Margaret Atwood Quotes

I became an optimist when I discovered that I wasn't going to win any more games by being anything else.

I learned there are ways to approach life. You can never change the events, but you can change the way you approach them.

We can always choose to perceive things differently. You can focus on what's wrong in your life, or you can focus on what's right.

Every time something bad happens to me, I don't ask the question, 'Why did it happen to me?' The question I ask is, 'Why did it happen for me?'

Your reaction to a situation determines whether it will be positive or negative. If you're determined to label a situation positive, no matter how it appears, the result MUST be positive. If you label something negative, that MUST be your experience. It's never too late to change a situation because you have an unlimited supply of positive sticky labels! Your life is always your call!

We don't make mistakes; we just have happy accidents.

Your problem isn't the problem, it's your attitude about the problem.

Any fact facing us is not as important as our attitude toward it, for that determines our success or failure.

It is what it is. But you have the power to turn it into an isn't so bad.

One thing my mom used to tell me was to look to the other side, and know that my present is not going to be everything. So if I'm having a bad day, she goes, 'Just imagine tomorrow. This is going to be over. This is going to be done with.'

Nothing in life is so hard that you can't make it easier by the way you take it.

When things go wrong or don't turn out the way you pictured them in your head, you just have to go with the best intentions defense. I have a lot of good intentions.

If my leg falls off, I'll get a prosthetic. There'd be no deep sadness about. I'd just get on with it! It's called life, and I love life. You have to be positive, and you have to crack on no matter what.

A lot of people asked me if it was frustrating not having a clear specific diagnosis, but I didn't mind, I just chose the most optimistic diagnosis.

Is everything funny? For me, yes. There's a positive to every negative. Even my divorce? For me, yes. If you go back and look at it, why it happened or how it happened, there's something in there that'll make you laugh.

I'm a romantic, but I'm not a romantic in the traditional sense. I like to romanticize what happens to me. Whatever happens to me - you could quantify it as good or bad - I romanticize it. I think along the lines of 'When that thing happened, it made me who I am.' That kind of thing. It's a different way of being romantic.

Life is 10 percent what you make it, and 90 percent how you take it.

Always turn a negative situation into a positive situation.

You've got to have a sense of humor to keep your sanity.

I couldn't have children, so that's the bad side. But compared to everything else I have, it's not all that terribly bad. I count my winners rather than my losers.

When you wake up every day, you have two choices. You can either be positive or negative; an optimist or a pessimist. I choose to be an optimist. It's all a matter of perspective.

When things don't go our way, we get to choose how we will respond. We get to choose our perspective. Will you focus on what you didn't get, or what you did get?

I have to really enjoy the good things because it makes the bad things OK.

If you can't make it better, you can laugh at it.

The one trait in a lot of dyslexic people I know is that by the time we got out of college, our ability to deal with failure was very highly developed. And so we look at most situations and see much more of the upside than the downside.