Daily Inspiration Quote by Margaret Atwood

Atwood is puncturing the cozy fantasy that myths arrive intact, like museum artifacts you can ship across centuries without damage. The first clause is a warning disguised as a gentle statement of limits: myths are not portable commodities. They are grown, not minted. “Ancient soil” does heavy work here, suggesting that stories are rooted in lived conditions - climate, labor, gender rules, fear, worship, power - and that when those conditions change, the story’s “natural” meanings change with them.

The subtext is also a swipe at cultural gatekeeping: the people who insist on the “true” myth often want the authority that comes with controlling interpretation. Atwood’s line strips that authority down to size. You can’t outsource meaning to the ancients, and you can’t hide behind them, either. If you invoke a myth today, you’re making a choice about what to emphasize, what to soften, what to ignore.

Context matters because Atwood’s career is basically a long argument with inherited narratives - biblical, classical, national - especially the ones that pretend women and outsiders are footnotes. Think of her rewritings and reframings: old plots re-entered through sidelined doors. When she says “we can only find our own meaning,” she’s not preaching relativism so much as accountability. Myths survive precisely because they’re reusable, but reuse is revision. Every retelling is a referendum on the present: what we fear, what we desire, who gets to be human, and who pays the price for the story to feel “timeless.”