Margaret Atwood Quotes

once upon a time all the rivers combined to protest against the action of the sea in making their waters salt. "When we come to you," sad they to the sea, "we are sweet and drinkable; but when once we have mingled with you, our waters become as briny and unpalatable as your own." The sea replied shortly, "Keep away from me, and you'll remain sweet.

We should take mothers in high seas and drown them there, they are as poisonous as lead in the air.

I find nothing healthful or exalting in the smooth conventions of society. I do not like the close air of saloons. I begin to suspect myself to be a prisoner, though treated with all this courtesy and luxury. I pay a destructive tax in my conformity.

It is a fact that our fresh water is becoming more scarce and that the new ways we are getting energy in America - fracking, mountaintop removal, cyclic steam extraction, deep-sea drilling - all pollute water, pollute the air, and pollute our soil and food.

Love doesn't happen in an instant. It creeps up on you and then it turns your life upside-down. It colours your waking moments and fills your dreams. You begin to walk on air and see life in brilliant new shades. But it also brings with it a sweet agony, a delicious torture.

I always say that a girl never really looks as well as she does on board a steamship, or even a yacht.

It's nine o'clock on a Saturday, the regular crowd shuffles in / There's an old man sitting next to me making love to his tonic and gin / He says, 'Son, can you play me a memory?/ I'm not really sure how it goes / But it's sad and it's sweet, and I knew it complete when I wore a younger man's clothes.'

Sweet and low, sweet and low, Wind of the western sea, Low, low, breathe and blow, Wind of the western sea! Over the rolling waters go, Come from the dying moon, and blow, Blow him again to me; While my little one, while my pretty one, sleeps. Sleep and rest, sleep and rest, Father will come to thee soon; Rest, rest, on mother's breast, Father will come to thee soon; Father will come to his babe in the nest, Silver sails all out of the west Under the silver moon: Sleep, my little one, sleep, my pretty one, sleep.

The sweet air coming into your house on a fine day, from water etched with waves as formal as the scales on a fish.

A man who casts no shadow isn't really a man at all.

Nobody knows like a woman how to say things at the same time sweet and profound. Sweetness and depth, this is all of woman; this is all of Heaven.

In "Drive," there's a heightened male edge. In "Only God Forgives," it was almost crawling back into the womb of the mother. And now with "The Neon Demon," being reborn as a 16-year-old girl.

Chic is a convent for unloved women.

I'm pretty as a girl.

To one given to day-dreaming, and fond of losing himself in reveries, a sea-voyage is full of subjects for meditation; but then they are the wonders of the deep and of the air, and rather tend to abstract the mind from worldly themes.

There are little Indian girls out there who look up to me, and I never want to belittle the honor of being an inspiration to them. But while I’m talking about why I’m so different, white male show runners get to talk about their art.

What action could bodies and substances have if they were not named in a further increase of dignity where common nouns become proper nouns?

A woman must wait for her ovaries to die before she can get her rightful personality back. Post-menstrual is the same as pre-menstrual; I am once again what I was before the age of twelve: a female human being who knows that a month has thirty day, not twenty-five, and who can spend every one of them free of the shackles of that defect of body and mind known as femininity.

A girl who is really pretty - whether she wraps herself in an abayah, a nun's habit, or the front hall rug - never wraps herself so that the world can't tell.

Everyone knows the phenomenon of trying to hold your breath underwater - how at first it's alright and you can handle it, and then as it gets closer and closer to the time when you must breathe, how urgent the need becomes, the lust and the hunger to breathe. And then the panic sets in when you begin to think that you won't be able to breathe - and finally, when you take in air and the anxiety subsides...that's what it's like to be a vampire and need blood.

I'm always concerned about marketing or commercial philosophies. I can't feel good about having my name on a bottle of perfume that comes from a factory making perfume with all the same ingredients as every other perfume. I can't feel good about a factory overseas polluting the air for something with my name on it. I'm okay with music - because it's digital or a CD. My music is my emotion in a bottle. But how is a perfume supposed to reflect me? How is a sweatshirt supposed to represent me?

It's hard when you look a certain way. I look All-American, sweet, girl-next-door, so naturally those are the parts that are going to land on my doorstep.