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48 Chillingly Beautiful Margaret Atwood Quotes To Read When You're Coming Undone

The human condition has never sounded quite this melodic.
Heidi Priebe
October 20, 2016
“Take me to your trees. Take me to your breakfasts, your sunsets, your bad dreams, your shoes, your nouns. Take me to your fingers.”
— Margaret Atwood, Good Bones
“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.”
— Margaret Atwood, The Blind Assassin: A Novel
Tagged: Youth, Growing Up, Time
“You can only be jealous of someone who has something you think you ought to have yourself.”
— Margaret Atwood, The Handmaid's Tale
Tagged: Jealousy, Desire
“Potential has a shelf life.”
— Margaret Atwood, Cat's Eye
Tagged: Potential, Opportunity, Going For It, Ambition
“If we were all on trial for our thoughts, we would all be hanged.”
— Margaret Atwood, Alias Grace: A Novel
Tagged: Thoughts, Perspective, Perception
“When you are in the middle of a story it isn't a story at all, but only a confusion; a dark roaring, a blindness, a wreckage of shattered glass and splintered wood; like a house in a whirlwind, or else a boat crushed by the icebergs or swept over the rapids, and all aboard powerless to stop it. It's only afterwards that it becomes anything like a story at all. When you are telling it, to yourself or to someone else.”
— Margaret Atwood, Alias Grace: A Novel
Tagged: Confusion, Middles, Stories, Uncertainty
“Why does the mind do such things? Turn on us, rend us, dig the claws in. If you get hungry enough, they say, you start eating your own heart. Maybe it's much the same.”
— Margaret Atwood, The Blind Assassin
Tagged: Mind, Perception, Obsessiveness, Obsessing
“I’m working on my own life story. I don’t mean I’m putting it together; no, I’m taking it apart. It’s mostly a question of editing. If you’d wanted the narrative line you should have asked earlier, when I still knew everything and was more than willing to tell.”
— Margaret Atwood, The Tent
Tagged: Life, Story, Confusion, Uncertainty, Change
“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.”
— Margaret Atwood, Cat's Eye
Tagged: Love, Loving People, Future, Life, Confusion, Change
“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 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.”
— Margaret Atwood, The Blind Assassin: A Novel
Tagged: Future, Clarity, Depression, Understanding, Big Picture
“Ignoring isn’t the same as ignorance, you have to work at it.”
— Margaret Atwood, The Handmaid's Tale
Tagged: Igorance, Ignoring
“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.”
— Margaret Atwood, The Handmaid's Tale
Tagged: Pain, Memory, Remembering
“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.”
— Margaret Atwood, The Blind Assassin: A Novel
Tagged: Truth, Writing, Creativity
“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.”
— Margaret Atwood, The Handmaid's Tale
Tagged: Freedom, Stories, People, Life
“When we think of the past it's the beautiful things we pick out. We want to believe it was all like that.”
— Margaret Atwood, The Handmaid's Tale
Tagged: The Past, Nostalgia, Truth, Perception, Memory
“Touch comes before sight, before speech. It is the first language and the last, and it always tells the truth.”
— Margaret Atwood, Der blinde Mörder
Tagged: Touch, Love, senses, Truth, The Human Condition
“Farewells can be shattering, but returns are surely worse. Solid flesh can never live up to the bright shadow cast by its absence. Time and distance blur the edges; then suddenly the beloved has arrived, and it's noon with its merciless light, and every spot and pore and wrinkle and bristle stands clear.”
— Margaret Atwood, The Blind Assassin: A Novel
Tagged: Truth, Farewells, Goodbyes, Saying Goodbye, Returning, Reunions
“The best way of keeping a secret is to pretend there isn't one.”
— Margaret Atwood, The Blind Assassin: A Novel
Tagged: Secrets, Keeping Secrets
“Hatred would have been easier. With hatred, I would have known what to do. Hatred is clear, metallic, one-handed, unwavering; unlike love.”
— Margaret Atwood, Cat's Eye
Tagged: Hatred, Anger, Love
“What I need is perspective. The illusion of depth, created by a frame, the arrangement of shapes on a flat surface. Perspective is necessary. Otherwise there are only two dimensions. Otherwise you live with your face squashed up against a wall, everything a huge foreground, of details, close-ups, hairs, the weave of the bedsheet, the molecules of the face. Your own skin like a map, a diagram of futility, criscrossed with tiny roads that lead nowhere. Otherwise you live in the moment. Which is not where I want to be.”
— Margaret Atwood, The Handmaid's Tale
Tagged: Perspective, Life, Change
“Forgiveness is a power. To beg for it is a power, and to withhold or bestow it is a power, perhaps the greatest.”
— Margaret Atwood, The Handmaid's Tale
Tagged: forgiveness, Power
“A home filled with nothing but yourself. It's heavy, that lightness. It's crushing, that emptiness.”
— Margaret Atwood, The Tent
Tagged: self, Self-Concept, Emptiness, Sadness
“I am not your justification for existence.”
— Margaret Atwood, The Handmaid's Tale
Tagged: Existence, justification, Love, Idealism, Idealizing Someone
“Happiness is a garden walled with glass: there's no way in or out. In Paradise there are no stories, because there are no journeys. It's loss and regret and misery and yearning that drive the story forward, along its twisted road.”
— Margaret Atwood, The Blind Assassin
Tagged: Happiness, Joy, Pain, Loss, Grieving, Stories, Paradise, Change
“We yearned for the future. How did we learn it, that talent for insatiability?”
— Margaret Atwood, The Handmaid's Tale
Tagged: Future, Change, Yearning
“Beginnings are sudden, but also insidious. They creep up on you sideways, they keep to the shadows, they lurk unrecognized. Then, later, they spring.”
— Margaret Atwood, The Blind Assassin: A Novel
Tagged: Beginnings, Change, Endings
“I want everything back, the way it was. But there is no point to it, this wanting.”
— Margaret Atwood, The Handmaid's Tale
Tagged: Wanting, Desire, Change, Nostalgia
“What we share may be a lot like a traffic accident but we get one another. We are survivors of each other. We have been shark to one another, but also lifeboat. That counts for something.”
— Margaret Atwood, Cat's Eye
Tagged: Love, Co-dependency, Relationships, Exes, Ex-Lovers
“'Should' is a futile word. It's about what didn't happen. It belongs in a parallel universe. It belongs in another dimension of space.”
— Margaret Atwood, The Blind Assassin: A Novel
Tagged: Regret, Perception, Mistakes, Alternate Universes
“Old lovers go the way of old photographs, bleaching out gradually as in a slow bath of acid: first the moles and pimples, then the shadings. Then the faces themselves, until nothing remains but the general outlines.”
— Margaret Atwood, Cat's Eye
Tagged: Love, Exes, Ex-Lovers