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I did not know how to paint or even what to paint, but I knew I had to begin.

Margaret Atwood

Don’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.
MARGARET ATWOOD

Complicated Evil Sometimes
The object is very clear in the fight against racism; you have reasons why you’re opposed to it. But when you’re writing a novel, you don’t want the reader to come out of it voting yes or no to some question. Life is more complicated than that.
MARGARET ATWOOD

Fight Racism Write
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

Dignity Ignorance Poetry
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

Government People Real
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
Fatigue is here, in my body, in my legs and eyes. That is what gets you in the end. Faith is only a word, embroidered.
MARGARET ATWOOD

Body Embroider Eye Leg
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

Analysis Benefit Cost Nature Running
Show me a character totally without anxieties and I will show you a boring book.
MARGARET ATWOOD

Anxiety Book Character
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
The best way of being kind to bears is not to be very close to them.
MARGARET ATWOOD

Bears Close Kind Way
Better never means better for everyone… It always means worse, for some.
MARGARET ATWOOD

Change Handmaid Mean Tale
I didn’t go to school for a full year until I was 12. In the summer I was a wild child in the woods, with no shoes, and in the fall it was back to the city, shoe shops and school.
MARGARET ATWOOD

Children Fall Summer
Canada was built on dead beavers.
MARGARET ATWOOD

Beaver Built Country People
I would like to be the air that inhabits you for a moment only. I would like to be that unnoticed and that necessary.
MARGARET ATWOOD

Air Love Sleep Unnoticed
I’m bad at picking heroes.
MARGARET ATWOOD

Bad Hero Pick Theory
Too much God and you overdose. God needs to be filtered.
MARGARET ATWOOD

God Much Need

I did not know how to paint or even what to paint, but I knew I had to begin.

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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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Popular Authors

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