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Canada was built on dead beavers.

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

Analysis Benefit Cost Nature Running
You can pretty much trace when the big individual indebtedness kicked in, and it was when the credit card became generally available.
MARGARET ATWOOD

Cards Credit Individual
And yet it disturbs me to learn I have hurt someone unintentionally. I want all my hurts to be intentional.
MARGARET ATWOOD

Hurt Intention Need Someone
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
I’m from the generation that had the boys’ door and the girls’ door when you went to school, and you got in big trouble if you went in the wrong one.
MARGARET ATWOOD

Boy Girl School
Farewells can be shattering, but returns are surely worse. Solid flesh can never live up to the bright shadow cast by its absence.
MARGARET ATWOOD

Farewell Flesh Shadow
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

Ignorant Shame Way
The best way of being kind to bears is not to be very close to them.
MARGARET ATWOOD

Bears Close Kind Way
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
we lived in the gaps between the stories
MARGARET ATWOOD

Gap Handmaid Stories Tale
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
Canada was built on dead beavers.
MARGARET ATWOOD

Beaver Built Country People
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 ATWOOD

Fear Lying Night
I don’t think of poetry as a ‘rational’ activity but as an aural one. My poems usually begin with words or phrases which appeal more because of their sound than their meaning, and the movement and phrasing of a poem are very important to me.
MARGARET ATWOOD

Important Sound Think
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

Canada was built on dead beavers.

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Canada was built on dead beavers.

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