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Canada was built on dead beavers.

Margaret Atwood

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
There is no fool like an educated fool.
MARGARET ATWOOD

Educated Emotional Fool People
The best way of being kind to bears is not to be very close to them.
MARGARET ATWOOD

Bears Close Kind Way
In the end, we’ll all become stories.
MARGARET ATWOOD

Biography Decade End Stories
There’s always something to occupy the inquiring mind.
MARGARET ATWOOD

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

Emotion Love Piss
The biggest debt is always the government debt; it’s always debt that government has run up on your behalf.
MARGARET ATWOOD

Debt Government Run
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
Better never means better for everyone… It always means worse, for some.
MARGARET ATWOOD

Change Handmaid Mean Tale
Once upon a time, novelists of the 19th century, such as Charles Dickens, published in serial form.
MARGARET ATWOOD

Century Novelist Once Time Upon
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
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
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
we lived in the gaps between the stories
MARGARET ATWOOD

Gap Handmaid Stories Tale
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
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 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
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
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
We are silent, considering shortfalls. There’s not much time left, for us to become what we once intended. Jon had potential, but it’s not a word that can be used comfortably any more. Potential has a shelf-life.
MARGARET ATWOOD

Shelves Silent Use
Although from you I far must roam, do not be broken hearted. We two, who in the souls are one, are never truly parted.
MARGARET ATWOOD

Broken Roam Soul Two
It’s evening, one of those gray water-color washes, like liquid dust.
MARGARET ATWOOD

Color Dust Water
Show me a character totally without anxieties and I will show you a boring book.
MARGARET ATWOOD

Anxiety Book Character
I was kidnapped by literature at a young age and never wanted to be ransomed.
MARGARET ATWOOD

Age Literature Young
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
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

Canada was built on dead beavers.

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Canada was built on dead beavers.

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