Margaret Atwood Quotes That Will Inspire You to Live Your Best Life

1. A truth should exist,it should not be usedlike this. If I love youis that a fact or a weapon?

2. All you have to do, I tell myself, is keep your mouth shut and look stupid. It shouldn't be that hard. The Handmaid's Tale

3. 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. The Handmaid's Tale

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

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

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

7. How could I have been so ignorant? she thinks. So stupid, so unseeing, so given over to carelessness. But without such ignorance, such carelessness, how could we live? If you knew what was going to happen, if you knew everything that was going to happen next—if you knew in advance the consequences of your own actions—you'd be doomed. You'd be as ruined as God. You'd be a stone. You'd never eat or drink or laugh or get out of bed in the morning. You'd never love anyone, ever again. You'd never dare to. The Blind Assassin

8. How could I have been so ignorant? she thinks. So stupid, so unseeing, so given over to carelessness. But without such ignorance, such carelessness, how could we live? If you knew what was going to happen, if you knew everything that was going to happen next—if you knew in advance the consequences of your own actions—you'd be doomed. You'd be as ruined as God. You'd be a stone. You'd never eat or drink or laugh or get out of bed in the morning. You'd never love anyone, ever again. You'd never dare to. The Blind Assassin

9. I was taking something away from her, although she didn't know it. I was filching. Never mind that it was something she apparently didn't want or had no use for, had rejected even; still, it was hers, and if I took it away, this mysterious "it" I couldn't quite define. The Handmaid's Tale

10. I would like to be the air that inhabits you for a moment only. I would like to be that unnoticed and that necessary.

11. I'm not senile," I snapped. "If I burn the house down it will be on purpose. The Blind Assassin

12. It must have been then that I began to lose faith in reasonable argument as the sole measure of truth. Bluebeard's Egg

13. 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. The ruin you've made. Cat's Eye

14. Neither of us says the word love, not once. It would be tempting fate; it would be romance, bad luck. The Handmaid's Tale

15. 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.

16. She imagines him imagining her. This is her salvation.In spirit she walks the city, traces its labyrinths, its dingy mazes: each assignation, each rendezvous, each door and stair and bed. What he said, what she said, what they did, what they did then. Even the times they argued, fought, parted, agonized, rejoined. How they’d loved to cut themselves on each other, taste their own blood. We were ruinous together, she thinks. But how else can we live, these days, except in the midst of ruin? The Blind Assassin

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

18. The only way you can write the truth is to assume that what you set down will never be read. Not by any other person, and not even by yourself at some later date. Otherwise you begin excusing yourself. You must see the writing as emerging like a long scroll of ink from the index finger of your right hand; you must see your left hand erasing it. The Blind Assassin

19. The truth is seldom welcome, especially at dinner. Morning in the Burned House

20. There I am, in the Grade Six class picture, smiling broadly. Happy as a clam, is what my mother says for happy. I am happy as a clam: hardshelled, firmly closed. Cat's Eye

21. This is how the girl who couldn't speak and the man who couldn't see fell in love. The Blind Assassin

22. Truly amazing, what people can get used to, as long as there are a few compensations. The Handmaid's Tale

23. We understand more than we know. Oryx and Crake

24. What is it the I'll want from you? Not love: that would be too much to ask. Not forgiveness, which isn't yours to bestow. Only a listener, perhaps; only someone who will see me. Don't prettify me though, whatever else you do: I have no wish to be a decorated skull. But I leave myself in your hands. What choice do I have? By the time you read this last page, that- if anywhere- is the only place I will be. The Blind Assassin

25. You shouldn't do that," said Laura. "You could set yourself on fire. The Blind Assassin

26. ...we must be a beacon of hope, because if you tell people there's nothing they can do, they will do worse than nothing. The Year of the Flood

27. A Paradox, the doughnut hole. Empty space, once, but now they've learned to market even that. A minus quantity; nothing, rendered edible. I wondered if they might be used-metaphorically, of course-to demonstrate the existence of God. Does naming a sphere of nothingness transmute it into being? Der blinde Mörder

28. Better not to invent her in her absence. Better to wait until she's actually here. Then he can make her up as she goes along. The Blind Assassin

29. By now you must have guessed: I come from another planet. But I will never say to you, Take me to your leaders. Even I - unused to your ways though I am - would never make that mistake. We ourselves have such beings among us, made of cogs, pieces of paper, small disks of shiny metal, scraps of coloured cloth. I do not need to encounter more of them.Instead I will say, Take me to your trees. Take me to your breakfasts, your sunsets, your bad dreams, your shoes, your nouns. Take me to your fingers; take me to your deaths.These are worth it. These are what I have come for. Good Bones and Simple Murders

30. He has to find more and better ways of occupying his time. His time, what a bankrupt idea, as if he's been given a box of time belonging to him alone, stuffed to the brim with hours and minutes that he can spend like money. Trouble is, the box has holes in it and the time is running out, no matter what he does with it. Oryx and Crake