Best selling author and joint winner of the 2019 Booker prize for literature, Margaret Atwood, today turned 80.
Happy Birthday Margaret!
The accomplished literati has been known for her extensive and brilliant writing that has spanned over eight decades.
with her first book ‘Annie the Ant’ written at age seven.
Her best selling book-turned-TVseries, ‘The Handmaid’s Tale’ has gained considerable global appeal since it’s release, and fans the world over waited expectantly for the long overdue second instalment which finally came in ‘The Testament’, another best selling-book that sold over 100,000 copies in the first week.
We are taken by Margaret’s colourful wit, sharp intellect, love and understanding of nature and most of all her penchant for great quotes.
As she turns 80, here are some of our favourite quotes from Margaret Atwood.
War is what happens when language fails.
-Margaret Atwood
I would like to be the air that inhabits you for a moment only. I would like to be that unnoticed and that necessary.
-Margaret Atwood
A word after a word after a word is power.
-Margaret Atwood
Don’t let the bastards grind you down.
-Margaret Atwood
Men are afraid that women will laugh at them. Women are afraid that men will kill them.
-Margaret Atwood
Another belief of mine: that everyone else my age is an adult, whereas I am merely in disguise.
-Margaret Atwood
In the spring, at the end of the day, you should smell like dirt.
Margaret Atwood
Love blurs your vision; but after it recedes, you can see more clearly than ever. It’s like the tide going out, revealing whatever’s been thrown away and sunk: broken bottles, old gloves, rusting pop cans, nibbled fishbodies, bones. This is the kind of thing you see if you sit in the darkness with open eyes, not knowing the future.
-Margaret Atwood
Ignoring isn’t the same as ignorance, you have to work at it.
-Margaret Atwood
We were the people who were not in the papers. We lived in the blank white spaces at the edges of print. It gave us more freedom.
We lived in the gaps between the stories.
-Margaret Atwood
Longed for him. Got him. Shit.
-Margaret Atwood
I read for pleasure and that is the moment I learn the most.
-Margaret Atwood
The only way you can write the truth is to assume that what you set down will never be read. Not by any other person, and not even by yourself at some later date. Otherwise you begin excusing yourself. You must see the writing as emerging like a long scroll of ink from the index finger of your right hand; you must see your left hand erasing it.
-Margaret Atwood
Time in dreams is frozen. You can never get away from where you’ve been.
-Margaret Atwood
A rat in a maze is free to go anywhere, as long as it stays inside the maze.
-Margaret Atwood
You can only be jealous of someone who has something you think you ought to have yourself.
-Margaret Atwood
We still think of a powerful man as a born leader and a powerful woman as an anomaly.
-Margaret Atwood
Hope you enjoyed reading the quotes as much as we did.
She’s so divine.
Do us a big favour, pop over to her twitter handle and wish her a happy birthday.
Here it is: @margaretatwood
Thanks!
