Margaret Atwood Quotes

I like to run fast but not drive.

People say there's delays on flights. Delays, really? New York to California in five hours, that used to take 30 years, a bunch of people used to die on the way there, have a baby, you would end up with a whole different group of people by the time you got there. Now you watch a movie and [go to the toilet] and you're home.

Pray to catch the bus, then run as fast as you can.

In proportion as our inward life fails, we go more constantly and desperately to the post office. You may depend on it, that the poor fellow who walks away with the greatest number of letters, proud of his extensive correspondence, has not heard from himself this long while.

We want to get there faster. Get where? Wherever we are not. But a human soul can only go as fast as a man can walk, they used to say. In that case, where are all the souls? Left behind. They wander here and there, slowly, dim lights flickering in the marshes at night, looking for us. But they're not nearly fast enough, not for us, we're way ahead of them, they'll never catch up. That's why we can go so fast: our souls don't weigh us down.

You've been gone so long from all that you know. It's been shuffled aside as you bask in the glow. All the beauitful strangers who whisper your name, do they fill up the emptiness? Larger that life is your fiction, in a universe made upon one.

As I have been arguing for a long time now, there is a real need not simply for a political economy of wealth but also for a political economy of speed.

I walked around Soho's street for over an hour, running into familiar faces but never once stopping to chat. It was then that I felt something discomforting and comforting all at once. I didn't want to be here, in this city, anymore.

It does not matter whether one is at the giving or receiving end of love just as long as one is part of the process in some way. It is only when we become disconnected from the process altogether that we should begin to worry.

Speed takes a little bit of getting used to, but rules have to be followed. At any speed, the more you run, the more you get used to it.

Our gazes locked, so much passing between us. In those moments, I wasn't in a tent with him, on the run from those who regarded us as villains. There was no murderer to catch, no Strigoi trauma to overcome. There was just him and me and the feelings that had burned between us for so long.

Apathy adds up, in the long run, to cowardice.

The road we have long been traveling is deceptively easy, a smooth superhighway on which we progress with great speed, but at its end lies disaster.

I suspect victims; they win in the long run.

I think the biggest problem we have is taking too long over things. Not in terms of getting it right, but sometimes we do things quickly that are really good.

For John was running, and this was terrible. Because if you ran, time ran. You yelled and screamed and raced and rolled and tumbled and all of a sudden the sun was gone and the whistle was blowing and you were on your long way home to supper. When you weren't looking, the sun got around behind you! The only way to keep things slow was to watch everything and do nothing! You could stretch a day to three days, sure, just by watching!

Natural selection does not give any preference at all to anything that, in the long run, could be advantageous for the species but blindly rewards everything that, momentarily, affords greater procreative success.

All our efforts to attain immortality-by statesmanship, by conquest, by science or the arts-are equally vain in the long run, because the long run is longer than any of us can imagine.

What's the future of mankind? How do I know, I got left behind.

My goal is not to fail fast. My goal is to succeed over the long run. They are not the same thing.

Women in bed are like Diesel engines. What I mean by that is, it may take them a while to get going, but when you do, they can go for a long, long time. Whereas men are like... bottle rockets.

My philosophy? Have a laugh for as long as you can and don't get run over. Or stabbed.

We have to learn to be kind to ourselves. In the long run avoiding unpleasantness is a very unkind thing to do to yourself.

What is good for our customers is also in the long run good for us.

In the long run, the most unpleasant truth is a safer companion than a pleasant falsehood.