I lie on the floor, washed by nothing and hanging on. I cry at night. I am afraid of hearing voices, or a voice. I have come to the edge, of the land. I could get pushed over.
MARGARET ATWOODThere’s always something to occupy the inquiring mind.
More Margaret Atwood Quotes
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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 -
Show me a character totally without anxieties and I will show you a boring book.
MARGARET ATWOOD -
I’m a person of whim, and easily distracted. I don’t like multitasking. When I’m doing one thing, I like to do just that thing.
MARGARET ATWOOD -
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.
MARGARET ATWOOD -
Maybe that’s what love is, I thought: it’s being pissed off.
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 -
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 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 -
In the end, we’ll all become stories.
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 -
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 ATWOOD -
I’m bad at picking heroes.
MARGARET ATWOOD -
Science fiction is filled with Martians and space travel to other planets, and things like that.
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