Margaret Atwood Want Quotations

Science is a tool, and we invent tools to do things we want. It's a question of how those tools are used by people.

Science never makes things that do not have to do with what we feel, by which I mean what we want and what we fear.

To want is to have a weakness.

I want, I don’t want. How can one live with such a heart?

You can wet the rim of a glass and run your finger around the rim and it will make a sound. This is what I feel like: this sound of glass. I feel like the word shatter. I want to be with someone.

And yet it disturbs me to learn I have hurt someone unintentionally. I want all my hurts to be intentional.

I want to be held and told my name. I want to be valued, in ways that I am not; I want to be more than valuable. I repeat my former name; remind myself of what I once could do, how others saw me. I want to steal something.

People cry at weddings for the same reason they cry at happy endings: because they so desperately want to believe in something they know is not credible.

But most hearts say, I want, I want, I want, I want. My heart is more duplicitous, though no twin as I once thought. It says, I want, I don't want, I want, and then a pause. It forces me to listen...

I suppose these deadlines we set for ourselves are really a way of saying we appreciate time, and want to use all of it.

Waste not want not. I am not being wasted. Why do I want?

They will not let you have peace, they don't want you to have anything they don't have themselves.

Remember,' she'd tell her staff, 'every customer wants to feel like a princess, and princesses are selfish and overbearing.

Despite their cool poses they wear their cravings on the outside, like the suckers on a squid. They want it all.

It's probably a form of childish curiosity that keeps me going as a fiction writer. I ... want to open everybody's bureau drawers and see what they keep in there. I'm nosy.

Some travelers think they want to go to foreign places but are dismayed when the places turn out actually to be foreign.

I want everything back, the way it was. But there is no point to it, this wanting.

If he wants to be an asshole, it's a free country. Millions before him have made the same life choice.

Maybe I don't really want to know what's going on. Maybe I'd rather not know. Maybe I couldn't bear to know. The Fall was a fall from innocence to knowledge.

It's his word against the Commander's, unless he wants to head a posse. Kick in the door, and what did I tell you? Caught in the act, sinfully Scrabbling. Quick, eat those words.

If you want what's in the package you should at least know how to get the string off, is what I say.

I don't want to look at something that determines me so completely.

I didn't want him to become gray and multi-dimensional and complicated like everyone else. Was every Heathcliff a Linton in disguise?