent
5. “When we think of the past it’s the beautiful things we pick out. We want to believe it was all like that.”
― The Handmaid’s Tale
6. “When you’re young, you think everything you do is disposable. You move from now to now, crumpling time up in your hands, tossing it away. You’re your own speeding car. You think you can get rid of things, and people too—leave them behind. You don’t yet know about the habit they have, of coming back.”
― The Blind Assassin
7. “Do not let the bastards grind you down.”
― The Handmaid’s Tale
8. “Male fantasies, male fantasies, is everything run by male fantasies? Up on a pedestal or down on your knees, it’s all a male fantasy: that you’re strong enough to take what they dish out, or else too weak to do anything about it. Even pretending you aren’t catering to male fantasies is a male fantasy: pretending you’re unseen, pretending you have a life of your own, that you can wash your feet and comb your hair unconscious of the ever-present watcher peering through the keyhole, peering through the keyhole in your own head, if nowhere else. You are a woman with a man inside watching a woman. You are your own voyeur.”
― The Robber Bride
9. “But how can you have a sense of wonder if you’re prepared for everything?”
― Stone Mattress: Nine Tales
10. “Gone mad is what they say, and sometimes Run mad, as if mad is a different direction, like west; as if mad is a different house you could step into, or a separate country entirely. But when you go mad you don’t go any other place, you stay where you are. And somebody else comes in.”
― Alias Grace
11. “To live in prison is to live without mirrors. To live
without mirrors is to live without the self. She is
living selflessly, she finds a hole in the stone wall and
on the other side of the wall, a voice. The voice
comes through darkness and has no face. This voice
becomes her mirror.”
― Selected Poems
12. “What am I living for and what am I dying for are the same question.”
― The Year of the Flood
13. “Another belief of mine: that everyone else my age is an adult, whereas I am merely in disguise.”
― Cat’s Eye
14. “A man is just a woman’s strategy for making other women.”
― The Handmaid’s Tale
15. “There is more than one kind of freedom. Freedom to and freedom from. In the days of anarchy, it was freedom to. Now you are being given freedom from. Don’t underrate it.”
― The Handmaid’s Tale
16. “Some people can’t tell where it hurts. They can’t calm down. They can’t ever stop howling.”
― The Blind Assassin
17. “I wanted to forget the past, but it refused to forget me; it waited for sleep, then cornered me.”
― Lady Oracle
18. “My friends, who are both women, tell me their stories,
which cannot be believed and which are true. They
are horror stories and they have not happened to me,
they have not yet happened to me, they have
happened to me but we are detached, we watch our
unbelief with horror.”
― Selected Poems
19. “Love blurs your vision; but after it recedes, you can see more clearly than ever. It’s like the tide going out, revealing whatever’s been thrown away and sunk: broken bottles, old gloves, rusting pop cans, nibbled fishbodies, bones. This is the kind of thing you see if you sit in the darkness with open eyes, not knowing the future.”
― Cat’s Eye
20. “After everything that’s happened, how can the world still be so beautiful? Because it is.”
― Oryx and Crake
