30 phrases by Margaret Atwood to honor this brilliant author

When we think about the past, it’s the beautiful things we always choose. We want to believe that everything was like that.

Pain scars you, but too deeply to see. Out of sight, out of mind.

Writing is a way for the voice to outlive the person.

Living in prison is living without mirrors. To live without mirrors is to live without the self.

Don’t let the bastards burn you to ashes.

The felt absence of God and the felt presence amount to almost the same thing, only in reverse.

People always forget prophecies unless they come true.

I am the horizon you walk to, the thing you can never lasso.

All that is silenced will cry out to be heard even if silently.

What I call myself is something I now have to compose, as a discourse is composed. What I have to present is a thing made, not something born.

You can only be jealous of someone who has something you think you should have.

Stupidity is the same as meanness, if you judge by the results.

Surely, only true love could justify my lack of taste.

There is a certain solace that can be found in routine.

The best way to keep a secret is to pretend it doesn’t exist.

War is what happens when language fails.

Writing is leaving a mark. It is to impose a permanent sign on the blank paper, it is to capture an instant in the form of a word.

The weapons that were once outside sharpening in the war are now inside, in the fortress, fragile in glass cases.

I never understood why people consider youth a time of freedom and pleasure. Probably because they forgot their own.

There is always someone else. Even when there is no one.

Knowing too much about other people puts you in their power, so they have the right to complain about you, you are forced to understand their reasons for doing things, and then you are weakened.

I was running in my usual stealthy way, suspecting no harm, when a big invisible thumb came down from the sky and pressed the top of my head. A poem was formed.

We were a dying society of too many choices.

A mouse in a maze is free to go anywhere as long as it stays inside the maze.

There is a certain solace that can be found in routine.

I remember that yearning, for something that was always about to happen and that was never the same.

It’s good to have small goals that can be achieved easily.

Touch comes before sight, before speech. It is the first and last language, and it always tells the truth.

You can’t control how you feel, but you can control how you behave.

We lived, as usual, by ignoring. Ignoring is not the same as ignorance, you have to make an effort to do it.