Margaret Atwood Quotes

All stories are about wolves. All worth repeating, that is. Anything else is sentimental drivel.

Well, Company of Wolves was about that literally, about fairy tales.

The horror genre gets you in touch with our primal instincts as a people more than any other genre I can think of. It gives you this chance to sort of reflect on who we are and look at the sort of uglier side that we don't always look at, and have fun with that very thing.

Any dog, you put him in the corner, no matter if they're vicious or not, they're going to bite back.

With animal behavior, they're all fine until you introduce some rogue element into the cage, and then they go crazy.

I have been given the tag of Sher Khan. So, the tiger is my spirit animal.

I want to go barefoot because it’s holy ground; I want to be running because time is short and none of us has as much runway as we think we do; and I want it to be a fight because that’s where we can make a difference. That’s what love does.

I hunt deer because they aren't capable of higher forms of thinking. All they care about is, 'What am I going to eat next, who am I going to screw next, and can I run fast enough to get away'. They are very much like the French in that way.

The voice was low and tinged with a hint of Scotland. It would have caused Alexia to shiver and think primal monkey thoughts about moons and running far and fast, if she'd had a soul. Instead it caused her to sigh in exasperation and sit up.

I can't remember exactly the first thing I wrote, but one of the stories, was about a pilot whose plane crashed on a desert island, and the only other life on the island was a brown cow with yellow spots. The cow had... to survive, had taught itself to eat and get nutriments from sand. I guess, I've always been interested in adaptability and taking whatever life hands you and running with it.

I think we are constantly faced with the same decision. The decision to be blindly obedient to authority versus the decision to try and change things by fighting the powers that be is always, throughout history, the only decision.

Something about the howling of a wolf took a man right out of his here and now and left him in a dark forest of the mind, running naked before the pack.

There is no better way to know us Than as two wolves, come separately to a wood.

Someday an opportunity will come. Think about Harry Potter. His life is terrible, but then a letter arrives, he gets on a train, and everything is different for him afterward. Better. Magical." "That's just a story." "So are we- we're stories too.

Out of this pack-persecution he learned two important things: how to take care of himself in a mass-fight against him; and how, on a single dog, to inflict the greatest amount of damage in the briefest space of time.

You got to fight them, Celie, she say. I can't do it for you. You got to fight them for yourself. I don't say nothing. I think bout Nettie, dead. She fight, she run away. What good it do? I don't fight, I stay where I'm told. But I'm alive.

The easiest period in a crisis situation is actually the battle itself. The most difficult is the period of indecision - whether to fight or run away. And the most dangerous period is the aftermath. It is then, with all his resources spent and his guard down, that an individual must watch out for dulled reactions and faulty judgment.

I think there's a part of all of us that wonders how we would survive on an island untouched by Man. Even better, an island untouched by Man and inhabited by King Kong.

You don't deliberately submit people you love to something like that. I don't think I'd run again for vice-president. Next time I'd run for president.

There have always been people like you, Nicholas Flamel. People who think they know what's best, who decide what people should see and read and listen to, who ultimately try to shape how the rest of the world think and acts. I've spent my entire life fighting the likes of you.

I think the good stories are those where the character decides to break away and do something different.

My friend taught me this one. You take the heel of your hand, you can shove someone's nose right through their brain. I can't even watch someone blow their nose. If I'm in a fight, I'm not gonna be shoving or poking, I'm gonna be running or begging - that's my two choices, right there.

There are surely many ways that [media select and contextualise events determine the boundaries of public thinking] happens, but we can note at the most obvious level the way in which forms of resistance or violence get cast as "conflicts" that assume two sides that are fighting only against one another.

I don't know if I was always an open person, but I think stand-up comics specifically have this way of running towards embarrassing things - whereas regular people tend to run away - because the embarrassing story is always going to be the really funny story.

There are some dogs which, when you meet them, remind you that, despite thousands of years of man-made evolution, every dog is still only two meals away from being a wolf. These dogs advance deliberately, purposefully, the wilderness made flesh, their teeth yellow, their breath a-stink, while in the distance their owners witter, "He's an old soppy really, just poke him if he's a nuisance," and in the green of their eyes the red campfires of the Pleistocene gleam and flicker.