Margaret Atwood Quotes

People are essentially red meat. They are.

A lot of guys are very intimidated by an attractive woman, and they dehumanise her because our culture perceives beautiful women as commodities. But I think if you're able walk up to a person and get to know them, and you see their flaws and their impurities, and realise that they're like you, then you can humanise them again.

Humanity's become a product and when humanity is a product, you get Auschwitz and you get Chair.

You can very easily be turned into a commodity. I've grown up with it.

As soon as there is language, generality has entered the scene.

The trouble with this wide-open pornography ... is not that it corrupts but that it desensitizes; not that it unleashes the passions but that it cripples the emotions; not that it encourages a mature attitude but that it is a reversion to infantile obsessions; not that it removes the blinders but that it distorts the view. Progress is proclaimed but love is denied. What we have is not liberation but dehumanization.

I regard the poor man, in his present condition, as so much wasted raw material. Cut up and properly canned, he might be made useful to fatten the natives of the cannibal islands and to improve our export trade in that region. I shall recommend legislation upon the subject in my first message. My campaign cry will be: "Dessicate the poor working-man; stuff him into sausages.”

I think that the dehumanization of another person can happen in the matter of an instant.

People talk about each other in the worst way, especially when you become a product for sale. You're just a thing.

I'm a normal person, but people see me as this person who's not really real, almost like I don't have feelings. They think they can treat me any way they want to.

They treat you as if you are a different kind of human or life form when you are a celebrity - as if we don't breathe the same air, or we don't bleed the same - and I hate that. I really hate that.

But then you hear that he can't hear you, you see that he can't see you. You are not here--and you haven't even died yet. You see yourself through his eyes, as The Generic Woman, the skirted symbol on the ladies' room door.

That is what you have to do before you kill, I thought. You have to create an it, where none was before.

No good book has ever been written that has in it symbols arrived at beforehand and stuck in. ... I tried to make a real old man, a real boy, a real sea and a real fish and real sharks. But if I made them good and true enough they would mean many things

I've been treated as less than human, as a thing, as a pawn. And just because I don't have a Bible or a microphone-just because I don't draw millions of people on TV-doesn't mean I'm not human.

My songs are my hookers. I can't worry about how they are going to be treated; they just need to bring home the bacon.

There are metaphors more real than the people who walk in the street.

The woof and warp of all thought and all research is symbols, and the life of thought and science is the life inherent in symbols; so that it is wrong to say that a good language is important to good thought, merely; for it is the essence of it.

Words are merely utterances: noises that stand for feelings, thoughts, and experience. They are symbols. Signs. Insignias. They are not Truth. They are not the real thing.

She’s a commodity in a sea of broken girls.

After that [father's death] I never cried with any real conviction, nor expected much of anyone's God except indifference, nor loved deeply without fear that it would cost me dearly in pain. At the age of five I had become a skeptic and began to sense that any happiness that came my way might be the prelude to some grim cosmic joke.

Oh, she doesn't belong to anybody now,' he said, and suddenly I saw her for what she was - a piece of refuse waiting to be cleared away: if you needed a bit of hair you could take it, or trim her nails if nail trimmings had value to you. Like a saint's her bones could be divided up - if anybody required them. She was going to be burnt soon, so why shouldn't everybody have what he wanted first? What a fool I had been during three years to imagine that in any way I had possessed her. We are all possessed by nobody, not even by ourselves.

What pornography is really about, ultimately, isn't sex but death.

Too large a proportion of recent "mathematical" economics are mere concoctions, as imprecise as the initial assumptions they rest on, which allow the author to lose sight of the complexities and interdependencies of the real world in a maze of pretentious and unhelpful symbols.

Men and women, old and young, married and single, were ranked with horses, sheep, and swine