I strongly believe that privacy is one of the biggest luxuries one can have in life - to have your own private world and not be invaded by the outside.
— Margaret Trudeau
I love the life I've had.
I had to divorce my husband, the prime minister. I found it terribly overwhelming.
For me, because I'm a mental health advocate, I want everyone to be the healthiest they can be.
If you rely completely on protocol, you can become a robot.
Everyone wants a loving, equal relationship.
Politics is an ugly and thankless role.
I prepared myself for my marriage to Pierre Trudeau, but I didn't prepare myself for marriage to the prime minister.
I've never been one to celebrate anniversaries.
I miss being exposed to the leading thinkers of the world.
Who am I - Canada's Rodney Dangerfield? I get no respect.
I just want to find my individuality.
I don't think I'm marriage material, to tell you the truth. I'd be a bad choice. But I'd be darling at being a girlfriend.
I turned 65 and thought, 'Oh my God, I'm a senior. How did this happen?'
Simply put, women should prepare in their 50s for the rest of their lives.
At 65, most of us still have a lot to give and a lot to contribute.
Growing up in Vancouver in the 1950s, I was often capricious and temperamental, quick to laugh, even quicker to feel despair, prone to flailing my arms, pouting and crying when things didn't go my way, or I thought something was unfair, or I was bullied by my sisters.
I know what it's like to feel marginalized and defeated and humiliated by suffering from a mental illness.
I have five of the most beautiful children.
When you're mentally ill, sometimes you're so self-involved that you forget how much you're hurting all the people around you who love you so much, because you don't understand that you've got to get help.
Suddenly I turned 65 and realized, 'Oh my goodness, I'm old.' I think it was when I got into the movie theatres cheaper.
I feel very confident and positive about my life.
I can't be a rose in any man's lapel.
I'm pretty much an out-front, straightforward chick, and I get a bit confused by expectations.
I have studied Freud and that kind of thing. I just never thought I would need it.
There's nothing antifeminist about showing a lovely body; it's part of the person you are.
I have worked hard to become happy. It was a real struggle.
Everywhere I go, particularly when there's people who know me or recognize me, I get the warmest hugs and happiest sighs full of hope and full of relief.
I am not a weirdo, a wacko, or an eccentric for wanting to do good, honest work on a day-to-day basis.
I was a late bloomer on the career front.
I have learned one thing: the only thing you can change about your husband is the way he dresses.
I certainly don't have all the answers, but I know this to be true: we have a great degree of control over what happens to us in the last third of our lives.
I wince at some of the things I did as the young wife of Canada's fifteenth prime minister, Pierre Elliott Trudeau.
Bad choices make good stories.
I don't think Pierre Trudeau knew how to be a husband. I couldn't stay in that marriage.
Don't feel badly when you take off work to go for a run, to go for a walk; don't feel badly to take time to play with your children, to be part of their lives. Work is important, but you can't work at your best unless you're a whole person.
I'm no political pundit.
I tend to keep the press at a distance, you know, and I don't really react to what they say. I react to what I feel more.
I tried during the 1974 campaign to show my husband not as the aloof intellectual people think he is, but the warm, passionate man I know. But the day after the election - after I'd worked so hard - I was put back on the shelf. I was devastated.
I don't paint, and I can't draw, but I see things, I think, quite well, and I love being able to freeze things with the camera, particularly the children. Then I discovered with the camera that you can tell a whole story with just freezing a moment in reality. I find it a very good way, a very satisfying feeling.
The label 'wife of the prime minister' is like a giant signboard pointing at my head from a Monty Python sketch. But I am not Mrs. Prime Minister. I'm a human being.
I know it will blow minds, but I plan on finding an apartment in New York. I'll commute to Ottawa, so I can still be Pierre Trudeau's wife and the mother of our three children - but I also want to be a working photographer.
I don't care about the respect of the press or the public or anybody. Whose respect every day I'm trying to garner is the respect of my children and my grandchildren and my friends, the people I work with.
I've had enough of being public property.
I am a free spirit that must survive in a free world.
I'm an old hippie who lives in the now. I seldom look forward, but we have to.
Our youth-oriented society does not have a clearly defined place for the older woman.
A truly empowered woman turns her values into verbs. She understands what she values most, and she takes steps to bring that value to life.
I was a quicksilver girl who saw every leaf on every tree. For me, there was no middle ground between sinking and flying, and once I was into my early adult years, my roller coaster got wilder and faster: I seemed to rise and fall with the same reckless velocity.
