black
grey
blue
red
brown
white

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

Maybe that’s what love is, I thought: it’s being pissed off.
MARGARET ATWOOD

Emotion Love Piss
we lived in the gaps between the stories
MARGARET ATWOOD

Gap Handmaid Stories Tale
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

Distract Multitasking Whim
Victorian literature was my subject at Harvard.
MARGARET ATWOOD

Harvard Literature Subject
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

Art Civilization Dust
Better never means better for everyone… It always means worse, for some.
MARGARET ATWOOD

Change Handmaid Mean Tale
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

Character Gossip School
Science fiction is filled with Martians and space travel to other planets, and things like that.
MARGARET ATWOOD

Fiction Planet Space
Confronted by too much emptiness … the brain invents. Loneliness creates company as thirst creates water. How many sailors have been wrecked in pursuit of islands that were merely a shimmering?
MARGARET ATWOOD

Island Loneliness Water
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

Grow Survival Wood
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

Able Away People Walk
There’s always something to occupy the inquiring mind.
MARGARET ATWOOD

Inquiring Mind
The heart with letters on it shining like a light bulb through the trim hole painted in the chest, art history.
MARGARET ATWOOD

Art Light Shine
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

Animal Forever Joy
Show me a character totally without anxieties and I will show you a boring book.
MARGARET ATWOOD

Anxiety Book Character
These things you did were like prayers; you did them and you hoped they would save you. And for the most part they did. Or something did; you could tell by the fact that you were still alive.
MARGARET ATWOOD

Alive Fact Prayer

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.

Related Topics

Popular Authors

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.

Related Topics

Popular Authors

More Margaret Atwood Quotes