Margaret Atwood Quotes

About the only thing that'll stay with you that you can trust all your life is your breath. Your breath will be there at the very last, because when it stops, you will stop.

Why should I ask the wise men: Whence is my beginning? I am busy with the thought: Where will be my end?

There are only three events in a man's life; birth, life, and death; he is not conscious of being born, he dies in pain, and he forgets to live.

Life and death. They are somehow sweetly and beautifully mixed, but I don't know how.

There's a sense in all my novels that nothing is certain.

In my solitude I have pondered much on the incomprehensible subjects of space, eternity, life and death.

People don't want to be plagued by not knowing-they want answers.

Once life is finished it acquires a sense; up to that point it has not got a sense; its sense is suspended and therefore ambiguous.

Nothing is a matter of life and death except life and death.

To be, or not to be, that is the question.

Life is a spark between two identical voids, the darkness before birth and the one after death.

I am no lover of disorder and doubt as such. Rather do I fear to lose truth by this pretension to possess it already wholly.

I still don't even know if the sheriff will let me see him. And suppose he did; what then? What do I say to him? Do I know what a man is? Do I know how a man is supposed to die? I'm still trying to find out how a man should live. Am I supposed to tell someone how to die who has never lived?

I to die, and you to live. Which is better God only knows.

You're born, you die. Everything in between is subject to interpretation.

This was real. And it was me. I had lived that life, and I had died that death. I was staring at the very end of me.

Man cannot live without some knowledge of the purpose of life. If he can find no purpose in life he creates one in the inevitability of death.

Il n'est pas certain que tout soit incertain. (Translation: It is not certain that everything is uncertain.)

For there is a VOID in things; a truth which it will be useful for you, in reference to many points, to know; and which will prevent you from wandering in doubt.

The truth of the matter is, you die, all you do is die, and yet you live, yes you live, and that's no Harvard lie.

Nothing is certain, ma petite, not even death." - Jean-Claude

What is not surrounded by uncertainty cannot be the truth.

There are about as many ways to be dead as there are to be alive. People linger in different ways, both publicly and privately.

I believe that the black-and-white photograph, or rather the gray zones in the black-and-white photograph, stand for this territory that is located between life and death.