If I waited for perfection... I would never write a word.
— Margaret Atwood
All fat women look the same; they all look 42.
The story as told in The Odyssey doesn't hold water. There are too many inconsistencies.
We thought we were running away from the grownups, and now we are the grownups.
Gardening is not a rational act.
This above all, to refuse to be a victim.
I've never understood why people consider youth a time of freedom and joy. It's probably because they have forgotten their own.
If I were going to convert to any religion I would probably choose Catholicism because it at least has female saints and the Virgin Mary.
If the national mental illness of the United States is megalomania, that of Canada is paranoid schizophrenia.
I hope that people will finally come to realize that there is only one 'race' - the human race - and that we are all members of it.
Optimism means better than reality; pessimism means worse than reality. I'm a realist.
Reality simply consists of different points of view.
Time is compressed like the fist I close on my knee... I hold inside it the clues and solutions and the power for what I must do now.
The beginning of Canadian cultural nationalism was not 'Am I really that oppressed?' but 'Am I really that boring?'
Myths can't be translated as they did in their ancient soil. We can only find our own meaning in our own time.
The answers you get from literature depend on the questions you pose.
War is what happens when language fails.
You need a certain amount of nerve to be a writer.
Popular art is the dream of society; it does not examine itself.
An eye for an eye only leads to more blindness.
Because I am a mother, I am capable of being shocked: as I never was when I was not one.
Their mothers had finally caught up to them and been proven right. There were consequences after all but they were the consequences to things you didn't even know you'd done.
Heroes need monsters to establish their heroic credentials. You need something scary to overcome.
Another belief of mine; that everyone else my age is an adult, whereas I am merely in disguise.
Little girls are cute and small only to adults. To one another they are not cute. They are life-sized.
A voice is a human gift; it should be cherished and used, to utter fully human speech as possible. Powerlessness and silence go together.
The Eskimos had fifty-two names for snow because it was important to them: there ought to be as many for love.
Canada was built on dead beavers.
For years I wanted to be older, and now I am.
A ratio of failures is built into the process of writing. The wastebasket has evolved for a reason.
Never pray for justice, because you might get some.
A divorce is like an amputation: you survive it, but there's less of you.
A word after a word after a word is power.
In the spring, at the end of the day, you should smell like dirt.
Genres aren't closed boxes. Stuff flows back and forth across the borders all the time.
We still think of a powerful man as a born leader and a powerful woman as an anomaly.
