Margaret Atwood Quotes

I find looking forward scary because you might die.

I have no illusions of the future. Or maybe it's all illusion. I don't know. I've always been ready for it.

Everyone wants to be foremost in this future-and yet death and the stillness of death are the only things certain and common to all in this future! How strange that this sole thing that is certain and common to all, exercises almost no influence on men, and that they are the furthest from regarding themselves as the brotherhood of death! It makes me happy to see that men do not want to think at all of the idea of death!

Fear is a scavenger who feeds on the future; on what may be and what is possible, extending down the line of our lives.

Most of the time one night blends into the next and weeks blend into weeks and months into other months. And sooner or later we all die. But at the beginning of the night anything’s possible.

You realize as you get older that tomorrow is not guaranteed for anybody.

There is something insane about a lack of doubt. Doubt - to me, anyway - is what makes you human, and without doubt, even the righteous lose their grip, not only on reality but also on their humanity.

I don't know exactly where my life will lead. Adventure and the unknown has always been appealing to me.

I always live in the present. I never dream about what might happen. Why? It might not.

I don't know what the future will bring.

I don't want to actually die. I want to see what happens in life. I want to see where it goes.

I'm not gonna make 65. Let's just face facts, guys.

I don't want to fight until I'm 40. I don't even know if I'll get to 35.

Death at times seems like a dark tunnel to be traveled, and the future seems bleak.

One day everything will be well, that is our hope. Everything's fine today, that is our illusion.

Even now, as I write this, I can still feel that tightness. And I want you to feel it--the wind coming off the river, the waves, the silence, the wooded frontier. You're at the bow of a boat on the Rainy River. You're twenty-one years old, you're scared, and there's a hard squeezing pressure in your chest. What would you do? Would you jump? Would you feel pity for yourself? Would you think about your family and your childhood and your dreams and all you're leaving behind? Would it hurt? Would it feel like dying? Would you cry, as I did?

Death undoes us less, sometimes, than the hope that it will never come.

I've lived through some terrible things in my life, some of which actually happened.

We are all going to die one day. Everything else, my friend, I am not sure.

Time enough to think of the future when you haven't any future to think of.

I could worry about pretty much anything you put in front of me, so I'm not actually sort of anti-technology. So it doesn't sort of come out of that. It's not like a fear of the future. It's a fear of everything.

I always live in the present. I don’t know the future and no longer have the past. The former oppresses me as the possibility of everything, the latter as the reality of nothing.

Age is provident because the less future we have the more we fear it.

For the world is founded and built up on death, and the reality of death is neither to be questioned nor feared. Death is a dark dream, but it is not a nightmare. It is mankind's lack of pity, mankind's fatal propensity for torture, that is the nightmare.

Even if you don't acknowledge it, people die, and guys sleep with girls. That's just how it is.