A lot of being a poet consists of willed ignorance. If you woke up from your trance and realized the nature of the life-threatening and dignity-destroying precipice you were walking along, you would switch into actuarial sciences immediately.
MARGARET ATWOODCanada was built on dead beavers.
More Margaret Atwood Quotes
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I was kidnapped by literature at a young age and never wanted to be ransomed.
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Vampires get the joy of flying around and living forever, werewolves get the joy of animal spirits. But zombies, they’re not rich, or aristocratic, they shuffle around. They’re a group phenomenon, they’re not very fast, they’re quite sickly. So what’s the pleasure of being one?
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I’m not used to girls, or familiar with their customs. I feel awkward around them, I don’t know what to say. I know the unspoken rules of boys, but with girls I sense that I am always on the verge of some unforeseen, calamitous blunder.
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There is no fool like an educated fool.
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Victorian literature was my subject at Harvard.
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Better never means better for everyone… It always means worse, for some.
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Canada was built on dead beavers.
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I would like to be the air that inhabits you for a moment only. I would like to be that unnoticed and that necessary.
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I grew up in the north woods of Canada. You had to know certain things about survival. Wilderness survival courses weren’t very formalized when I was growing up, but I was taught certain things about what to do if I got lost in the woods.
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I did not know how to paint or even what to paint, but I knew I had to begin.
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Waste not want not. I am not being wasted. Why do I want?
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Although from you I far must roam, do not be broken hearted. We two, who in the souls are one, are never truly parted.
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Immortality,’ said Crake, ‘ is a concept. If you take ‘mortality’ as being, not death, but the foreknowledge of it and the fear of it, then ‘immortality’ is the absence of such fear. Babies are immortal. Edit out the fear, and you’ll be.
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We are silent, considering shortfalls. There’s not much time left, for us to become what we once intended. Jon had potential, but it’s not a word that can be used comfortably any more. Potential has a shelf-life.
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If one of the arguments against eating meat is to do with cruelty and animal intelligence, then lab meat avoids that. There’s also the environmental argument for it.
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Hunger is a powerful reorganizer of the conscience.
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I don’t think of poetry as a ‘rational’ activity but as an aural one. My poems usually begin with words or phrases which appeal more because of their sound than their meaning, and the movement and phrasing of a poem are very important to me.
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It made him feel invisible—not that he wanted to feel anything else.
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Nature is an expert in cost-benefit analysis,’ she says. ‘Although she does her accounting a little differently. As for debts, she always collects in the long run.
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we lived in the gaps between the stories
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When any civilization is dust and ashes,” he said, “art is all that’s left over. Images, words, music. Imaginative structures. Meaning—human meaning, that is—is defined by them. You have to admit that.
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Stick a shovel into the ground almost anywhere and some horrible thing or other will come to light. Good for trade, we thrive on bones; without them there’d be no stories.
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Show me a character totally without anxieties and I will show you a boring book.
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The heart with letters on it shining like a light bulb through the trim hole painted in the chest, art history.
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Once upon a time, novelists of the 19th century, such as Charles Dickens, published in serial form.
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Science fiction is filled with Martians and space travel to other planets, and things like that.
MARGARET ATWOOD