Great Throughts Treasury

This site is dedicated to the memory of Dr. Alan William Smolowe who gave birth to the creation of this database.

Margaret Atwood, fully Margaret Eleanor Atwood

Canadian Author, Poet, Critic, Essayist and Environmental Activist

"A divorce is like an amputation; you survive, but there’s less of you."

"The facts of this world seen clearly are seen through tears."

"Men are afraid that women will laugh at them. Women are afraid that men will kill them."

"Potential has a shelf life."

"Nobody dies from the lack of sex. It's lack of love we die from."

"I am not your justification for existence."

"A bachelor, a studio, those were the names for that kind of apartment. Separate entrance it would say in the ads, and that meant you could have sex, unobserved."

"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: hard-shelled, firmly closed."

"Too friendly, too eager to be on message, man is obsolete, dooming ourselves to extinction, restore the balance of nature and babble babble, he overdid it so much that he sounded preposterous, and in an outfit like Bearlift, with its full quota of preposterous green-hued furfuckers, that took some effort."

"All creatures know that some must die that all the rest may take and eat; sooner or later, all transform their blood to wine, their flesh to meat. But man alone seeks vengefulness, and writes his abstract laws on stone; for this false justice he has made, he tortures limb and crushes bone. Is this the image of a god? My tooth for yours, your eye for mine? Oh, if revenge did move the stars instead of love, they would not shine."

"A few brown leaves are stuck to the outside of the glass like leather tongues."

"You don't look back along time but down through it, like water. Sometimes this comes to the surface, sometimes that, sometimes nothing. Nothing goes away."

"A handful of crumpled stars."

"A great fear came over me, and my body went entirely cold, and I stood as if paralyzed with fear; for I knew that the horse was no earthly horse, but the pale horse that will be sent at the Day of Reckoning, and the rider of it is Death; and it was Death himself who stood behind me, with his arms wrapped around me as tight as iron bands, and his lipless mouth kissing my neck as if in love. But as well as the horror, I also felt a strange longing."

"A home filled with nothing but yourself. It's heavy, that lightness. It's crushing, that emptiness."

"A hot wind was blowing around my head, the strands of my hair lifting and swirling in it, like ink spilled in water."

"A lot of people call you a feminist painter."

"A language is everything you do."

"A man in a cloud, with icicle teeth and eyes of fire."

"A lot of poets published their own work then; unlike novels, poetry was short, and therefore cheap to do. We had to print each poem separately, and then disassemble it, as there were not enough a's for the whole book; the cover was done with a lino-block. We printed 250 copies, and sold them through bookstores, for 50 cents each. They now go in the rare book trade for eighteen hundred dollars a pop. Wish I'd kept some."

"A movie about the past is not the same as the past."

"A man is just a woman's strategy for making other women. Not that your father wasn't a nice guy and all, but... there's something missing in them, even the nice ones. It's like they're permanently absent-minded, like they can't quite remember who they are. They look at the sky too much. They lose touch with their feet. They aren't a patch on a woman except they're better at fixing cars and playing football, just what we need for the improvement of the human race, right?"

"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?"

"A new flesh dress..."

"A puff of air?whuff!?hits his ears, blows out the candle. He can't be bothered relighting it, because the bourbon is taking over. He'd rather stay in the dark. He can sense Oryx drifting towards him on her soft feathery wings. Any moment now she'll be with him. He sits crouched in the chair with his head down on the desk and his eyes closed, in a state of misery and peace."

"A prison does not only lock its inmates inside, it keeps all others out. Her strongest prison is of her own construction."

"A rat in a maze is free to go anywhere, as long as it stays inside the maze."

"A ratio of failures is built into the process of writing. The wastebasket has evolved for a reason."

"A Sad Child: You're sad because you're sad. It's psychic. It's the age. It's chemical. Go see a shrink or take a pill, or hug your sadness like an eyeless doll you need to sleep. Well, all children are sad but some get over it. Count your blessings. Better than that, buy a hat. Buy a coat or pet. Take up dancing to forget. Forget what? Your sadness, your shadow, whatever it was that was done to you the day of the lawn party when you came inside flushed with the sun, your mouth sulky with sugar, in your new dress with the ribbon and the ice-cream smear, and said to yourself in the bathroom, I am not the favorite child. My darling, when it comes right down to it and the light fails and the fog rolls in and you're trapped in your overturned body under a blanket or burning car, and the red flame is seeping out of you and igniting the tarmac beside your head or else the floor, or else the pillow, none of us is; or else we all are."

"A road is a process, not a location."

"A space-time, between here and now and there and then, punctuated by dinner"

"A Tennyson garden, heavy with scent, languid; the return of the word swoon."

"A truth should exist, it should not be used like this. If I love you is that a fact or a weapon?"

"A voice is a human gift; it should be cherished and used, to utter fully human speech as possible. Powerlessness and silence go together."

"A wave of blood goes up to my head, my stomach shrinks together, as if something dangerous has just missed hitting me. It's as if I've been caught stealing, or telling a lie; or as if I've heard other people talking about me, saying bad things about me, behind my back. There's the same flush of shame, of guilt and terror, and of cold disgust with myself. But I don't know where these feelings have come from, what I've done."

"A Sister, dipped in blood."

"A word after a word after a word is power."

"A writer's age at the time of a work's composition is never irrelevant."

"According to Adam One, the Fall of Man was multidimensional. The ancestral primates fell out of the trees; then they fell from vegetarianism into meat-eating. Then they fell from instinct into reason, and thus into technology; from simple signals into complex grammar, and thus into humanity; from firelessness into fire, and thence into weaponry; and from seasonal mating into an incessant sexual twitching. Then they fell from a joyous life in the moment into the anxious contemplation of the vanished past and the distant future."

"After a year or two of keeping my head down and trying to pass myself off as a normal person, I made contact with the five other people at my university who were interested in writing; and through them, and some of my teachers, I discovered that there was a whole subterranean Wonderland of Canadian writing that was going on just out of general earshot and sight"

"All fathers are invisible in daytime; daytime is ruled by mothers and fathers come out at night. Darkness brings home fathers, with their real, unspeakable power. There is more to fathers than meets the eye."

"All fat women look the same; they all look 42."

"After everything that's happened, how can the world still be so beautiful? Because it is."

"Ah men, why do you want all this attention? I can write poems for myself, make love to a doorknob if absolutely necessary. What do you have to offer me I can't find otherwise except humiliation? Which I no longer need."

"All I can hope for is a reconstruction: the way love feels is always only approximate."

"All observations of life are harsh, because life is. I lament that fact, but I cannot change it."

"All myths are stories, but not all stories are myths: among stories, myths hold a special place."

"All it takes, said Crake, is the elimination of one generation. One generation of anything. Beetles, trees, microbes, scientists, speakers of French, whatever. Break the link in time between one generation and the next, and it?s game over forever."

"All of them have been green again by the time I got there. Each has inspired a few good quotes in its day. Sad marble angels brood like hens over the grassy nests where nothing hatches."

"All of this was understood, and if not condoned, at least pardoned."