Daily Inspiration Quote by Margaret Atwood

Atwood’s line works like a spell you can hear being cast: repetitive, patient, almost child-simple, then suddenly predatory in its certainty. “A word after a word after a word” isn’t just how sentences get built; it’s how authority gets manufactured. The rhythm mimics accumulation - not a single thunderclap of rhetoric, but the slow stacking of language until it becomes something you can’t easily push back against.

The subtext is pointedly political. Atwood has spent a career mapping how power hides in the everyday tools we treat as neutral: laws, scriptures, slogans, “common sense.” In that light, the quote reads as both a writer’s credo and a warning label. Words don’t merely describe reality; they choose which realities are legible. Control the story, control the options people can imagine, control what feels “normal.” That’s why regimes obsess over naming, banning, redefining; why victims struggle first to be believed; why propaganda is rarely one lie but a steady drip of phrasing that trains the mind.

There’s also a craft argument tucked inside the menace. Power here isn’t inspiration or genius; it’s persistence. You earn it through sequence, revision, the unglamorous act of putting one word down and then another, refusing silence. Coming from Atwood - a novelist steeped in feminism and dystopian governance - the line carries the chill of recognition: language is how we get free, and how we get owned.