black
grey
blue
red
brown
white

Waste not want not. I am not being wasted. Why do I want?

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

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

Fiction Planet Space
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.
MARGARET ATWOOD

Good Light Stick Stories
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
The best way of being kind to bears is not to be very close to them.
MARGARET ATWOOD

Bears Close Kind Way
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

Awkward Boys Girl
Show me a character totally without anxieties and I will show you a boring book.
MARGARET ATWOOD

Anxiety Book Character
I did not know how to paint or even what to paint, but I knew I had to begin.
MARGARET ATWOOD

Begin Country Paint People
I was kidnapped by literature at a young age and never wanted to be ransomed.
MARGARET ATWOOD

Age Literature Young
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
It’s evening, one of those gray water-color washes, like liquid dust.
MARGARET ATWOOD

Color Dust Water
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
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
In the end, we’ll all become stories.
MARGARET ATWOOD

Biography Decade End Stories

Waste not want not. I am not being wasted. Why do I want?

Related Topics

Popular Authors

Waste not want not. I am not being wasted. Why do I want?

Related Topics

Popular Authors

More Margaret Atwood Quotes