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.
MARGARET ATWOODDon’t misunderstand me. I am not scoffing at goodness, which is far more difficult to explain than evil, and far more complicated. But sometimes it’s hard to put up with.
More Margaret Atwood Quotes
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Show me a character totally without anxieties and I will show you a boring book.
MARGARET ATWOOD -
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 ATWOOD -
Hunger is a powerful reorganizer of the conscience.
MARGARET ATWOOD -
I did … learn an important distinction in graduate school: a speculation about who had syphilis when is gossip if it’s about your friends, a plot element if it’s about a character in a novel, and scholarship if it’s about John Keats.
MARGARET ATWOOD -
And yet it disturbs me to learn I have hurt someone unintentionally. I want all my hurts to be intentional.
MARGARET ATWOOD -
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.
MARGARET ATWOOD -
The biggest debt is always the government debt; it’s always debt that government has run up on your behalf.
MARGARET ATWOOD -
I walk away from him. It’s enormously pleasing to me, this walking away. It’s like being able to make people appear and vanish, at will.
MARGARET ATWOOD -
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?
MARGARET ATWOOD -
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.
MARGARET ATWOOD -
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.
MARGARET ATWOOD -
Victorian literature was my subject at Harvard.
MARGARET ATWOOD -
The way love feels is always only approximate. I would like to be without shame. I would like to be shameless. I would like to be ignorant. Then I would not know how ignorant I was.
MARGARET ATWOOD -
I’m a novelist, and idle speculation is what novelists do. How odd to spend one’s life trying to pretend that non-existent people are real: though no odder, I suppose, than what government bureaucrats do, which is trying to pretend that real people are non-existent.
MARGARET ATWOOD -
You can pretty much trace when the big individual indebtedness kicked in, and it was when the credit card became generally available.
MARGARET ATWOOD






