Margaret Atwood - Quodid

About

Picture of Margaret Atwood

Margaret Eleanor Atwood (born November 18, 1939) is a Canadian novelist, poet, literary critic, and inventor. Since 1961, she has published 18 books of poetry, 18 novels, 11 books of nonfiction, nine collections of short fiction, eight children's books, two graphic novels, and a number of small press editions of both poetry and fiction. Her best-known work is the 1985 dystopian novel The Handmaid's Tale. Atwood has won numerous awards and honors for her writing, including two Booker Prizes, the Arthur C. Clarke Award, the Order of Canada, the Franz Kafka Prize, the Prince of Asturias Award for literature, and the National Book Critics and PEN Center USA Lifetime Achievement Awards. A number of her works have been adapted for film and television.

Quotes from Margaret Atwood

How old do you have to get before wisdom descends like a plastic bag over your head and you learn to keep your big mouth shut? Maybe never. Maybe you get more frivolous with age.

—Margaret Atwood

wisdom silence age frivolity

I stand holding the apple in both hands. It feels precious, like a heavy treasure. I lift it up and smell it. It has such an odor of outdoors on it I want to cry.

—Margaret Atwood

Fear has a smell, as love does.

—Margaret Atwood

love fear smell

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—Margaret Atwood

Gardening is not a rational act. What matters is the immersion of the hands in the earth, that ancient ceremony of which the Pope kissing the tarmac is merely a pallid vestigial remnant. In the spring, at the end of the day, you should smell like dirt.

—Margaret Atwood

rationality gardening ceremony dirt

We must accept that this creative pulse within us is God's creative pulse itself.

—Margaret Atwood

You refuse to own yourself, you permit others to do it for you.

—Margaret Atwood

Sympathy from strangers can be ruinous.

—Margaret Atwood

She wasn't ready to settle down, she told her friends. That was one way of putting it. Another would have been that she had not found anyone to settle down with. There had been several men in her life, but they hadn't been convincing. They'd been somewhat like her table—quickly acquired, brightened up a little, but temporary. The time for that kind of thing was running out, however. She was tired of renting.

—Margaret Atwood in Moral Disorder: and Other Stories

Another belief of mine; that everyone else my age is an adult, whereas I am merely in disguise.

—Margaret Atwood

Books

Margaret Atwood has the following books quoted on Quodid:

Moral Disorder: and Other Stories