Margaret Atwood Quotes

I think reality is over-rated

You do not believe, you only believe that you believe.

You know, that stuff about pink elephants, that's the bunk. It's little animals. Little tiny turkeys in straw hats. Midget monkeys coming through the keyholes.

A hallucination is a species of reality, as capable of teaching you as a videotape about Kilimanjaro or anything else that falls through your life.

I do not believe that I am now dreaming, but I cannot prove that I am not.

A lot of people experience the world with the same incredulity as when a magician pulls a rabbit out of a hat.…We know that the world is not all sleight of hand and deception because we are in it, we are part of it. Actually we are the white rabbit being pulled out of the hat. The only difference beween us and the white rabbit is that the rabbit does not realize it is taking part in a magic trick.

Life is only a dream and we are the imagination of ourselves.

Reality: What a concept!

Not seeing is half-believing.

I can feel this heart inside me and I conclude it exists. I can touch this world and I also conclude that it exists. All my knowledge ends at this point. The rest is hypothesis.

Never believe your eyes

We believe what we see.’...What do you do when you’re in the dark?

I find that the sensation of myself as an ego inside a bag of skin is really a hallucination.

Insanity is believing your hallucinations are real. Religion is believing that other peoples' hallucinations are real.

None of it seems real. Who knows? Maybe it isn’t. Maybe it’s actually happening to someone else. Maybe it’s something I imagined. Maybe soon I’m going to wake up and find everything fixed with Lissa and Dimitri. We’ll all be together, and he’ll be there to smile and hold me and tell me everything ‘s going to be okay. Maybe all of this really has been a dream. But I don’t think so.

How hard it is, sometimes, to trust the evidence of one's senses! How reluctantly the mind consents to reality.

I tell myself that I know you, and then when I think about it, I realize that I don't.

He thinks he believes only what he sees, but he is much better at believing than at seeing.

It's very hard to look in the mirror. We all know this. It's much easier to have illusions about yourself. And in particular, when you think, well, I'm going to believe what I like, but I'll say what the powerful want, you do that over time, and you believe what you say.

Seeing is not believing - it is only seeing.

A dream inside a dream might not be a dream.

At the time I could no more believe my eyes than now I can trust my memory.

The fear is not real, Dil Bahadur; it is only in your mind, like all other things. Our thoughts form what we believe to be reality.