Margaret Atwood Quotes & Sayings (Page 8)

“Reading and writing, like everything else, improve with practice. And, of course, if there are no young readers and writers, there will shortly be no older ones. Literacy will be dead, and democracy - which many believe goes hand in hand with it - will be dead as well.”

“In the spring, at the end of the day, you should smell like dirt.”

“Before the Civil War, Canada was at the top of the underground railroad. If you made it into Canada, you were safe unless someone came and hauled you back. That was also true during the Vietnam War for draft resisters.”

“A divorce is like an amputation: you survive it, but there's less of you.”

“Heroes need monsters to establish their heroic credentials. You need something scary to overcome.”

“An eye for an eye only leads to more blindness.”

“A voice is a human gift; it should be cherished and used, to utter fully human speech as possible. Powerlessness and silence go together.”

“Our problem right now is that we're so specialized that if the lights go out, there are a huge number of people who are not going to know what to do. But within every dystopia there's a little utopia.”

“Every utopia - let's just stick with the literary ones - faces the same problem: What do you do with the people who don't fit in?”

“Storytelling is a very old human skill that gives us an evolutionary advantage. If you can tell young people how you kill an emu, acted out in song or dance, or that Uncle George was eaten by a croc over there, don't go there to swim, then those young people don't have to find out by trial and error.”