Margaret Atwood Quotes

Everything seems beautiful because you don't understand. Those flying fish, they're not leaping for joy, they're jumping in terror. Bigger fish want to eat them. That luminous water, it takes its gleam from millions of tiny dead bodies, the glitter of putrescence. There's no beauty here, only death and decay.

We must all die. But that I can save him from days of torture, that is what I feel as my great and ever new privilege. Pain is a more terrible lord of mankind than even death itself.

My painting is not violent, it's life that is violent. Even within the most beautiful landscape, in the trees, under the leaves, the insects are eating each other; violence is a part of life. We are born with a scream; we come into life with a scream and maybe love is a mosquito net between the fear of living and the fear of death.

Every word affords me pain. Yet how sweet it would be if I could hear what the flowers have to say about death!

I am dying: it's a beautiful word. Like the long slow sigh of the cello: dying. But the sound of it is the only beautiful thing about it.

If nothing else, there's comfort in recognising that no matter how much we fail and sin, death will limit our suffering.

It is not death or pain that is to be dreaded, but the fear of pain or death.

It is not death, but dying, which is terrible.

It is not death, it is dying that alarms me.

What we think of as our sensitivity is only the higher evolution of terror in a poor dumb beast. We suffer for nothing. Our own death wish is our only real tragedy.

I'm not afraid of death but I am afraid of dying.

Being ill like this combines shock - this time I will die - with a pain and agony that are unfamiliar, that wrench me out of myself.

My biggest fear in life is losing the people I love, and the thing with cancer is that it seems that you can't really control it.

I don't fear death so much as I fear its prologues: loneliness, decrepitude, pain, debilitation, depression, senility. After a few years of those, I imagine death presents like a holiday at the beach.

I'm dying always.

Death By A Thousand Cuts

What you should worry about is how you suffer here on this planet. You do not worry about suffering after you make the exit.

We do not know what love is. We know the symptoms of it, the pleasure, the pain, the fear, the anxiety and so on. We try to solve the symptoms, which becomes a wandering in darkness. We spend our days and nights in this, and it is soon over in death.

There's worse things in life than death.

Death inspires me like a dog inspires a rabbit.

She was tired of everyone wanting to go to heaven, nobody wanting to die. The only thing worth grieving over, she said, was that sometimes there was more beauty in this life than the world could bear.

Everyone is down on pain, because they forget something important about it: Pain is for the living. Only the dead don't feel it.

Fear was the knowledge of pain, the awareness that you could be hurt, that you could die.

Oliver: Fear is the natural state of anything that dies.

You never really feel somebody's suffering. You only feel their death.